I used ZLibrary a couple weeks ago. I use it when an Anna's archive link is too slow.

Long term wise, people will move elsewhere to share their digital stuff. I pirated stuff before broad public internet was a thing. Sneakernets worked out well and were globally unstoppable. Or maybe autonomous radios like Wimax and stuff. Won't be as efficient as fiber internet but for books it doesn't matter. The books are already available via torrent albeit in an uncomfortable way.

If end-users build their own network, all hell will break loose because the social control over it will be zero and it will be used by serious criminal and state actors.

Stop letting morons become judges.

When emigrating, we will have to choose between countries which have replaced their constitution by "terms and conditions" and those by "code of conduct". I'll chose to live on a raft in the middle of the ocean Bompard style.

This (expected) story reminds me another one.

An internet buddy of mine, who lives in France, shorted Trump Media for what he considered a nice sum. Knowing the thing was a scam that would crash and burn but nevertheless there would be MAGA tards would would buy it anyway.

So he shorted it. Mad a nice profit and donated the profit to Ukraine. :)

Because it is ubiquitous.

But because the pesky licenses, for example, the Commander X16 retro computer uses a good old VGA port. :)

https://www.commanderx16.com/

The last time it happened, Liam was amused to be called "a fansite" :D

A more stable political system that does not give as much power to smaller political parties.

Also, i am pro-EU but in this particular case, being out of it is probably an advantage. But that is probably going to change.

Part of the explanation is the antinuclear movement has lost a lot of steam in Belgium. The scientists were strongly against the phasing out of the nuclear plants but the full proportional parliamentarian system of Belgium gives to relatively small parties a role of kingmakers, which the green parties used to sabotage the nuclear industry.

In typical Belgian fashion, a nuclear phase-out was promised to the greens but delayed due date after due date because go figure, we need electricity. That policy, while hypocritical was not without effect: Since officially the plants were supposed to be phased out, they were not modernised and their maintenance was kept to the strict minimum.

To add insult to injury, the government instituted a "nuclear tax" that quite burned investors. So, it is moderately surprising Engie does not want to invest in expensive power plants. What they want is to sell gas. Cheap gas plants. This way you have little money immobilised in the country in case the government would go full retard again and want to tax them. And just import gas. So if Belgium ceases to be profitable, you disengage yourself by stopping to buy gas.

Of course, if you want to sell gas, it helps to have non dispatchable renewables so the grid goes unstable and you need gas plants as "backup". When i was a young engineering student, our first year chemistry professor was an oil industry shill who gave us folders from Total. They advocated for wind energy. Not because Total is a company of hippies but because they knew with wind turbines they could sell fossil fuels.

Of course, this pseudo phase out turned out horribly wrong and the electricity penury went so dire old airplanes engines were used as auxiliary electricity generators. The cost of electricity skyrocketed and the CO2 emissions worsened.

Now, the greens are losing votes. I do not know how this decision will turn out. Competence and efficiency are not things the average Belgian voter find very important. But it is probably a good thing the electricity generation goes back to the public. The private sector is bad for these kind of things. The most successful electrical grids were made by public companies.

I also have a confession to make. I am an ancient member of the ECOLO party. The French-speaking green party. Shame on me. I projected my imagination on this kind of parties because i had learned about nature and the CO2 problem via my chemistry class in high school. So i stupidly assumed this party must have been full of concerned scientists.

Nothing was farther from the truth. They were almost all wash-outs with always the same two bullshit degrees and had zero interest in nature. They hated maths. They hated scientists whom they perceived as arrogant. They frowned at me when i talked to them about the greenhouse effect. At the time, it was a preoccupation of science minded people and my dumb party buddies had not heard of it and told me in no uncertain terms they had zero interest in it. I was lectured on the fact that political ecology was not about whales a little flowers and had deep ideologically pure left wing roots and i had to be loyal to that.

They were just a party of vaguely anticapitalist, anti-industry people who could not balance a chemical equation to save their lives. One of the founders was a doctor in physics who ended up dying of COVID because he refused to vaccinate. Another executive was an agronomist and it is all i remember. Then i left the party. Then i left the country (for other reasons)

In practice, many do. Allow piracy, i mean.

Because it is considered minor. Judges, sane ones i mean, care about serious cases. Like drug trafficking, murders, child abuse. These kind of things. Downloading books is not one of these things. And if they are not completely stupid, they give pirates a little bit of rope so the public doesn't escalate towards means of exchange that would not be practically possible to monitor.

Your internet provider and VPN provider know very well you download stuff. They say they don't but they do. They monitor what you do. And if you download child porn or order a murder on the internet they will rat on you. Since most people content themselves with pirating stuff and are not interested in seeing children being raped, they continue to use these services and accept to be monitored, knowing very well nobody is going after them for their peccadillo.

That's why in practice The Pirate Bay is still easy to find. A bit of gesticulation from the judges so the most retarded of the lawyers leave them alone but they carefully leave the door open.

Or else people would move to the darknet, sneakernets (impossible to monitor) or worse, some sort of decentralised internet. Anything judges can't put their nose in. These laws are not enforceable because nearly nobody take them that seriously.

And if people work out a decentralised internet, state actors will take advantage of the fact they can't be monitored and even less censored to spew propaganda and we'll end up with an even more destructive president than Trump. The Russians managed to ease the election of Trump but that could have been prevented. With what i just described, that would be impossible to stop.

Gendarmerie Nationale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They are happy about it.

"June 2024 - 97% of workstations running GendBuntu (103,164 stations)"

For the anecdote, i saw adverts for 486 motherboards which accepted 128 Mo or RAM before the 486DX2 was even available. I never tested them, of course.

Later, there were also souped-up versions of the 486 like that AMD with a quadrupled clock multiplier you could run at 160 Mhz.

I wonder (i don't know) if there are more modern clones running at a higher clocks for specialized tasks, maybe because a 486 design would be immune to some vulnerabilities and its design is out of patent right now.

A bit like those 6502 you can buy by the hundreds that run at 14 Mhz instead of one or three.

Not sure what you mean by "mainstream" but the BSD distros do. :)

There is a small problem here: If all the dudes buy themselves taller bodies, the average size of males raises. Then to stay above average they'll have to buy other even taller bodies ad infinitum. That's actually a great marketing strategy.

They can serve as presidents. As said previously: You won't have to vote. You'll just have to build them in factories.

Interesting post, thanks.

But if i may, if you think us "first world" countries lack people who skirt the law, you idealise us. :D

And i am not sure i want to call Brazil some sort of third world country. :D