I’m looking to change my reading and buying habits away from Amazon and need an alternate source for my ebooks. Where can I buy ebooks that won’t expire or have their licence revoked and will allow me to download a copy of that ebook I can store on my own system regardless of the websites status?
OP wants to avoid Amazon. This is still giving Amazon money and therefore encouraging Amazon's greed, walled garden and dark patterns.
A better alternative would be using almost any other digital book seller. There's plenty. And if the author chose or was forced to only sell through Amazon, then you can try library sources (like Overdrive) so the author at least gets something. And if you still can't get what you're looking for, then it's time to sail the high seas.
Uh, yeah it does. Not to mention the US has killed more people through colonisation, direct and proxy wars, etc. than any other nation in human history.
I assume that was a US only thing (maybe US/CAN?). I've been playing NMS since it was first around but don't ever remember this - looks like it would have been fun.
They haven’t particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it’s happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc....
”Finding a co-maintainer or passing the projects completely to someone else has been in my mind a long time but it’s not a trivial thing to do. For example, someone would need to have the skills, time, and enough long-term interest specifically for this.” - https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00571.html
As someone who runs a charity almost completely solo because of a lack of volunteers, I feel this so much in my bones. It's one thing to say, "Hey folks, I can't run this on my own, I need help" but it's another to find people who actually have the level of skill, committent, passion and integrity to contribute in a meaningful way. I can get people putting their hands up but I've lost count of the number of people who have then turned around and said, "Oh, actually I realise now I don't have time for this" or start in great and then just ghost me. It also takes more of my own time and energy, on top of what I'm already doing' to onboard and train people and it sucks so hard when I do that and then people disappear shortly after - I constantly have to question whether the time it takes to do that will be worth it vs just continuing the struggle by myself.
When you get consumers being arrogant and demanding, getting angry at you for taking too long to respond to their messages or not work fast enough.... it's soul crushing. Way too many people take volunteer work for granted or assume you're getting paid for your time and can therefore treat you like a working-class pleb or are plain just fucking rude and entitled. :( APPRECIATE YOUR VOLUNTEERS FOLKS! We need more volunteers, and appreciation. Many hands makes light work.
Actually being paid is one of the biggest reasons for a lack in volunteers (the other is people working more than they used to). So many volunteers have been replaced with paid workers. Many charities aren't volunteer run organisations anymore but run more like not-for-profit businesses. As a result it's harder to get funding and donations. And people are less interested in volunteering unless they can be paid for it.
It's a vicious cycle and I'm watching more and more local, community organisations get eaten up by massive, centralised non-profits; and more and more local volunteer organisatns struggling to get off the ground. 😞
This only really works in cases where people are making a free choice. But since people don't live in a vacuum where consumerism, capitalism, advertising, greed, power imbalances, class divides, poverty, platform decay, planned obsolescence, geoblocking, price gouging, etc. don't exist, a significant portion of piracy comes from either having little choice (I'm poor and I either pirate or I miss out) or making a choice based on ethical considerations (such as not giving money to a corporation that is known to engage in unethical behaviour). Or that we've had decades, if not hundreds of years of elites/corporate propaganda telling us that poor people are poor because they're bad and we must listen with zero critical thinking to our capitalist overlords who are wealthy because they're smart and know what's best for us stupid plebs and here you go, have some bread and a circus so you can ignore your long work hours for pittance pay which is totally your fault for being dumb and not because the system is rigged against you, also don't ever cross us because we control the politicians that make the laws that say piracy is worse than corporate fraud, even though corporate fraud and tax evasion costs countries and communities infinitely more than piracy ever did....
I was thinking of how people on the old internet would just create and share stuff for the simple sake of doing it, without trying to grind the algorithm. This woman in the mid 00’s would bike through Chernoby, taking pictures and checking rad levels along the way....
I used to be one of those people. It was a much different place then. It genuinely felt like a place to share useful information and help others or connect with folks from all over the world. If you had a question, or needed to fix something, it was usually pretty easy to find.
I used to prefer Altavista over Google as I found it served results closer to what I was looking for.
Now most of the internet is trash - pages and pages repeating the same crap, useful information or tutorials are hard to find without first wading through irrelevant search results or tutorials that are unhelpful but know how to capture the algorithms to generate cash, my ad blocker now telling me it's blocking hundreds of ads instead of just a few, tracking and spying almost everywhere, clickbait hot takes, artificial and disingenuous lifestyle filtering, information desert eeeeverywhere....
What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes....
Red Hat back in the 1990s. I had to buy it from a local stationary shop because being in a small, isolated country and the internet being in it's infancy, it was all I could find. Came with a manual bigger than a phone book and cost about the equivalent to these days $200.
Also can confirm. Been using Arch, which most people consider requires more fiddling than other distros, for almost 10 years now and have had few issues with it. I've had to fix my Windows install more than my Linux.
No offence, but I used to think Windows had good font rendering while I was using it. That was until I started using Linux distros. Now every time I boot into Windows, I again remember how awful Windows looks in comparison - washed out, pixelated, gives me eye strain....
I have the inverse - where Windows is so fine and pixelated it looks blurry. Linux is sharp and legible. It may be to do with with sub-pixel rendering. And this has been the case for across multiple computers and laptops, windows versions and Linux distros.
My use case is probably a bit more niche but I have Memory Impairment and bookmarks don't work that well for me. I'm a very organised person and did previously use things like bookmarks extensively. But since my memory has gotten really bad I need more visual representations. Visual bookmarks could kinda work for this but I am yet to find something that's private, easy to set up (or just works out of the box) and isn't fiddly to use. Bookmarks that aren't visual, don't stay in my memory so I forget about them. Search bar helps a bit but sometimes I also can't think of the right words to use to get Firefox to bring up the right bookmark (even with extensive keywords - because I also can't always think of the right keywords to set).
So I have heap of tabs open. I need things to stay in my recent memory and recent use, otherwise they just get forgotten. It does mean over time more and more tabs get left open. But I do fairly regular sort throughs where I go through each tab to make sure it's something unimportant where I've just forgotten to close the tab or something I am actually using/working on.
It's not ideal but it's the only thing that works for me right now. I have so many things going on at once, it sucks that I have to remember so much at once when I have memory issues but such is life when disabled folks aren't properly supported, lack of volunteers means I have to take more volunteer work that I should, western society sucks for supporting parents, and sexism means that I'm still default parent (mother) despite my husband being more progressive than most hsubands/dads are (he's also woefully disorganised which is in part just him and also in part how boys and men are socialised). Anyway, this isn't meant as a commentary on the differences in organisations levels and how that affects tab usage between mothers and fathers lol.
VANCOUVER - A British Columbia Supreme Court judge says a class-action lawsuit can move forward over alleged privacy breaches against a company that made an app to track users’ menstrual and fertility cycles. The ruling published online Friday says the action against Flo Health Inc. alleges the company shared users’ highly...
Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start “retiring” games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim...
They also monitor outbound streaming. I've twice had a documentary movie I was watching at a theatre stopped because so one was supposedly live streaming the movie to the internet. The second time it happened they stopped the movie until the person doing it stopped, only it turned out they made a mistake and no one was live streaming it at all - they just interrupted the movie for fucking ages because of wanky attitudes. What made it even more stupid was that it was a special screening for a one off event AND a pretty niche documentary that most people wouldn't give a fuck about let alone pirate 🙄
Part of the problem with that though is that to become that wealthy to start with means that someone (or many someones) weren't paid the value of their labour. Capitalism is predicated on making profit from the labour of others and you can't make profit if you're paying the full value of that labour.
Sometimes that's obvious in the form of slavery and exploitation. But many times it's not obvious at all - especially when a wealthy person is born into wealth (which almost all of them are) and they haven't themselves engaged in any exploitive practices - they likelihood is though that someone or more likely multiple people in their ancestry DID create their family wealth through exploitation. Because, again, capitalism cannot function without someone along the way being underpaid for their labour.
Maybe from the number of people making posts to the Good News community that's 'X Philanthropist donates X millions to X". It's not really good news since most philanthropy is bullshit.
Where can I buy ebooks that will actually be mine for life?
I’m looking to change my reading and buying habits away from Amazon and need an alternate source for my ebooks. Where can I buy ebooks that won’t expire or have their licence revoked and will allow me to download a copy of that ebook I can store on my own system regardless of the websites status?
NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden (cointelegraph.com)
My inner child needed some sea monkeys (i.imgur.com)
When the bombs fall, I want to be sure they get into a GOOD vault.
Which Linux Distro is best for dogs? (lemmy.world)
Anyone remember the Atlas Pass v4? (i.postimg.cc)
I just pulled this out of my stuff to show a friend.
Lasse Collin, the other xz maintainer, has acknowledged the backdoor (tukaani.org)
They haven’t particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it’s happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc....
Economic explanation for piracy and the prisoner's dilemma
Hello mateys,...
DistroWatch has been banned in Turkey (lemmy.world)
It is possible that it is related to how Turkey has been flagging Linux software as malware.
Some "old internet" brand of interesting. (web.archive.org)
I was thinking of how people on the old internet would just create and share stuff for the simple sake of doing it, without trying to grind the algorithm. This woman in the mid 00’s would bike through Chernoby, taking pictures and checking rad levels along the way....
Your first distribution
What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes....
I need a distro that can work right out the box without too much hassle to configure it, which one would you recommend?
Thx in advice.
thinking of trying linux,
My current issue is i see you guys constantly having issues, editing files etc....
Firefox looks so much better than Chrome (tux.social)
A little admiration of how easy UI customization is on Firefox, and how shitty Chromium looks.
Mozilla Firefox is Working on a Tab Grouping Feature (news.itsfoss.com)
Menstruation cycle tracking app breached users' privacy, B.C. class-action lawsuit alleges (bc.ctvnews.ca)
VANCOUVER - A British Columbia Supreme Court judge says a class-action lawsuit can move forward over alleged privacy breaches against a company that made an app to track users’ menstrual and fertility cycles. The ruling published online Friday says the action against Flo Health Inc. alleges the company shared users’ highly...
Warner Bros. is now erasing games as it plans to delist Adult Swim-published titles (www.polygon.com)
Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start “retiring” games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim...
OC Message from the moderator: why should we stop praising wealthy philanthropists ?
Wealthy people are often depicted as example for society, especially when they are financing good causes. Thy're not. Here are a few reasons why....