I got rid of a fine but just being nice, acknowledging my mistake to the officer and apologizing without the intention of getting away without my well deserved fine.
I have been in forums my whole life and discord is far from them, discord is just a chat akin to irc. Forums and IRC worked together very well, when I was moderating a huge gaming community we had several IRC channels for those who wanted live participation.
It's impossible to follow a discussion in discord because when you arrive it may be over and they are talking about something else, that doesn't happen in a forum you can just post and add your take. And managing knowledge is easier in a forum, I can still find my 15 year old replies, or access all the news I created back when I was a mod.
Yes, their marketshare overall is lower however in certain very large EU countries their market share is very high and their practices shouldn't escape scrutiny as this type of law also applies to smaller players. I suppose it's an issue of allocation of resources for the regulators. Smaller has less impact. The individual country regulators can also address this.
When there's only two competitors and the margin is only 20% in some subset of the population, that's not "very high market share." EU-wide, Android is >70%.
I have never stopped pirating since I got internet. My TV provider gives me Netflix, I have HBO Max through a sweet deal, amazon because of the delivery and Disney because a friend share the account, yet I still download all the shows I want, for example, I downloaded House of the Dragon week after week while I watched it on HBO Max, I think the only episode I watched pirated was the leaked one.
Why? Because I automated this process along time ago and also because I know sooner or later I am going to stop paying for that and this way I am prepared for it, because I don't have Apple or Rakuten, or many others. Because I have my own library of stuff (paid, and pirated) that goes back decades and I can access it from anywhere in the world.
It's the fragmentation and lack of ease of use that does it. If I had a NAS and Jellyfin setup, I'd have a catalog of basically everything available to stream; I wouldn't have to look a dozen different places to see if anyone has it available; I'd not have to worry about the streaming rights switching to another service in the middle of a show I'm watching; I'd not have to search through a bunch of different services to find where exactly I purchased it; I wouldn't have to learn a bunch of different inconsistent crappy, buggy interfaces; previous purchases wouldn't mysteriously disappear.
Throw all that on top of not being forced to watch the same ad for Rings of Power the thousandth time in a row, a much broader library of content, a better library of subtitles, and no performance issues.
I'm happy to pay for things that deliver usable experiences. Concretely, I'd gladly pay $200/month for a good streaming service that avoids the pitfalls mentioned. But I'm not going to pay money to subject myself to abusive practices and terrible experiences.
My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.
Despite being strongly motivated to find and watch things that are inexplicably unavailable to me (especially new foreign cinema) I usually just wait, and then sign up for a trial of whatever service has it a year or more after I read the review.
> My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.
Only if you want rare and older stuff (and even then, only sometimes). Anything mainstream, a public tracker is more than enough.
Are content owner letters/lawsuits still a thing? Piracy was cool(tm) when I was a broke high school student, but now that I have assets worth being sued over (and now that if my ISP cut me off I couldn't just move to a different apartment at a moment's notice) I'll just pay for the Bluray or for a month of Hulu or whatever, it's far simpler.
I have a significant legitimate media library (>1TB), I have the Plex/Kodi infrastructure to stream it to my TV, but going one step further and mixing in piracy is a step I'm not willing to take.
Depends on your country. In Germany: Extremely. Probably a few seconds of uploading (of a movie or porn, don’t think they care much for other things) will get you a letter (edit: C&D + damages, courts see it as commercial distribution, so the letter blackmails you to pay 300-500 € instead). Or you can use a VPN.
As I said in another post, I like to pay when given the option and I don’t have to jump through tons of hoops.
If you are in a lenient country you'll be fine with a public tracker, and it's easy to deploy sonarr and some torrent client to download things automatically.
I haven't torrented in forever. I usually just google "Watch XXXX online free" or check a few sites that I frequent that allow you to stream them.
It's (almost) as easy as looking something up on youtube.
Why would "normal" people muck about with torrent software? I think it's mostly the groups doing (and monetizing) the re-uploads that bother with torrents
I said in another comment I pay for some services too, but if my online experience have taught me anything is that I can't trust them to be around, or be good forever.
I used House of the Dragon as an example, I watched it on HBO max but I also downloaded it and shared it online. One of my favorite shows (Future Man) is now on D+ but I am not going to delete it from my collection.
It all comes to: "I don't trust others with the data I care for"
It depends on the movie. Friends might drop from Netflix, but there’s a lot of content being made that’s wholly owned by the streaming service itself that will stick around forever. Especially with Disney.
Currently the top comment says "Basically, in our experience, anything below 38.4 °C could just as well be caused by any of a number of non-fever conditions at something like a 90 % confidence level" ... which is panicky territory for me. But anything under 38 is fine.
Well, if I have anything above 37.5C, I definitely feel ill. If you call that fever, or something else, feels hypocritical to me. Luckily, this stuff is a continuum. Still remember the 40.6C as a child, as my sense of equilibrium completely went bonkers and I start to hallucinate.
I left google a long time ago but this is how digital good work. Steam works like that, amazon video works like that and probably online music stores work like that too.
There is a reason gog sells games without drm and you can download and keep the installer forevers, that's what differenciates them from the rest.
