Sorry, no, you can’t just digitize, share copyrighted books without permission. //

The San Francisco-based Internet Archive has been scanning printed books and distributing them online – without the consent of copyright holders – through a process called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). The idea is that the Internet Archive can lend readers one digital copy as a proxy for each physical book in its control without violating the law.

That idea has been rejected by US courts, first by Judge John Koeltl from the Southern District of New York in March 2023, and now by Second Circuit Judges Steven J. Menashi, Beth Robinson, and Maria Araújo Kahn.

The appeals court decision [PDF] states, "This appeal presents the following question: Is it 'fair use' for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors?"

The answer from the US justice system so far is no, it's not fair use.

Casey is unlikely to change the result without counting defective or challenged ballots. Fortunately, law and precedent “does matter in this country.” There are still officials who can transcend their political preferences to maintain the rule of law. After the last presidential election, many Trump appointees ruled against the former president, and many Democratic judges rejected the effort to strip Trump from ballots.

That does not mean that Democrats who value the weaponization of law will not continue to embrace lawfare warriors like New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).

Others will use the rage of these times as a license to ignore legal and ethical obligations altogether. They are arguably the saddest manifestation of our political discord. They are people who have not just lost faith in our system but in themselves. They have become untethered from any defining principle for their own conduct. This election has left them adrift in a sea of moral and legal relativism, with only their rage as a following wind. They cling to that rage as reason vanishes like a distant shore.

For the rest of us, there is work to be done as a nation committed to the rule of law. We cannot win at any cost when that cost is the very thing that defines us.

Pelosi won't go away because her ego won't let her. She's sociopathic in her pursuit of power and prestige, and while the press has long lauded her as a historic figure, reality tells a different story. Despite doing everything she could to take down the Republican Party, she ended up being the Speaker who lost the gavel twice. Worse, she helped usher Donald Trump into office twice.

She desperately wants to save her legacy, but pushing Biden out to defeat the bad orange man was likely her last chance at redemption. It's all downhill from here whether she wants to accept it or not, and if she doesn't, the civil war in the Democratic Party will only get worse. //

Hank Reardon
9 hours ago
Bonchie's last two paragraphs nail it. What else can be said about a Speaker who passed the lead to Jeffries so that she wouldn't be photographed handing the gavel to Kevin McCarthy? The woman is ill with hatred.

zrepl is a one-stop, integrated solution for ZFS replication.

Today we have a quick guide on how to automate Proxmox VE ZFS offsite backups to Rsync.net. The folks at rsync.net set us up with one of their ZFS enabled trial accounts. As the name might imply, Rsync.net started as a backup service for those using rsync. Since then they have expanded to allowing ZFS access for ZFS send/ receive which makes ZFS backups very easy. In our previous article we showed server-to-server backup using pve-zsync to automate the process.

• Backup test

This is very primitive and is unix-centric, but if I rsync from a source to a destination, I will do the following on both:

 # find /backup | wc -l
 # du -ah /backup | tail -1

... and I expect them to be identical (or nearly so) on both ends. Again, very blunt tooling here and this is after a successful, no errors rsync ... but I'm feeling good at that point.

That virus is the implementation of DEI and gender theory in our service academies. This is damaging to the intent of those academies. It's dangerous. It's harmful. And it could cause us to lose a major war. Pete Hegseth obviously understands this. //

Pete Hegseth has been there. He has led men in a war zone. He has smelled the smoke, and knows what it is like to be in a foreign place, to be in danger, to face possible death or maiming - and to have his men look at him and say "Sir, what do we do now?" Making a decision and acting under those conditions is like nothing else in any other field of endeavor. The wrong decision may get the officer and all his men killed, and he may have only seconds to make that decision. Pete Hegseth knows what that is like.

In an op-ed posted to Fox News on Saturday, former Mumford & Sons guitarist Winston Marshall put Trump's historic win into perspective -- including with a bit of humor.

The White House, the Senate, the House, the popular vote, a state legislative and mayoral majority, all on top of the Supreme Court majority... George Clooney retiring from politics and late-night TV hosts like Jimmy Kimmel literally crying on television. It's all too good to be true. //

And already, America has a spring back in her step. Ebullience fills the air. Hope rushes its veins. The land of freedom has embraced those qualities that made it great -- aspiration, entrepreneurship, responsibility. The nation’s eyes are fixed upwards once again. Up to Mars. Up to God. What a pleasure it was to witness history being made, and to see our transatlantic cousins back on their feet. //

Alas, this morning I have walked into a parallel universe. Beneath the heavy clouds of Heathrow, I touched down back in Blighty. You see, my country, Britain, today is what America would be if Kamala had won.

Violent criminals released from prison and replaced by Tweeters and Facebook meme creators. Rioters, let alone if they are a protected minority but given the heavy hand if they are indigenous working classes. Crippling taxes against campaign promises.

Full steam into Net Zero [climate] oblivion while protesting farmers roar tractors down Whitehall. And the hapless relinquishing of the Chagos Islands suggests Starmer’s heart is set on making British self-flagellation as public as possible.

All these decisions make sense if one understands the self-hating anti-human globalist ideology behind them.

Ifill's conduct during the interview was so outrageous, an unlikely voice has now spoken out—a former Biden WH aide, Michael LaRosa, who was First Lady Jill Biden's press secretary. //

This st has to stop. Opposing DEI initiatives does not make you a white supremacist. Conversations and demonization like this are a big part of the reason we got our aes kicked.

The answer to extremism is not more extremism. Voices like this on the left are turning the Democratic Party into a joke. We've got to knock it off and get serious guests who are going to diagnose politics, not make it worse. Name calling, vilifying, and defaming nominees you oppose, even if there is very good reason to oppose them, represents everything the Democratic Party should be RUNNING away from.

Let's fight back with a strategy and tactics .... not pointless, defamatory, and juvenile invective. We need to get serious people opining about policy and politics, not one-upping each other or competing for who can make the most provocative insult about a Trump nominee you oppose. //

NavyVet
3 hours ago
"The answer to extremism is not more extremism."
For at least 40 years now, I have been the victim of anti-white discrimination. That has been bad enough, but with "DEI", it just got extreme.

To oppose DEI is to oppose extremism, not engage in it. DEI denigrates everyone. It denigrates minorities by stating they need favoritism to succeed, which they don't, and it denigrates white people because it declares anti-white racism open season. It is divisive, hateful bigotry and extreme racism.

Hare dare you divisive leftist hate-pushers pretend you are anything less than the extremists you project on people of common sense. That's right, common sense: the voters showed it when they rejected you.

justpaul
4 hours ago
The lady at the bakery clearly knows who Goldman is, which suggests that she is a longtime customer. If so, any political issues would have come out years ago.

Goldman is lying. Again.

A couple of years ago, Amazon removed the ability to purchase e-books with their flagship Kindle for Android from the Google Play Store. Google implemented a policy that all in-app purchases had to be made using their billing system. Instead of paying Google 30% of each e-book sold, Amazon removed the ability to buy e-books or audiobooks. //

Amazon operates their own Android App store. You can install the Amazon App Store and download the Kindle app if you have a smartphone or tablet. All of the audiobooks and e-books that are available in the store can be purchased. This is because Amazon uses their billing system, the same one that their Kindle e-readers use.

At the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan, attendees are full of dire predictions that the world’s climate will worsen under President-elect Trump. But when Trump fulfills his campaign promises to increase U.S. oil and gas production and removes President Biden’s pause on new liquid natural gas exports, global emissions will likely decline rather than rise.

This is because exports of U.S. natural gas generally displace coal, reducing global CO2 emissions. Even Germany, Europe’s largest manufacturer, is using lignite coal (rather than the less-polluting bituminous coal) to deal with shortages of renewables now that it has closed its nuclear power plants and Russian gas is no longer available.

About 3 billion people in emerging economies lack electricity and running water, and cook over wood and dung. Natural gas power plants would reduce particulates from wood and dung and make the air cleaner. Under President Biden, the World Bank does not make loans for fossil fuel power plants. //

a dramatic increase in American oil and gas production will have a significant effect on prices - even gas we don't export, as these are fungible commodities. And that will make the use of gas-fired power plants more practical, which will incentivize gas rather than coal plants, and will reduce emissions. That's what the climate scolds want, right?

But American exports of coal to Europe have been increasing under President Biden.

hagaetc.eth

@hagaetc
So I tried to build a tech company from Norway and here’s what happened:

1. Two years of building without almost any money/funding, better part of a year without salary
2. Raise VC and become one of Norway’s first unicorns
3. Face unrealized gains wealth tax bill of many x my annual net salary. ofc the company is loss making and all the investors have preference shares so I can’t take out any money.
4. Call out publicly that this does not make sense. Independent of level, taxation needs to happen when you actually make money.
5. I move to Switzerland because no politician cares/listens.
6. I still don’t get any tangible and sensible answers to my criticism of unrealized gains tax, BUT I do get put up on the “wall of shame” at the socialist parties offices…

I’m Norwegian and I love Norway but the socialist politicians are taking the country down a dark path. It’s a real life Atlas Shrugged. //

Alex Svanevik 🐧
@ASvanevik
·
17h
Here’s how insane things have gotten in Norway:

The Socialist Party has a “wall of shame” in their office with “rich people who have left Norway” - due to the outrageous taxes they’re now being charged.

Who do you find on that wall?

Startup founders like @hagaetc -

Jonatan Pallesen
@jonatanpallesen
Here in Denmark I know an early contributor to successful startups (Unity and more). One year their stocks rose, and the next they fell. This left him with a tax burden much larger than his wealth. He is now a million dollars in debt for doing this successful work.

Orwell2024🏒
@orwell2022
·
5h
Plain evil. And intentional. Socialists do not want a country with business owners and entrepreneurs, but a couple of large companies which they fully control.