and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.
Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.
Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.
*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.
OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:
Fun fact: this is called the analog loophole, and it’s completely impossible to close, even in principle. No matter how much copy protection you add to a piece of media, it will eventually have to be sent to a display and then turned into an audio/video output that humans can interpret, because… that’s the whole fucking point
So even if they find some way to encrypt the signal sent to the display so you can’t intercept it with a VCR or tape recorder (which would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible), at the end of the day you just can’t do anything about someone pointing a camera at the screen or a microphone at the speaker. Yo ho ho
(By the way, I’d love to see someone actually talk about the legal precedent of this wrt it being literally the same thing as recording a TV show on a VCR or recording a mixtape off of the radio, both of which I believe are absolutely unambiguously legal. OP may be right that this is literally, legally, not piracy, but I’m not a lawyer nor am I opposed to crimes so don’t ask me)
What’s the advantage to including a tape recorder in this process, rather than cutting out the middle steps and just having Audacity record your headphone output? Is it just that it bears a closer resemblance to the situations that set legal precedent regarding time-shifting?
Tags:
#reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
1. Sue someone; doesn’t matter who or why. Or get sued if you’d rather.
2. When listing off your claimed facts, open with “Plaintiff is a natural person, residing at [location].” This will look like you’re just establishing jurisdiction and will raise zero eyebrows.
3. For the rest of time, you can call yourself an “alleged human.”
If you’re describing a thing as being the size of another thing and you need to qualify the size of the thing in order to convey the size of the thing, it’s a bad thing to compare the thing to. “It was the size of a small—” no. Find a thing that’s the same size as the thing.
“Listen Dale, I’m telling you this thing was the size of a goddamn house! I mean, not like a big house, not mansion-sized, but definitely a modest single-family bungalow… okay fine, yeah Bill, maybe more like a large garden shed, but come on, that’s a pretty big garden shed dude. Stop trying to steal my thunder man. Let’s go with… a small garage. Single car, but with a little extra space for the lawn mower.”
“It was the size of a small cement mixer. Not like the truck, I mean the little ones with the handcart bases. But, you know, that’s still well outside the realm of okay sizes for a spider.”
“The blast affected an area the size of a small country… no, not the Vatican City, smartass. Or one of those really tiny island countries. Not a little city state, I mean big enough to be called a country out of more than courtesy. But one of those small countries that the news always compares to Rhode Island if it ever gets mentioned.
…Why don’t I just compare it to Rhode Island? Because Rhode Islands aren’t a SI unit of area measurement, that’s why! I’m trying to combat Americentrism here!”
“It was about as big as a small freight train. Not a short regular-gauge freight train, mind you. A narrow-gauge freight train. Maybe like 2 ft gauge, 2 ft-6? I dunno, I ain’t no railroad expert, or a giant death worm expert for that matter.
“It was about as big as a small freight train. HO Scale to be precise.”
“It was about as long as a small breadbox. I’m talkin’ a one-loafer max, Joey, no baguettes. You’d have to saw a baguette in half to fit it in the damn thing.”
“It was as long as a short yardstick. Whaddya mean what’s a short yardstick, you went to Catholic School too didn’t ya? After the nun smacks ya with it enough you got a short yardstick!”
“It was the size of a small bobcat. No, no, I mean the animal, not the piece of construction equipment. Jesus, can you even imagine that? I’m telling you if it were the size of a skid-steer loader I wouldn’t be standing here arguing with you about it.”
“It was the size of a small moose. But you know, moose are a lot bigger than most people think they are. So picture about how big you think an average moose is, and you’ll be pretty close.”
“It was the size of what $1200 a month gets you in New York these days.”
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #fun with loopholes #overly literal interpretations #spiders
compelling argument, but on the other hand, literally everything about this is incoherent and wrong and requires the speaker to have never ever thought about any of these subjects for a second
like
do they think without a landlord
there would be an apartment building sitting there for people to just go into? that apartments are “hoarded”?
what do you think the world would look like without this thing?
at least this isn’t as bad as the “insurance companies only exist to get between people who need health care and people who want to provide it” take, though it comes from the same place
think more than “not at all” about why events might happen and why people might have reasons to do things
Actually, what *would* happen? Like, there’s a new law, long-term renting of living or office space is illegal, and you can only own property if you live or work in that space for at least three months or it reverts to the state and gets sold at auction. Apartment buildings are now privately owned condos, and you do a similar thing for office space for businesses.
There’s an initial wave of homelessness so bad that the entire governing state breaks down, so its probably more interesting to just hand wave the transition and consider only the steady state. Property values *would* be a hell of a lot lower, that seems obvious. But even fairly successful people would have to live in group or extended family households well in to their thirties, unless high-prestige jobs started offering condos as a signing bonus. I think the top… say, 20-25% of the country by income would probably thrive, since land is now cheap and they could buy it wherever they wanted to live. The bottom 25% would be more interesting, basically anybody living paycheck to paycheck. For them, the only option is to live in a family or group home, since they couldn’t save up. So a large fraction of the country would be basically living in sprawling tribal halls that were inherited and passed from one generation to the next- you’d get all the downsides of that, including rampant abuse and tyrannical family heads, and exile-as-death. But this property would be owned and you wouldn’t be paying rent on it (aside from insurance and taxes). So ‘paycheck to paycheck’ would actually be easier to escape than it is now, since you wouldn’t be spending two weeks out of every year paying your landlord instead of yourself. (Though medical and educational expenses could still overwhelm). It’s a weird society, and probably worse than ours, but kind of interesting?
My guess is that the place the scenario breaks down is in “*long-term* renting of living or office space is illegal”. Renters end up living in short-term accommodations originally intended for travellers, getting kicked out of any given hotel (or other local analogue) after X weeks/months because the hotel would be violating the law by allowing them to stay longer.
Also probably a lot of couchsurfing, shading along a spectrum from “living with pre-existing friend who is genuinely not charging you anything” to “basically a live-in housekeeper, paid in shelter” to “exchanging money under the table”.
Also also, it depends on how exactly the law defines “rent”. A HELOC is effectively a mechanism for selling part of your house to a bank and then renting it back from them: is this legal in no-landlords-allowed world? If so, with what (if any) restrictions? Can you put a down payment on a house, cover the rest with a HELOC instead of a mortgage, and make interest-only payments for years on end?
—
(I personally know people who have done all of these things, which is probably why I thought of them.)
Tags:
#one of the people reading this…may actually have done *everything* listed along the couchsurfing spectrum #I know a family in meatspace who did the hotel thing #the person with a large long-term interest-only-payment HELOC is me #(okay *technically* it’s my dad but like where do you think he’s getting the money from) #((we are *currently* doing well enough financially that we’ve been able to increase the payments to a little above interest-only)) #((and make occasional extra payments on top of that)) #((but we *were* only paying the interest for a long time)) #((and it’s still very much an option on the table)) #discourse cw #story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes #homelessness #adventures in human capitalism
You’re momentarily confused because it sounds like a thing that you just read on a news site
You go onto their blog; every single thing that you read, as far back as you can scroll, is just things that have actually happened. There’s posts about vaccine protesters; posts about NFTs; posts about January 6th; posts about the pandemic; about Trump; about Brexit; about fucking Harambe for God’s sake
You look at the notes on each post; a few of them are people panicking like this is news to them; most of them are variants on “Oh shit, I need to look at the blog name!”
You select a random reblogger, and look at their Tumblr; it’s full of happy, well-adjusted people, but you just can’t seem to reblog any of their posts; every time you try, you get a message that you’ve never seen before:
“You are not authorized to share in this content”
You hit the back button, but it takes you back to the top of posts-from-a-darker-timeline
In mounting trepidation, you check to see if there are any new posts
There’s one: a fake(?) tweet from the leader of your country, lamenting the massive loss of life in the freak storm that just hit your city
You put your phone down
You look out the window
In the distance, you hear the wind starting to blow
Tags:
#storytime #death tw #unreality cw #apocalypse cw #…so what you’re saying is that I get minutes-to-hours-scale advance notice of disasters #(mixed in with some noise about changes to Tumblr’s formatting and other such minor issues‚ but still) #that’s often not enough‚ and it #might turn out not to be enough *this* time in which case I will have no further opportunities to make use of it‚ but… #…like‚ I stand a much better chance of surviving the freak storm now than I would have if I hadn’t read the tweet‚ right? #I don’t have time to evacuate but I’ll get a head start on bunkering down #in the future (if I survive that long)‚ I’ll set up my phone to react to a new posts-from-a-darker-timeline post in a manner #approximating the way it would react to an emergency broadcast #get as many other people as possible to do the same #(the exact details depend on what circumstances allow one to view primeverse Tumblr) #(if we can only get my phone to do it‚ that requires different implementation than if anyone can just point any device at a particular URL) #in fact‚ I should at least dash off a quick post about this immediately‚ in case I *don’t* survive the storm #leave some breadcrumbs for others to investigate #(”you can view primeverse posts but not reblog them” sounds like a job for the fundamental theorem of software engineering) #(can I screenshot them? point a camera at the screen and take a photograph?) #((…honestly‚ ”a friend posts a screenshot of a tweet that hasn’t been written yet and then #immediately dies in the disaster the tweet describes” sounds like a thriller-novel plot hook in itself)) #((maybe I’m just the prologue to *that* story)) #tag rambles #fun with loopholes #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #story ideas I will never write
How you expect the “no weapon forged by mortal hands shall slay me” loophole to go down: playing with the definitions of “weapon”, “forged”, or possibly “mortal”.
How it actually goes down: the blacksmith who forged the sword is a giant spider – strictly speaking all of their limbs are feet.
Tags:
#spiders #fun with loopholes #story ideas I will never write #violence mention #death mention
I have discovered the truth about chainmail bikinis, and it is imperative those wearing such armor do not think about it too hard or they may inadvertently cross the line between Sexy Hero and Homicidal Pervert.
Item: enchanted chainmail bikini/headband/anklet set
Tags:
#art #comics #clothing #fun with loopholes #…nsfw?
Brinens and Things 