Yes if you don’t mind getting arrested by our fascist border police

Great list!

I tried both and found Fastmail vastly easier to use.

The encryption part wasn’t that valuable for me and ofc Proton doesn’t encrypt the metadata and unless they’re proton too it’s not E2E so I’m happy sticking with Signal for that sorta stuff and leaving email for talking to businesses.

> Proton doesn’t encrypt the metadata and unless they’re proton too it’s not E2E

To be fair though your emails are E2EE at rest in your inbox, so in the event of seizure or a subpoena they can’t hand over anything usable aside from metadata unlike fastmail who will hand everything over.

UI/UX is definitely paramount for me, appreciate the note!

Isn’t it being destroyed because it makes the scanning process easier?

Perhaps partially? I assume that cutting the pages out of the spin makes them easier to scan at least partially. That said I have no insider knowledge of this type of operation so I don't know how much easier that actually makes it.

But ultimately, it's a moot point, because the legal requirement means the books must end up destroyed. Even if the people at Amazon wanted to scan the books in a way that required no destruction at all, it's not currently (legally) possible for them to do so, so they might as well take the easy way out today.

Non-destructive scans are at least 10x as much, and tend to lower quality.

https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...

Cutting the pages out makes them machinable. Non-destructive scans involves gently turning pages, and paying a lot of attention to the state of the spine. Destructive scans involve guillotine cutting the spine off, scanning the covers by hand, putting the pages into a hopper, clamping them in and hitting a button. While that book is scanning, you're already cutting the spine off the next book. If the machine jams, try to work the jam out gently, scan the pieces, and let the computer stitch it together.

Perhaps this is a use case that's worth investigating, to invent better, less-destructive scanning processes! Or some way to rebind them afterwards.

No.

A judge a while ago decided that as long as the physical copy is destroyed, and "transformed" into an electronic copy, you can do the upload. But if you preserve the physical copy after scanning it, you are in violation of copyright because you "copied" the book.

That's literally the only reason they are trashing them. It's a legal requirement.

Can you find a citation for this? I have heard this claimed rule recently from other people, and I haven't seen this decision (nor do I know what level of court or jurisdiction it might be). This is not a rule that I heard many years ago when working on and adjacent to copyright issues (including book scanning!), although of course the issue has been newly litigated again recently, so there may be new interpretations coming out.

Edit: Someone else linked to an order in Bartz v. Anthropic which appears to emphasize that destroying the original copies improved the defendant's position with respect to the fair use analysis. Is that the decision you're thinking of?

Distributing an exact copy of the text would be illegal; if you could get an LLM trained on a book to output the exact copy of the text from the book then that would be illegal as well.

They still made a bunch of copies and reused it to train multiple models after making the first copy. Unless they copy and destroy a book each time they use it as as training sample

ZOHO calls their Microsoft Office suite an OS I think.

I feel like if it’s a platform app developers can target to run general purpose user facing software, it can be an OS.

In some sense, it is. Sandstorm called itself an OS too. Arcan calls itself an Overlay-OS.

I think for any platform for general purpose computing that provides an application model that programs are written to target, it's close enough I don't mind. Ie: it makes sense for some end-user software to have a target for Windows, Linux, Sandstorm, etc.

& from the other side- what does Debian add that lets it call itself an OS? A set environment and package manager that software is specifically packaged for.

I see a Linux distro as a "integration project", which delivers several software pieces glued together that work in harmony, which includes "OS pieces" such as the Linux kernel.

Is it? I hear about 10xers all the time

Or documentation that everyone could read and refer to

SVG?

I am normally the first to complain that people in hacker news are biased against WMF in a way that seems forced and weird (oh no ! they’re sponsoring some cool open culture stuff in addition to running the website ! they pay for more than literally just web server hosting !)

But this is obscene. I’ve cancelled my donation.