Coming back to this after a while trying out. Qwant is indeed very nice in Europe at least. I tested it and adopted it, I also like the fact it have a map based on OSM which is nicer than the Apple thing in DDG.
fievel
I purchase mostly digital books because I use to read at night next to my sleeping partner and e-reader is the easiest way for me. Also O don't have a very big house to store all. Now from a piracy vs purchase point of view: I actually buy ebooks as a mark of support to authors I like very much. Now I must confess that for some very popular authors, I trend to think that one book pirated or one book bought won't change a lot for them. So I buy mostly less known or indie authors at the end.
Internet Relay Chat.
Indeed, I was focusing mainly in the fact that there is not a easy solution to completely avoid this problem. Now indeed being able to mute, to ban or to "report" an user to his instance admin could be useful tools even if they are not the full solution.
Now Lemmy can implement anything but nothing could ever prevent blocked/muted user to create another account in order to continue harassment.
But it's not specific to Lemmy and same with anything open on internet.
I think the only way to prevent such issue would be a system which would require to prove identity in some way in order to create a single account. But this is completely against the openness of a federated network.
The stand, by Stephen King
I've also used Startpage and DuckDuckGo, they all have their strengths
Can you develop? Why do you prefer qwant over ddg for example.
I also dropped Google search mainly for two reason. First privacy, making money with my private data and so on. Then I find Google search is less and less good, the first thing being that sponsored links are first even if they don't match well the search keywords and even not looking at sponsored links I think the results are much worse than in the past.
I now use duckduckgo and I'm happy with it but I can try something else.
With my Clara HD, I can upload with calibre but what I do more often is to convert epub to kobo specific one Kepubify. The reader can read regular epub but you don't have book progression, meta data etc the same as with the kepub.
Then put the result on a local web server (even possible on android if you're on the go). I then use the built-in kobo web browser (in beta menu) to browse and download the book.
Kobo Clara HD. Pretty old now (I bought it in 2018), but it still got updates. I'm very satisfied with it (well I've not tested any other). Perhaps the only drawback if I had to change would be to have some kind of physical button to turn pages, but with the configuration options that it have it's really not necessary.
By chance, I'm doing more or less the same as you. I initially read lotr when I was ~15 yo (I'm nearly 40 now). I also read it in French those years ago but I'm rereading now the real thing in English. Loving it too.
I think you raise a very good point about explaining the problem... Even us as "smart humans" have often great difficulty to see the point while reading PM specs...
I'm volunteer to donate because of I accidentally die, rather that it deserve someone who would have more luck than me rather than no one.
Now in Belgium it works a bit differently. Everyone is, by default, considered as a donor.
You can then register to either refuse it or to impose it whatever your family says.
This is because the law is that the doctors must always ask the family if they are ok to give organs from diseased family member even with the "by default donor", with the registration you can say "don't ask my family and just do it".
This can be used in two situation in my opinion, the first one being family that have different conviction and may refuse despite the opinion of the diseased. The second situation (mine) being not wanting to worry grieving family with one more difficult decision to take.