The founders and administrators of the Swedish bittorrent tracking megasite The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of assisting in making copyrighted material available illegally in a Swedish court.

The group have been sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, and a fine of 3.6 million $USD in damages.  For the record, that’s about 30 million SEK by today’s exchange rate, one of the highest fines ever imposed in a Swedish court.

It’s a sad day for filesharers, and just goes to show how far out of touch governments and the entertainment industry are with the effects of filesharing.  When will they ever get the point that they’re overcharging for content, underpaying their artists, and strangling a situation that has been proven to actually INCREASE their sales?

Interestingly enough, the trial has not lessened traffic to the site, but rather greatly increased, swelling membership numbers to new heights, and fueling huge membership in the political Pirate Party which seeks reform of copyright laws.

Fly your pirate flags at half staff and have a look at the guilty party’s press conference on the ruling.

If you haven’t seen the awesome mixtape and music site MixTape.me yet, then you definitely should.  People are putting some interesting effort into the ancient art of the mixtape, and the results are phenomenal.  Just take a listen to this playlist made up entirely of covers…All of really good songs.

Sure, it has covers performed by big names like Johnny Cash (Hurt from NiN) and Marilyn Manson (Sweet Dreams), but more importantly, it has Jonathan Coulton (of Still Alive from Portal fame) performing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back.  Rock on.

Among the recent crop of streaming video sites, I came across this little gem: BMovies.com. The site is extremely straightforward, and has quite a variety of films across its four categories (horror, science fiction, kung fu, wild westerns), and seems to have decent bandwidth (after the first few minutes of Angel and the Badman, I never saw another hiccup in the streaming).

If you’re looking for some cheap entertainment, this is the place to go for sure. One of the best features? Fullscreening. While that doesn’t sound like such a big deal, it gets annoying watching a four inch box, and is a feature missing from other popular legal streaming sites.

It’s not often that a “best of the best” list really captures the zeitgeist of the young adults bemused by the various idiocies and intricacies of the internet, but this short animated video somehow manages to do it perfectly, and quit possibly by accident.

It’s almost disturbing how many of these the net culture references the average collegiate / yuppie internet user can identify, and I’ll happily yet sadly admit that I’m no exception. It’s a very strange perspective of the last decade and the changing winds of media and brief entertainment.

The Meth Minute 39 – Episode 1, from Frederator

On a separate note the “grape stomping lady falling on her face” video was a local Atlanta news report being held from the Chateau Elan vineyards in northern Georgia.

Usually when I’m at my computer, and need to look up a word, I just use the “define:yourwordhere” operator at Google. After trying out definr, however, I’ll never use Google’s dictionary again. Unless, of course, they’re the only option left at the end of the “you can’t live without us war” currently raging on the internet. You just can’t beat definr for speed, and its definitions are accurate. There’s really not much more you can ask for in a dictionary.

definr - An incredibly fast dictionary.

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I’m a big fan of — but by no means expert at — strategy games. One of my recent favorites is a free and open-source project called Battle for Wesnoth. Set in the fantasy kingdom of Wesnoth, the game features a variety of units spread across several races. With a built-in editor, there are literally limitless map and campaign options, including dozens of ready-made scenarios available directly for download. Did I mention this is all free?

I never though to mention this awesome game until recently after having rented Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Nintendo Wii from my local Blockbuster. Despite its flashy graphics and reasonably well translated backstory, the game really didn’t differ that much from Battle for Wesnoth in playstyle. That’s pretty impressive for a big-name contender on a next-gen console to be similar or equal in gameplay to a free offering.

In any case, you don’t have anything to lose by checking the game out. It’s free, cross-platform, and constantly improving.

Battle for Wesnoth Homepage
Download Page

Screenshot:

Several years ago, Kodak made the decision to stop producing and selling 35mm black-and-white film. Last year Polaroid quit producing their famous “instant” quick developing cameras on which the company’s name and reputation were built. Now they’ve decided to end production on film for said cameras once they’ve produced enough to last through the next year (2009).

Even ignoring the hundreds of jobs this takes away due to factory closings during a less-than-stellar point in the US economy, it really takes away something more. Polaroids have always held a special sort of place in photography, especially for the spur-of-the-moment fun of the things. There’s something entirely different about a shoebox full of Polaroids when compared to a dvd full of digitized image files. It’s a level of personality that coming generations may well be bereft of in their daily lives if trends continue.

Instant film is still currently being produced by Fujifilm.

[Via: Curbly]

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There seems to be a bit of buzz going around about a new web service called ControlC. Basically, the website offers a small piece of software which automatically uploads everything you copy to the clipboard to their website. That way, if you forget to paste before copying or cutting something new, it’s all right there waiting for you.

According to their homepage,

All content uploaded from your clipboard is encrypted to protect your
data completely. You can optionally, however, unencrypt and permanantly
store the data in your account, and share it with the world.

Hmm. So the link to that gallery of hot cheerleaders somebody just IMed me is now safely online? The serial number for my new copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 too? My social security number? That pretty blonde’s phone number? Great!

This is a good idea in theory but in my opinion it’s just one more way for people to spread way more information about themselves, their habits, and their personal data onto the internet for no real reason.

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