Court Finds Pirate Bay Founders Guilty, slapped with 1-Year Jail Sentence and $3.6M fine

The Pirate Bay Verdict and the Future of File Sharing - PC World

Today is a sad, sad, day for pirates and file-sharing enthusiasts alike. It’s all over the interwebs now: A Swedish court has ruled that the four founders of the popular BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay are guilty of “assisting in making copyright content available”.

Quite frankly, the verdict is shocking given the technical competence of the prosecution and their inability to make a solid case.

Best of luck to the TPB team as they try to combat this BS verdict and appeal, but if worst comes to worst, rest assured that file-sharing, P2P, and BitTorrent will be around for some time to come, thanks to rapidly evolving decentralized networking tech as well as the inumerable small-scale and private P2P networks and sites/trackers.

Long live the pirates!

Sticking it to the TurboTax Man

Any TurboTax user needing to file forms in more than one state will quickly find that they need to pony up $39.95 per state after the first free state. Almost $40 just for a bunch of electronic forms? Puh-leez. That’s probably enough to buy ANOTHER copy of TurboTax! Considering the current state of the economy, Intuit sure doesn’t seem to be helping its customers.

Naturally, this led me to some tinkering with TurboTax’s innards. I gotta give them some kudos here – a registry and filesystem sweep turned up nothing on how TurboTax keeps track of what states you have and whether to charge you. Nevertheless, I came to the conclusion that this data must still be present locally as a fresh install on another computer still allowed me to download the first state for free.

After installing TurboTax on a VMWare Workstation install of Windows XP, I was able to download the first “free” state. The downloaded state forms are located in folders in C:\Program Files\Intuit\TurboTax 2008\forms\  (e.g. the Michigan forms are in a directory named mii_08). After zipping that folder up and copying it to the corresponding TurboTax folder on the real computer, TurboTax happily detected the new state forms. Voila – talk about increasing your refund by $40!

Bill to Delay DTV Switch Fails in U.S. House

DailyTech - Bill to Delay DTV Switch Fails in U.S. House

If there’s one issue that I have to disagree with the Obama administration on, it’s their push to delay the DTV switch to June instead of February. The new president has a strong reputation for being tech-savvy – so why delay this? Seriously, if anyone still hasn’t gotten their head out of the sand about digital television, it’s their OWN FAULT. For god sakes, get off your lazy ass and go buy a damn converter box! Never mind that the coupon program is broken and out of funds. The point is, citizens have no excuse not to be ready. Delaying the switch will only cost more money. Broadcasters and media networks are poised to make the switch in February, and postponing the switch date will only jack things up. PBS, for example, will have to sing to the tune of $22 million for going along with this crazy retrograde scheme. For once, the Republicans have done the right thing in opposing any further delay.

Waterboarding now an amusment park attraction

Waterboarding an attraction at amusement park | Oddly Enough | Reuters

LoL - waterboarding has been made notorious by the public as a cruel and harsh
interrogation technique. Now, at New York's Coney Island, waterboarding is the new
American pastime. Simply put in a dollar and watch some robots waterboard each other!
Is this the culmination of some secret government plot to increase public awareness of the
virtues of waterboarding? As the article quotes SpongeBob, ""It don't Gitmo better!"

English Video Project - Supreme Court and Gratz v. Bollinger

My group's video for the English class project is now up on YouTube...check it out! Inspired by The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin.