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Saturday, May 9, 2009

This isn't Bear related... however... has anyone been following the news concerning the Swedish website The Pirate Bay...? The Pirate Bay is a site that indexes and tracks torrent files - so - get yourself a program like BitTorrent, then start your quest to find and download music from your favourite bands while at the same time grab the latest blockbusting movies. Once you find these files, you now become part of the group that is 'sharing' that particular file. It's as simple as that, and because it's so simple, there's a whole bunch of people online who seed and leech torrent files. Getting back to The Pirate Bay, they've been having legal issues since 2006 specifically because certain people are saying that torrents are not about sharing but rather it's about stealing, and with a name like 'The Pirate Bay'... well... I'm sure the site has angered a ton of people who feel they are watching their dollars disappear with every 'shared' byte flying by.

There's 4 main guys who run the site and they are all up for a year in jail including having to pay a fine for $3.2 USD (news articles here). However, there's been a ton of backlash ever since this court case. First they stated that the judge is biased since he is a member of various copyright protection trade groups. And rather than scare and deter people from downloading torrents by putting these guys up on trial, this court case has increased the number of torrent users, by double if not more.

It will be interesting to see just which way this case is going to go. However I do know that you just cannot stop people from passing stuff back and forth online. Ever since I have been online, since 1994, I have heard about people passing games and files and what have you, first through the newsgroups then the BBS and IRC. Now you can movies, music, games, and files from other sites such as RapidShare, MegaUpload and from bloggers on BlogSpot. And for those who like movies, you don't even need to download them anymore, not with sites like Vidics. I just don't see how anyone is going to police what people want to share over the net.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

A Bearish prince is suing Michael Jackson. The prince's name is Sheikh Abdulla bin Hamad Al Khalifa and he claims that Michael Jackson owes him an album, an autobiography and and a stage play. Michael Jackson's lawyer stated to the British court that the singer is too ill to testify in person for this breach-of-contract brought on by the prince. There's not too many photos of the Sheikh online but here's one and here's another. It'll be interesting where this story will lead.

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Wednesday, November 12, 2008

So the story goes: a bunch of KKK members are holding an initiation rite. One woman who they met online was there... now I'm not sure if she was the only one being initiated, but at some point she didn't want to be a part of it and wanted to leave. That's when the leader Raymond Foster, 44 (photo) decided to kill the woman. There's 7 others involved.

Now the only reason why I'm mentioning this is because... dang... the leader is so cute. How can such cuteness just be so evil...? It's like discovering your favourite teddy bear you love to cuddle has fangs and decided to bite you. It just saddens me when guys I find cute turn out to be evil creatures.