Bong Cat

The Bong Cat does not like.

Some brain-dead ‘lolcat’ fanatic has taken it a little too far. 20-year-old Acea Schomaker has created a bong that houses his kitten. The Nebraska deputies did not take kindly to smoking marijuana out of the bong while the cat was still inside. Here’s the full article after the jump.

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The Pirate Bay Trial Begins, Pirates 1, Prosecution 0

Image via Wikipedia

The most important day in file sharing history has taken place. Remember the first time you downloaded an Mp3? How about the first time you used Napster or Limewire?

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, you’ll have heard the stories of silicon swashbucklers and rampaging record companies. Perhaps the largest contributor to the pirate software scene is The Pirate Bay. Hosted in Sweden, this website tracks and indexes BitTorrent files (.torrent) for almost every flavor of data. You can find movies, games, albums, programs, and pretty much anything else of digital value all for free. Most of the sites content is uploaded by its 3.4 million user base.

Of course, this cant last forever.

The Swedish Government has been after TPB for years. After a raid in 2006 and 3 days of downtime, officials pushed to bring TPB to court for their blatant disregard for copyright law. The trial began Feb 16th, 2009.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall read out the charges that can be best summarized as “commercial copyright infringement”. The plaintiffs are Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal. Lundström’s lawyer pointed out that the prosecutor may have drawn up some charges incorrectly. Interestingly, Lundström is the only one of the defendants with two lawyers, one of which is a copyright expert. – TorrentFreak

It was apparent that the prosecution had made an error in judgment when choosing their  ‘Computer Expert’. A live audio broadcast revealed the frantic clicking of their witness fumbling to get his PowerPoint presentation to display. He was later asked to “stick to the papers”. Unable to define the difference between Megabits and Megabytes, an EPIC FAIL sticker was quickly slapped on the prosecution’s case.

After the Second day, it had become apparent that the prosecution had clearly not done their research. According to TorrentFreak, at least half of the charges were dropped, sighting that the TPB did not host any copywritten materials, but only the .torrent files tracking them. It seems as if the court has realized that this site is a Torrent search engine, and not a distributor of pirated software. It is anticipated that the prosecution will fall flat on its face.

You can read more about the trial at http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ and http://torrentfreak.com/

Information is free.

LONG LIVE THE PIRATE BAY.

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Author of ’Rabbit, Run,’ John Updike, Dies of Cancer

(Bloomberg) — John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize- winning author who chronicled middle-class life in small town and suburban America through the prism of such issues as sexuality, adultery, mortality and loss, died today. He was 76.

Updike died after a battle with lung cancer, according to an e-mail from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.

A prolific writer, he authored more than 50 novels and volumes of short stories, poems, essays and criticism. Updike captured “the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America,” most notably in the four-book Rabbit series, which follows Everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom through the second half of the 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two novels in the tetralogy: “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981) and “Rabbit at Rest” (1990).

Some critics, like John Cheever, considered Updike “the most brilliant and versatile writer of his generation.” He was called America’s greatest poetic novelist, who skillfully wove metaphor, lyricism and detail into his narratives. Others say that his prose is superficial and overly descriptive to hide the fact that his work is about nothing.

Many of his books centered on middle-class domestic life, including marriage, adultery and divorce. Updike often peppered these novels with graphic descriptions of sexual intercourse –to the point of gratuitousness, said some critics.