Spain is NOT the place to be right now if you’re the typical Internet user.

A drastic move, really, since as pointed out here, you could simply block P2P traffic.

Levying duty on storage media is an alternative often brought up to compensate the music and movie industries. I’m personally against it. The really big losers from piracy right now are the smaller artistes or gaming companies. There’s simply no way to track who’s burning what, making it impossible to reimburse the copyright owner.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I just happened to er, stumble across the Pirate Bay today and they've merged their pirate ship with a Phoenix:

For all the internet-newbies out there, TPB is one of the biggest BitTorrent sites, well-known for thumbing their noses at legal threats made against them. They took advantage of the fact that they were based in Sweden, where US copyright laws don't apply.

The US movie moguls put pressure on the Swedish government however, and TPB's offices got raided recently. Rather than go the way of Napster however, they simply moved to the Netherlands and continued their operations. From their blog:

The big plan is to spread the site on different locations all over the world, so it will be faster and harder to take down. People and companies from various countries have already offered servers, bandwidth and money. 

You can read more about what happened here. The development of intellectual copyright is and interesting debate but I don't have the time to expound on it right now.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I'm sure most gamers appreciate how advanced the physics are in computer games, whether it be applied to a projectile in a first person shooter or anatomically, but apparently Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion takes the cake! Someone managed to set up a 3-minute domino display with the in-game editor. Probably a combination of having way too much free time and the fact that the game looks pretty but gets really boring…

Popularity: 14% [?]

So on page 13 of the Star today (14th June) we have a full-colour, full-page ad from the Selangor government thanking our PM, “with utmost sincerity” for visiting the state on the 13th. According to the rates, such an ad costs 35k and needs to be booked a week in advance.

Remember: “elegant silence”, unless you need to bodek!

Popularity: 10% [?]

Cars was great. The trend of many cartoons animated features now is to opt for a simple plot, and stuff you full of graphical wizardry and funny characters. Only Pixar’s Monsters and the Toy Storys have had particularly original plots. The romance subplot was practically forced down our throats, although if you think about it carefully, it’s the first time Pixar has had a developing romance in their films!

Comedy is of course a must, and these films are now utilizing cultural references to get the laughs out of the older audience as well. Cow tipping, annoying headlight-flashing, excessively cute Japanese characters, a Hummer with a Schwarzenegger accent, power sliding, etc - the list goes on and on and it’s fun to spot them (it took me a while to figure out the significance of car-insect “beetles” buzzing around).

The only thing bad about the movie outing was that GSC opted to ditch Pixar’s short film “One Man Band”, a staple feature in any Pixar movie, and give us 25 minutes of adverts + trailers instead!

Popularity: 9% [?]