People who really care about what they are downloading - collectors and such - go to private sites. Many private sites are tailored to one kind of entertainment and they always have the highest quality, best documented torrents with a community of seeders that will even help a leecher out if all the other seeds have died out. This method is also a lot legally safer.

All of these private sites track ratios and ban users (by IP usually but maybe MAC) if a user exhibits unabashed greediness. So it is definitly in your best interest to seed.

I belong to a lot of private sites (anime, music, and porn ones) and I always keep a good ratio. That doesn't mean I always seed to even 1.0 though. A lot of times it's just not worth it; if there's hundreds or thousands of other seeders it is a waste of your resources. In those cases I just seed a less healthy torrent for longer.

For public sites I agree with you though. I use public sites for movies and tv shows, and I usually kill the torrent as soon as the DL is complete. Eventually I'll find a good private tracker for those and I will then seed 'em up.

The judges should be locked up for at least 20 years. When an individual picks up the mantel of public protector the laws that govern them should be much harsher than for normal citizens; they are given authority over us "normal" people and should be punished in the harshest manner if they abuse that trust. The same goes for pigs, soldiers, etc.

Comcast already lost my business back in the throttling days. Luckily, I live in an urban center where there are choices for cable internet. Of course, each apartment building is usually only wired for one company's cable; this meant that when I was looking for an apt I had to find out what company it was wired for and weed out all the comcast ones. Really cut down my options, because comcast is the main provider around here. It was worth it though for RCN, who have publicly stated that they won't work with the RIAA or block/throttle/inhibit/cap downloads.

In most small cities and towns though there is only one provider. My friend, for example, has only one choice: Comcast. So he has to use that if he wants good internet speed.

It's pretty crazy to be running keygens on your system. Every time I do it, I think to myself "what are these guys getting for all their hard work?" The same thing with cracked software - you run an installer yourself how could the cracker pass up that type opportunity? I just assume most of them infect your computer with some spyware and trojans.