And what OS would you run in that? Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium? If you have a license for those, why run starter edition instead on installing that as the primary OS? If you are going to pirate a copy, why not just install the pirated copy as the primary OS? Running an OS inside an OS on a netbook is too much overhead for too little benefit.

Not to mention *OBSIDIAN* is designing this game instead of the original developers. The company that single handily ruined the sequel to Neverwinter Nights by creating the filth that was Neverwinter Nights 2. Obsidian has a track record of picking up games that other developers had worked on, and ruining them... Just check out their game list on Wikipedia.

Please submit a link to a post where you have done what you are asking of him.

Actually, I'd say step one is destroying the said raided "panty" so that they can't be traced back to their original owner who may have... erhm... had an accident.

Great! Now slashdot is guilty of being "Accessories to pirating" too. ;)

This was a low justice "dice" court. If you go to the pirate bay's website, they have a video broadcast up explaining more clearly what has happened. They are not going to jail because they can still move up to the higher courts for appeal. Once the highest court has made a decision, then it will be set in stone.

TPB Press conference video -> http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009epicwinanyhow.php

Near the end of the video, a gathering is mentioned on a website. Pirate Party, check the below link to see if there is anything in the external links listed there that you may want to participate in, or rally against. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party#Official_sites.2C_documents

In short, The pirate bay crew is not in jail, and the true trial is FAR from over.

I'm curious how they handle charging for unsolicited traffic. If someone decides to flood my connection offline, will I be stuck with the bill?

Yeah, I don't see the problem. I don't know about other LUGs around the country, but my LUG holds an "install-fest" at a nearby school facility on the second Saturday of every month. Any Jane or Joe can walk in with a computer and get help installing Linux of just about any flavor, get help using the system, and/or fixing some random trouble they have gotten themselves into. No charge, they have been doing this for longer than I have been part of the LUG and I participate in it myself about 5-8 times a year, depending.

So yeah, I don't see what people are complaining about here, if you need Mac/Linux/Windows help/training, there is almost always a local user group willing to help you in these areas. Just because Microsoft does this once or twice a decade, its no reason to get excited, it's likely your own community has had similar support for a much longer time. Also, there is networking to be achieved at these sorts of social events which could land you a nice job.

I'm thinking people missed the sarcasm in my post.

I meant to bring attention to the fact that their particular "Speedlimit Plan" is about as clear as mud, COMPLETELY inaccurate and uninformative. To find actual rates, I ended up looking to some random thread on DSLreports.com. The fact that they say you need "Turbo with Powerboost" to "watch videos" is completely insane, mind-boggling, and ludicrous. It seems like some monkey of a manager randomly throwing fecal matter at multiple options on a wall was used in order to decide what was put up there for each category. Seriously, you could move any of the check marks around in that chart and it would still technically be accurate and useless to a potential customer. It completely disregards things like bandwidth, up speed, down speed, email accounts, amount of public ip addresses, or port-blocking policies. You know, the little important details?

I don't understand. What is not clear about this pricing plan?

http://www.timewarnercable.com/SanDiego/learn/hso/roadrunner/speedpricing.html

If you've seen some of the sump basins that the waste water flows into, you wouldn't say that. :)

I have seen this problem in dvd::rip before, however, you should give it a second chance and check out http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/doc/gui-gui_transcode.cipp#gui_tc_aud_targtrack which may guide you to properly discarding the other tracks when ripping your DVD.

I have been using dvd::rip for a long time, and it really is a great tool. If you ever set up a cluster, you will get some serious encoding power! I currently have three machines working in parallel to encode my rip, works blazing fast.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. No matter what OS you use, you are bound to run into driver problems if you don't do your homework before hand. I know it is tedious, but it will save you from hassles like those. If you have existing hardware and you want to change your OS, you need to do your homework again before you even bother installing the new OS. If you can't find information about drivers for that OS, you are taking a risk installing it anyways and your results will never be guaranteed. If someone were to ask me to build them a new (windows based) computer, I would still build them to spec for Windows XP x64 edition. It is still the best performing windows platform for an average gamer.

It is very likely that any hardware supported by XP x64 will be supported under Windows 7 in the future. I let them know this before-hand, but also include the standard "no guarantees" caveat. I am not a fortune teller, but there is a bit of logic in thinking that any vendor providing 64-bit drivers for Windows XP will be on the bandwagon for Windows 7--unless the hardware is particularly old. At that point, you need to ask yourself why you are buying old hardware for a new system.

XP x64 is very stable and very fast if you keep this in mind, and I have more than a few friends who will vouch for that. As always, your experience may vary, but yeah, drivers can really, really, suck and I feel your pain there.

Windows XP Pro, 64-bit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_xp_tablet_pc_edition#Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition

Unless you run Virtual Machines or play video games with large textures. WoW alone takes up about 2GiB of RAM on my machine when running for a good hour... not that I play WoW or anything... >_> Add firefox with 20 some plus tabs open, about 5 terminals to other machines and I am starting to run out of that nice 4GiB pool.

So what have we learned? Situations vary from person to person and the whole argument is relative to the user and their computing needs. One size does not fit all. Personally, I am glad we have multiple applications to choose from to suit the various needs of this diverse array. Vuze has its place, as does uTorrent, as does... btdownload-curses in screen (hehe, had to sneak that in somewhere).