As many know the rise and fall of The Pirate Bay has been a long one, including many legal battles that finally caught up to the folks in Sweden who ran the site. However, The Pirate Bay is not dead just yet. While it is true that the bittorrent will no longer be active that is because they are switching to a new trackerless solution called DHT. The crew recently posted the following:

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”

The DHT system is much more decentralized and harder to track who is downloading what. It also means that when a tracker goes down the entire site won’t get hit.

The future of TPB is unclear. They have appealed their copyright infringement case and the appeal has been postponed until next summer. So, at least for the mean time, TPB is still around. Smoke em if you got’em.

Now, let’s put this in perspective, Twitter’s growth from October 2008 to October 2009 was a crazy 1,271% growth and their global visitors are at 58.4 visits per month, so there is still a lot to be optimistic about. This could be part of the motivation for Twitter to release many of their new features like the retweet button, geolocation feature and their new lists, which are really cool.

Still, the big question I have about Twitter, and the one which makes it’s valuation crazy, is how are they going to monetize this? The valuation is at least a half of a billion dollars if you base it on the offer that Facebook reportedly made to them early in the year. I can kind of understand why Facebook would want to buy Twitter, then they own the market on social networking. However, Biz and Ev don’t need any money, they’ve already struck it rich. Still, I don’t know why anyone else would want it because I’m still not convince that this thing can make that kind of profit . . . or any profit. They have not so far.

There were also rumors that this update might eliminate support for Intel Atom processors. Why would Apple do this you ask? Well the Atom processor is mostly used in mobile computers like Netbooks. Many folks have bought a Netbook and turned it into a “Hackintosh”, and you know how Apple is about stuff like that. I might be more sympathetic to Apple’s basic argument that they are a hardware company first and they sell an OS, which they want to control and keep stable. The only problem is that the Netbook is a growing market and Apple has no product that even compares to what the Netbook offers. Their cheapest laptop is $999, I can get a decent Netbook for about $250-300 bucks. If I could throw Snow Leopard on there, I’d be mighty interested. Apple is not going to cannibalize their market by allowing these Hackintoshes, people who are going to install Mac OS on a Netbook were never going to buy a Macbook anyway.

The good news is that this deal would not necessarily be tied to any piece of hardware such as the oft-rumored Apple Tablet or AppleTV. The content would simply be tied to your iTunes account, thus you could access the content through any device that had iTunes.

The real question here is can Apple get the networks on board? While networks often claim they are excited to look at new revenue streams, in reality they never really want to because they don’t want to threaten the subscription fees they receive from cable and satellite providers such as Time/Warner or Comcast. I can especially see Fox and NBC balking at this idea because they want to launch some paid form of Hulu and they might worry about canabalizing sales.

What the networks have to realize though is that in the long run, their real competitor is pirated television shows. In 2 years you’ll be able to buy a 30 gig USB flash drive for like $20 bucks. This means any 14 year old kid can easily take a bunch of shows and give them to all their friends, how doe the networks stop that? How do they stop pirate downloads from bit torrent sites or newsgroups? I have a “friend” who used to download tons of pirated music from Kazaa and file sharing sites, but after time my “friend” realized that it was much easier to just buy music for .99 cents from iTunes, and then he didn’t have to worry about being branded a criminal. This has to be where the networks move, I think they would find that a lot of would-be pirates would gladly pay $30 bucks a month for HD on-demand streaming of television shows, I know I certainly would. Yes, I would cancel my satellite service, between this and Netflix I’d be set for a much smaller monthly fee then I’m currently paying.

So, do the right thing networks, there are millions of us just waiting for this kind of service. Jump on board before you become the buggy whip dealer.

While devices like this have been around for a while, they have typically been rather expensive, anywhere from $200-500 dollars. The Little Buddy will sale for only $100, so it is a real alternative to obsessive parents who want to track their children’s every move.

Actually, it does have a few cool features. For example, you can set up specific times or locations where your child should be. If the child leaves that designated area then the device sends the parent a text message if something isn’t as it is supposed to be. As the father of 3 daughters under the age of 10, this sounds like an intriguing, although kind of creepy device.

Of more interest would be a similar device that you could discreetly tag your teenager with. I’m pretty confident I know where my 8 year old is most of the time, but when she’s 16 I have a feeling I won’t have anywhere near that same degree of confidence. I shudder to think what my parents would have done to me if they could have tracked my every move as a teenager.

This nuclear reactor, called the Toshiba 4S has some big advantages over the traditional nuclear reactor. Namely, it is very compact, it has minimal monitoring and maintenance requirements and comes with an automatic shutdown feature for safety purposes (always a good thing).

Reportedly both Mitsubishi and Hitachi have also developed similar concept reactors that output anywhere from 350,000-600,000 kilowatts. Not to shabby.

Now, if we can just get our country to start adopting more nuclear power. We hear those on the left complain constantly about our lack of clear, green power, something I think is a worthy goal. As of now there isn’t a single green power source (wind, solar, thermal) that is really a viable alternative. The only power source that is an actual, viable source of real energy is nuclear power. The traditional fear is that there are obvious safety concerns (largely now dealt with) and concerns about where to store the nuclear waste. Even the waste concerns are largely overblown, especially with the ability to essentially reuse the nuclear waste for further power. The French have been doing it for years.

Who knows, in 50 years we might all have small nuclear reactors in our basement and we’ll be self-sufficient, burning clean nuclear energy. Or we all turn into mutant zombies.

One of the best days for shopping (if you are looking for deals) of course is Black Friday. Black Friday, the first shopping day after Thanksgiving is usually chalk-full of great deals just to get customers in the door. Of course, you usually have to put up with thousands of other clamoring customers who also all want that same deal. Last year I got up at 3:00 in the morning (in Branson MO no less) and drove to the local Wal-mart and stood in line to get an $80 dollar Blu-Ray player and a sub-$100 GPS system. I felt that it was worth the pain, but often the key is coordinating where the best deals are so you can make sure you get the most of your crowd-packed Black Friday.

To that end, I’ve compiled a list of some of the top web-pages that track which stores are offering great deals on various products. So, in no particular order:

BFads – they have the leaked Office Max ad page up already

BlackFriday.info

BlackFriday Dealighted

iblackfriday

TheBlackFriday

Dealtaker-Black Friday

Gottadeal-Black Friday

So, get your shop on, there are deals to be had (including note-books for under $150 bucks!)

So, enter the new Barnes & Noble “Nook” (the supposed name, all though this is unofficial so far). You can see pictures of the beauty here. The Nook will feature two separate screens, a top e-ink screen and a separate bottom screen which should feature multi-touch very similar to the iPhone. Best of all, the price point is rumored to respectable $259. True, it’s only $20 cheaper then the Kindle, but it features both multi-touch and, presumably, Internet access.

Of course, the big question is always content. One of the things that makes the iPhone such a great device (despite it’s many flaws) is the iTunes catalog and the App Store. So, how will the Barnes and Noble device stack up to Amazon’s content? Once again, rumors say quite well. It will feature full access to the Google book library as well as all of the items that B&N publishes. It sounds like the content will be quite robust. Apparently it will also feature an option that will allow people to lend their e-books to friends. That is pure awesomeness right there.

The big question will most likely come down to battery life. The great advantage that the Kindle has is that is can run almost forever because e-ink uses very little power. Where I have to charge my iPhone nearly every day, the Kindle can literally go weeks without a charge because it is so light on the power consumption. So, will the Nook stack up on battery life? If it can go 2-3 days I’d be happy.

One thing for sure, this is a shot across the bow to Apple. If Apple intends on getting into the e-book business with their rumored tablet device they had better hurry up, and they better offer their device at a reasonable price. However this shakes out, it’s good for the consumer, more competition is always good!

One must wonder how happy Google is about this revelation, they can’t be too happy that details and actual builds of the OS are already getting out. On the other hand, that was pretty careless of them to place the entire OS on a publicly accessible folder. Also, it’s open source, so what can they really do? Not much.

I’m excited to see what the Chrome OS will be able to do once it has some solid development behind it (don’t judge it too harshly on it’s early release). The fact that it’s free, is a Google product and will making PC computing very cheap is a fine idea.

Oh yeah, if you want to download the OS click here. You can only install it if you have Linux, but if you are the adventurous type and want to give it a go and see the newest operating system sure to take the world by storm, have at it.

The first part of the attack of “Project Dark” or “Black” (depending on who you ask) comes from their heavy push of Android based phones such as the Motorola CLIQ and the Samsung Behold II. These beautiful, feature rich smart phones will be able to compete with the iPhone and the Palm Pre, Google is out to control the world through Android. T-Mobile was the first to offer a G-Phone, and while it wasn’t perfect (in fact there were many flaws) we got our first taste at the open, Android based platform, and it was impressive.

The second part of the Project Dark will implement a high speed data network of over 21 MPBS, which is much better then AT&T’s current 7.2 MBPS. T-Mobile is aggressively upgrading their network to hand higher capacity and speeds, which will be a boost to consumers as it pushes other networks to work on their speed.

Finally, and the post interesting part of the plan which would introduce a $50 plan that would include unlimited data, voice, text, etc. If true this would be clearly the best plan of any of the wireless networks. The next closest is Sprint’s Simply Everything plan that gives you basically the same thing (although only calls to cellphones are unlimited) for $70 bucks. This is $20 bucks cheaper!

Of course, any such plan as T-Mobile might be working on would come with considerable growing pains, including drastic increases in usage. Engadget lays out many of the arguments that such a plan is doomed to failure. While they raise some interesting points, I think that if some random writer for an Internet blog realizes these growth issues T-Mobile will as well.

Honestly, at this point, what do they have to lose? They are the also-ran in a pretty vicious industry. The big benefit to consumers is that if T-Mobile introduces such a plan, then the other companies are bound follow suit. At least we can hope. I love my iPhone, but their monthly rate is pretty steep.