by Will Conley

It's five minutes to midnight.

It is a fact that the SOPA and PIPA bills currently being debated in the United States Congress are harbingers of doom and destruction for the Internet as we know it. It has yet to be confirmed whether SOPA is indeed asking for the first-born child of all Web developers, or whether PIPA in fact calls for daily sacrifices of World of Warcraft addicts to the Mayan feathered serpent god Kukulkan.

What is clear is that SOPA and PIPA opens the door to legions of leathery-winged lawyers who are bloodthirsty to swarm the Internet with lawsuits for any and all sites that so much as link to a blacklisted website. Oh, the bills claim not to encourage blacklists, but that’s silly. You can’t keep track of which sites are bad, naughty sites that have allegedly pirated content, without maintaining lists.

So which websites will be put at risk of being shut down by SOPA and PIPA? We here at This Blog Rules have peered into the future using our magic decoder ring found at the bottom of a bottle of tequila, and this is what we came up with. The 13 most popular and important websites (by Alexa ranking and the author’s whim) that fall under the purview of SOPA/PIPA are as follows.

It’s quite elusive for a sequel to outstrip its predecessor. Sequels are often panned for being lazy and derivative excuses to pinch more pennies out of an already exhausted idea. No matter how atrocious the predecessor is, if the cash is rolling in, a sequel more disastrous than its predecessor is probably in the pipeline.

This winter saw snowy weather wreak havoc across the United Kingdom as it became clear that this country still isn’t prepared for icy conditions. Travel chaos erupted up and down the country as flights were delayed, trains canceled and roads closed a heavy snow and freezing temperatures drove the country to a standstill. There are those rare snowstorms that exceed all forecasts, break all records and cause mass devastation on an unprecedented scale; the UK’s so-called ‘Big Freeze’ certainly doesn’t fall into this category. So here are some truly devastating snowstorms that make the UK’s recent snowy spell seem like a touch of frost.

With the credit crunch biting hard, people on the front line with real jobs and real bills have found it increasingly difficult to cover all their weekly and monthly expenses. Traditional borrowing has been relatively simple, but in the last two years its been turned into an uphill struggle for most people. Witness the rise of cash advance services and payday loans in place of regular lending. Below we have an account from Tony who works in a auto parts factory and gives his view on how its affected him