The chances of getting caught by a patent troll firm is pretty high because it is extremely easy to find you by IP address. Of course, it depends on where you live. Here in the US it's pretty risky, other countries may not have a legal system that is as easy to use by patent trolls.

I live in Australia and although some ISPs have passed on warnings, my ISP (Internode), which is one of the largest in the country, does not. Honestly it's counter-productive for them to do so - if people were being threatened for downloading copyrighted material, they're probably end up moving to a small download quota plan since a large portion of what they'd use it for is no longer safe to do so. Lower quotas = cheaper plans = less money for ISP.

I don't think it is morally and ethically right....

To be honest, it a lot of cases I agree with you. Despite the fact that copying content is trivial, that does NOT make it worthless in a monetary sense and I believe in a fair exchange of money for product model, so long as its reasonable. But when some (old, obscure) content is not even available legally anymore, or not available in your country because no-one can be bothered to sell it to you... that's when the lines of morality and ethics start to blur.

You folks that torrent movies and stuff that is not in the public domain are crazy in my book.

Just out of curiousity, why?

There's always the third option I suppose: pirating (torrents). You get the game and it's without DRM, so it's yours forever no matter what happens. Technically it's the best outcome for the end users, but it's also a tiny bit illegal. I suppose one could just buy of Steam and get the torrented version (or just a crack), thereby fulfilling the monetary exchange and remaining morally sound. But it'd still be considered illegal unfortunately even if you did the right thing.

In my experience people are happy to put up with some DRM (Steam) as opposed to others because it's somehow "better", so even if your broad statements has merit (which I believe it does), it will fall of deaf ears when it comes to gamers.

This is why I keep using Windows. Despite preferring Linux for (some) technical and ideological reasons, ultimately Windows is always going to be the first-tier platform for a lot of companies to support, Mac second and Linux often not even on the radar. Doesn't matter if the content is always good or not, at least having the ability to see said content is better than being without. Apologies for any flamewars.

Why are some of the most pathetic comments on Slashdot made by ACs?

Conspiracy theorists have the burden of proof on them. It's not up to us to defend normal reasoning against those who have outlandish ideas. They have to prove their own position first.

I would argue the UI enhancements (snap windows to edges, full-drive indexing, etc) in Windows 7 were far and away the most useful, daily improvements over XP that I can swear on being ways to do things faster.

If we're just talking about games (your example), the software (the game engine) could be open sourced

It could, but it won't. Epic makes a shit-ton of money licensing their Unreal engine, so why would they open source it? Support? They have support contracts already, so there's no advantage in doing something that lowers their profits. I'd be happy if they open sourced older engines that were no longer part of their business strategy though, like iD does.

Besides, no one said "pay-per-copy makes no sense"... you made up that straw man.

Fine, I should have replied to this post instead of the one I did (read the last line): http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3667507&cid=43499793

Same commenter as the guy I originally replied to, as I was hoping for a response from him. So there, I'm not making anything up.

See, the thing is, most people here don't really want Microsoft to fail. Well, maybe a little bit, but that's not the point.

Yes and no.

I want to see Microsoft suffer some sort of comeuppance for all the disgusting business practices they performed in the past and still do to an extent. At the same time, I don't want the company to fail for reasons of decent people losing their jobs. I would at worst like to see them taken down a peg so that they have less of a stranglehold on the industry. The mere fact I cannot rely on LibreOffice alone for document transfers and assume 100% compatibility with my recipients, shows just how much influence they still have in the world of computers.

He provided evidence with a citation. Since the citation is Wikipedia and is (according to you) wrong, you're free to edit it. Just remember that the linked information also contains references to other articles, which provide further evidence that he's right. If he truly is wrong it's likely not out of deliberate ignorance as he's shown a wiliness to provide evidence.

In other words, don't be a dick and call someone "full of shit" just because it's easy to do over the Internet.

You've have to be pretty short-sighted to believe that telling someone to "get a life" means that the accuser is a bitter person. Some people need to be put in their place, even the nicest people know when to put their foot down and tell it like it is.

Seems like a lot of people agree with this "troll" if he's already gotten Score:5.

Your ideal situation sounds a lot like kickstarter. The only difference being that once the game is released, actual profit is generated through the pay-per-copy business model.

You say "The pay-per-copy software model is the one that makes no sense". If it made no sense, I'm not sure how it could have lasted so long. People have tried alternatives but when it comes to making money, nothing really work as well, except perhaps those free-to-play games which tend to use micropayments anyway.

Either laugh or don't post. No-one likes a dick.