hmmm, I think you're jumping to conclusions here. The AC didn't say 'steal', they said 'find other ways to get it'.

Let's say you produce an action game. It's based on the principles of lots of other action games. You decide that ten years of your life is worth $1000 per copy, so sell it at that.
A lot of people really like your game, but $1000 per game is too expensive for them to buy it. So a few of them get together and make a copy of your game. It's got the same gameplay elements that they liked in your game, but uses different art and a new engine. They sell this version of the game for $10.
People will probably buy their version rather than your version. The price for the product you spent all that time building is now $10, not $1000.

My point is that markets set prices, not producers. And markets need competition in order to function. If you're in a monopolistic position by being the only producer of something, then the market will find a way to introduce competition. Piracy is the way the games market is introducing competition.
Eliminating piracy is a matter of providing multiple methods of obtaining your product at multiple price points, not attempting to break the market by creating a monopoly through DRM.

So while a pirate may be a thief, that may be the more moral position than being a monopolist.

This.

Any business model based around filling physical media with information and selling it is borked (so DVD/BluRay, books, CDs, newspapers, magazines, encylopedias, etc).

Your friend has somehow got to provide a physical/real-world experience that makes it worth coming to the store, and then work out how to monetise that (to avoid being the place where people go to talk about the films they streamed from Netflix this week). Retail is going through the same struggle, how to avoid becoming "Amazon's Showroom" so there are lots of people thinking about this at the moment.

But a good start would be to ask the existing customer base why they still use the store. Using that feedback it should be possible to work out what they have in common and thus identify the target market for the store.

The mistake would be to think that the business model is about renting movies. If the business is going to survive it has to become about providing a service that people will rent a movie to experience.

that there is only one God. Only those three religions follow that premise.

The BBC abandoned impartial coverage of climate change, deliberately and publicly, as a result of this meeting, citing the opinions of the experts present at this meeting as sufficient justification.

I think the public has a right to know what experts were there so that they can judge the weight of their opinions and therefore the BBC's justification for abandoning journalistic impartiality.

The BBC disagreed and spent a significant amount of public money attempting to avoid the FOI request. Considering the almost complete lack of actual climate scientists at the meeting, and the high proportion of green activists and other interested parties, I don't blame them.

It's a criminal offence to use a television without a licence in the UK, so it's ultimately enforced by the police if you refuse to pay it.

I really hope you're trolling...

Windows 8 is going to be a buggy flop because MS OS's alternate between buggy innovative flops and boring stable usable systems. The upgrade path is clearly Win3.1 - > Win98/NT -> XP -> Win7 -> Win9 (which will be released in about a year in two versions: one for tablets with the Interface Formerly Known As Metro, one for desktop/laptop with the standard Windows interface)
This is known...

nope we haven't actually. Get some facts

It was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period. Coffee didn't die out. I call bullshit.

Surely these are terrorists fighting against their legitimate government (as much as they are also freedom fighters attempting to liberate themselves from a dictatorship anyway)?

If this decision was being made purely on political grounds (Syria is currently a Russian ally, so arming rebels = cutting down Russian power) then that's all fine, but the Cold War is apparently over and everyone's friendly now and we're supposed to be making these decisions on moral grounds these days.

How come the US can decide that it would like to arm terrorists and not become a terrorist-sponsoring rogue state?

shush now... I was merely attempting to balance a predominantly 'PC' representation of our current worldview with a balanced counter-opinion. I'm actually climate-agnostic these days.

and if that's the one thing you picked up on from the points I raised, then, yes, it's clearly the frontrunner candidate for being something that future generations will dispute and/or laugh at us for.

agree completely.

We live in an 'enlightened' age where we realise that racism is a bad thing. But we subscribe to plenty of other virulent irrational hatreds (according to another age's moral viewpoint). How would we feel if the best and brightest of our generation were discarded from future history books for being religious, or disagreeing with homosexual marriage, or eating meat, or supporting climate alarmism, or driving cars, or any one of a hundred other things that we consider normal now?

Our current views are incomprehensible to an educated person of 200 years ago. An educated person of 200 year's time will probably find our current worldview primitive beyond belief.

Hesitate to judge, lest ye be judged in turn. Appreciate the genius of Lovecraft's writing and ignore his irrational prejudices.

can't use OS X without buying an overpriced piece of crap from Apple.

can't use Windows (from 8 onwards) without buying all my software from Microsoft

so.... yeah... let's use the open operating system with a proprietary DRM system and see that as a step forwards...

I hear what you say, but if Google can basically fork Linux to create a massively commercial phone system because the Linux dev community weren't playing ball their way, there's nothing to stop Valve doing the same.

I wanted to rephrase your analogy but I've had too many gins to work through my own tortuous logic.

Agree with both, but once Valve decides to bring Steam to the Linux party and get most of the games library working then two things happen:
1: one of the major reasons (if not *the* major reason) for using Windows at home disappears: gaming.
2: the Linux development community can go on bickering all they want, but unless their proposed solutions are compatible with what Valve are building Steam on they'll be irrelevant as no-one will use them. Steam will effectively create the standard.

Linux is simply better code and a better architecture than Windows, as it should be; it's had developers calling the shots not commercial managers. So it's not at all surprising that it will run stuff faster than Windows. I suspect a LOT faster once there's been a few iterations.

Interesting times :)

the queen doesn't get fired, it'd take England to become a republic for that to happen (interesting thought... if England became a republic before Australia, would the royal family move Down Under?)

From my exhaustively-gathered and utterly scientific data collection (talking to random people in pubs), I think there's a narrow majority for Australia becoming a republic when herself dies, regardless of who's in line next.