I "pirate" a lot of media. It's a mixed bag really and not all of it is just completely freeloading. Example: I download rips of movies I already own on DVD/BR. I'm lazy and it's quicker than ripping it myself. Some of the guys who do this are excellent at keeping as much quality as possible while getting a smaller file footprint. I have no talent for this so why bother? I download music that I own on a variety of formats. I'm not going to re-buy digital content. If I own an old scratchy LP I feel no shame in downloading perfect mp3 files of the material. I also download movies that I skipped at the theater because I thought they'd suck. From time to time I pay for a good one on BR after the fact but more often than not I don't. The reason I responded to you though was your mention of a "free trial". When it started I downloaded Game of Thrones and got hooked pretty quickly. It's a good show. More importantly though my wife got hooked on it. We now subscribe to HBO which I would have bet the farm was never going to happen. We own books that we would not have otherwise bought. While I don't go much past that she spends money on all kinds of other Game of Thrones related junk. That all started because through word of mouth I heard that the show was good and downloaded a few episodes.

As a one time police officer who has been out of that line of work for almost 20 years I have to disagree with you. There are good cops. They are few and far between but they exist. You're on to one thing though and it's something that a lot of people just don't seem to understand. The police (speaking of the whole group and still maintaining that some do not fall into this group) are by and large exceptionally racist, which many people realize but what they don't get is that the police only really see two races. "Blue" and "You". Ok, it's not technically a racial issue but the reason I put it like that is because it's approached the same way by the police. I know because I was surrounded by people like that. If you're blue you're a fellow officer and most of them will tolerate a great deal in another officer. Crossing a line or two is nothing. A police officer has to almost be cornered before he'll hold another police officer to the same standard he'll hold you or I to. Even then it doesn't always end as it should because another officer further up the food chain will head that off if possible once the situation has moved beyond the public eye. I never really thought about it at the time but when I was in law enforcement I rarely kept my registration up to date. I drove one car for over two years without having to get it inspected or paying the registration fee. When I got pulled over I just whipped out "Badge Americard" and was given a pass. I drove as fast as I wanted without a care in the world. That's little stuff but it scales up. I didn't leave the profession out of outrage either. I left because I hurt my back (at home, not work related in any way) and had to move to a less physical career but when I did leave and stepped back I realized that I was part of a system that is almost entirely made up of bad cops. It's just that most of them are bad with a little "b".

Sometimes it is because they are evil or "bad guys". Granted we don't know anything about these people and they don't have a whole lot of time to tell their story even if they're so inclined but if you do these kinds of things you're buying a ticket for a chance at the kind of death evil bad guys often get.

That's already happened. This was rural Mexico for crying out loud. The odds that they weren't bit by a snake, spider, or donkey are miniscule at best. I'm betting on them being pricked by an Agave cactus. I want to see a superhero (or supervillain, I'm not picky) who attacks by peeing a stream of radioactive tequila and dresses like the Frito Bandito.

But are those "Enterprise SSDs"?

I don't understand why so many nations are trying to reach a consensus on military action in Syria over a chemical weapon attack that may or may not have been done by the regime there but nobody has suggested multi-national cooperation to take over the mess in Fukushima. Japan has failed miserably at dealing with this crisis and continues to do so. It's time to tell them to get the fuck out of the way and bring world-wide resources to bear on this. The UN should be bringing countries together to solve problems like this.

That's rubbish. Political correctness is the only reason why we'd want a female Doctor. If all we wanted was an interesting character then it would be easier to invent a female Time Lord character and start a series based on her adventures. Nobody wants to do that though because it's easier to point to a male character and say "Well that's been going on too long and it isn't fair". Seriously this stuff is as ridiculous as making the next Superman black or turning the Golden Age Green Lantern homosexual.

In the context of the world Ansel Adams lived in yes of course. In the world today and going forward? Maybe not. The way this system works is changing and Ansel Adams today could still charge money for prints of his photographs. Most likely he couldn't make the enormous amount of money he made in the past because once a picture had reached a wide enough level of distribution someone would scan it and let fly a free copy of it. Right, wrong, I'm the one with the wide-format scanner. What could Adams do to offset this? That's what we're figuring out in the present. Who knows where it will end. He's going to be able to make a living tomorrow. It just won't be the kind of living he grew accustomed to when he was alive.

Nothing entitles people to be able to earn a living doing what they love. There's no guarantee that it will happen. Many of them will need to get a "day job" just as many do today. They can attempt to sell the products of their effort and if there's no market for it then they need another source of income. This also doesn't mean that book, songs, and pictures will cease to be created. It just means that the people doing it will be doing it most likely for "love of the game" and not the money.

So true (#2)

I've seen one incident of a person using a phone in a theater. The time I did see it the person (middle aged man, white male if that matters) using the phone actually took a call while sitting in the theater. The theater was about three quarters full and his phone started ringing. Immediately people started with the "Come on man, take it outside". He ignored everyone, answered the phone, and started a conversation sitting right there. There was a short pause as everyone kind of took in the fact that he was going to do that and then it literally blew up. People started yelling at this guy. Someone got up to go get an usher and the guy using the phone turned halfway around and said something I couldn't hear to the people directly behind him. The "big guy" (of which there is one everywhere) got up, walked down to him and said something else I didn't hear. The man started to argue with him and just then a couple of ushers came in and got middle-age phone guy out of there. He shouted "Fuck you" to I think the whole room or maybe just to the big guy who talked to him as he left. I think general peer pressure is worse than anything the theaters can do and will work for most people. Some people are just going to do what they want and "Fuck you" to the rest of us.

No doubt about it. Check cashing is a lucrative business. It's not just check cashing services either. A lot of pawn shops will cash your pay check for a ridiculous fee with minimal identification. Back in the early 90's I worked at a very old pawn shop in Houston for about a year. It was a terrible job that paid well but left me feeling like I always needed a shower. You basically just take complete advantage of people who are very desperate for money and who don't understand how much money you're charging them. Every Friday we'd get a flood of guys (many didn't speak English) coming in to cash very small paychecks that they worked very hard for. You would charge them 10% of what the check was and a surprising number of people were totally fine with that.

I wouldn't expect Korea to ask for the US to withdraw or want it. I think it would be more likely that in return for an end to the North Korean regime the US would come to an agreement with China that Korea would unify under the South's government, China would agree to not oppose the reunification or interfere in any way and the United States would agree to withdraw from the mainland within some mutually agreed time-frame. Essentially Korea wouldn't have a say in it. Now I can imagine a lot would be made of the US selling Korea down the river but seriously, China borders a lot of countries and it's not like they invade their neighbors all the time. Ok, you got Nepal and then there was that little dust-up with Vietnam a while back. I mean, it's not unheard of but I think they'd keep to their word as long as the US did. There's no good reason to maintain that mess with the two Korea's anymore not from our perspective or China's. With the kind of range that aircraft today possess it's not like falling back to Japan would leave Korea hanging. a US-China conflict is going to be all aircraft and missiles anyway so seriously doubt either side wants that.

I think at this point China wouldn't have anywhere hear the concerns they had 60 years ago with a unified Korea provided that unification got an agreement from the US to withdraw from the mainland. The resulting "Korea" would be a competitor but not a military threat and it would be a competitor that was saddled with the cost of trying to absorb the North. I think that the US pulling back to Japan would be well worth the trouble of shutting down "Best Korea".

You know, I wonder if Lucas understood that the prequels would necessarily be a "fill in the blanks" excercise and tried to avert that with all that added shit that nobody liked. I don't think he's by any means as completely out of touch as many think. I think he's every bit is incompetent as your post portrays him though so I think he tried to fill out the already carved in stone narrative with bad ideas not knowing the difference between good ideas and bad ones anymore.