I had never heard of the site until this hoax. Now I at least know about it. I would say it would be a positive outcome (more people coming than going).

Who cares if it can be pirated? It'll cost Intel very little to do this and the aim isn't to get lots of geeks paying $50, its to get average Joe at home to do it. They will still make money off this idea (so long as it isn't a huge PR disaster - selling crippled hardware...) with or without a patch.

I like your idea of calling non-cyberspies 'meatspies' from now on.

Wouldn't the result be (P-1)!=N ?

I love the mindset of the computing field, when a 'background image' is considered copying (not least on twitter, for which its a fairly standard thing).

Exactly. Just because it doesn't have a decimal representation, doesn't mean it isn't a valid number...

... ahem... you insensitive clod!

That makes sense if someone is willing to pay $100 million for the first copy of the movie. A more reasonable suggestion would be that once a movie starts to profit, they allow free copies to be distributed. Even then, there is an issue of making an overall profit as some movies fail, and what the level of 'enough profit'. I am completely against many of the claims and practises that the *AAs perform (download != sale, poor profits given to recording artists), but they release a product under a set of conditions. If you don't like those conditions, don't get the product. Eventually free market forces will allow the studios that make the best use of the Internet to profit and the rest will catch on. Yes they have a near-monopoly on the industry and they advertise particularly well, but people lived perfectly well before Avatar came out, so if you don't want to pay to see it, you don't have to see it right away. Wait until the movie is showed with advertising for free or don't even see it at all.

The general rule: Don't feed the trolls

It works fine for me (v3.5.8 on kubuntu)

He could also be using Debian and needs a note taking application

You would find that the majority of the 'good' botnets rely on many computers doing low-bandwidth operations, so that the owner of the computer doesn't notice. If the speed of the Internet gets too slow, the owner could send the computer in to get fixed, and the IT guy would find and remove the problem files. If the owner never notices, its less likely this could happen. There still exists viruses that do the 'high impact' thing, but they are less common now and don't last very long (for the previously mentioned reason).

burn++;

You don't need to market to 'the masses' to make (substantial) money off a product. Law enforcement is a big enough market if you get good saturation and Google + other ad networks would be a massive market.

What ads?

While at the same time ensuring that all on board the pirate ships are in fact pirates (no hostages, etc). Bad things happen when people become judge and jury themselves. Stun them, call the authorities and then stay out of it.