> 2. Most states also draw income from urban poor in the form of taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and by state-run lotteries

Cry me a river.

You just jumped the shark with that one.

Sometimes, the only suitable response to a jackass is to be "anti-social".

I have saved a number of machines from the rubbish bin by adding new video cards to them. All of those cards were dirt cheap but still a massive improvement with whatever original came on those machines. The end users were happy as clams as the machines ran as if they were shiny and new again.

Repeat that a few thousand times and watch the global sales numbers implode.

> Yes, clearly entertainment on PC is dead. There's no such thing as Netflix or Steam, those are just myths.

Both of those are already more effectively delivered to the average consumer through some sort of speciality appliance. Game consoles have been the primary focus of the likes of EA for a long time now. Netflix is something that you can do with a $60 appliance.

Comparatively speaking, something like Netflix sucks on a PC. It's a poorly optimized resource hog demanding far better specs than the task really calls for.

One problem with PCs is that coders are used to being lazy.

> That's not the real issue. What do most people need computers to begin with?

They don't need the "power". They need the form factor. Tablets are basically a PC locked down to nothing but a one button mouse. For a lot of tasks, that just isn't good enough.

For a lot of trivial tasks, it's tolerable though.

The PC wasn't a new way of interacting with programs. It was just an older style machine that was under the full control of the end user. That level of control was what made the PC, not the keyboard or mouse or monitor.

Kids can most certainly appreciate a powerful machine if you bother to give one to them. They will happily lug it around too.

You can get 100MB/s transfer speed off of a wired home connection. That's what you can push around from room to room in your own house. Now that's faster than some of the slower hard drives and way faster than anything you are going to get from the cloud.

Replacing your local storage with remote storage only makes sense if have no clue whatsoever about technology and have never tried any of this stuff for yourself.

I have a 5 year old hard drive sitting in my main machine. I use it as a scratch drive not because it is old and unreliable but because it is old and small. It's been made obsolete by newer, cheaper, and LARGER drives.

Despite of all of the FUD and the occasional scandal from the likes of Seagate, spinning rust still is more likely to become obsolete than die.

> DRM is a non-issue for the vast majority of people who are streaming their stuff.

Says you. On the other hand, I have actually seen DRM validation glitches with iTunes content. Some network related nonsense was occurring with the AppleTV. Didn't know what the cause was, but the effect was that all iTunes content was unavailable. It was like someone took a backhoe to the coax running to the house.

Of course my DRM free files were fine.

DRM is just something else that can fail in mysterious ways and frustrate consumers. They might not know what it is when they see it but that doesn't mean they won't suffer.

Are you some kind of retard?

Why would "recovery" of your music collection ever be a problem? Just pull it back off of one of your mobile devices.

External storage is also a handy thing in this regard. Music remains small while external storage just gets larger and larger. Copies are easy to make and possibly even pretty cheap.

There are so many ways of having an entire music collection in your pocket that your Forrest Gump attitude is just sad.

> Many are upset because generally those services only work on OSX and Windows.

Who uses a PC for those services anyways?

The PC versions of those services are put together in such a way that you need unnecessarily overpriced hardware to deal with them versus a $200 HTPC or a $60 streamer.

>> MP3's being compressed, are pretty vulnerable to bitrot.
>
> wtf?

That was my reaction as well.

My notification tone on my Android phone is a 20 year old AU file I happened to have lying around my media horde.

It may be easier but it certainly isn't cheaper. HELL, the thing you are interested might not even be available. That is one key problem with all streaming services. They ALL have limited availability when compared to what's available on physical media.

Once something is available for sale as a physical product, it's in the market permanently. So even if something is discontinued, you will still have access to it. It may be hard to find. It may even be expensive. But it will still be available.

Also, a rental may not even be available.

They also aren't as cheap as you're claiming.

I don't think you even use it at all despite the fact that you are trying to lobby for it.

> MP3's being compressed, are pretty vulnerable to bitrot

They are also pretty trivial to back up to every device you own. Music is tiny compared to modern mobile devices. You can shove your entire collection into the underutilized space on most systems.

XBMC gives you all of the shiny shiny of something like iTunes but with the possibility that you can own and control your own content. You only have to pay for something once and it's yours forever and you never have to worry about some disguised cable TV company going out of business.

Of course it has to work against the framework that large corporations have lobbied for. Although that's not necessarily a show stopper.