Not to mention its future collector value.

Your nick makes it even funnier.

Probably the brick that turns Vita into something that could at least be considered "outsider art".

That mainly depends on whether you would have found someone willing to buy that many bitcoins. As far as I know, something like this never happened, that someone wanted to get out of the market big time.

As soon as someone actually wants to, we'll see whether it's a stable market.

Law has to reflect the general consensus on what's "right". People have to understand and support laws for them to be a foundation of stability. Laws that are unjust and not supported by public opinion are not only very hard, if not impossible, to enforce, they're a danger to the stability of a country in itself.

And I'm not even talking about unpopular laws like tax laws. Nobody likes to pay taxes. But we do. Because we somehow understand that the country needs money. And while we certainly don't really like that WE have to pay that money (why can't someone else?), it's something we do understand. Or, at least most of us do. And most of us also support the idea of a country or nation running certain businesses like military or police force.

So we're not talking about unpopular. Many laws are unpopular, but we accept their existence and we understand that they have to be to make living together possible. I'd sure like to take my neighbor's car, but I understand that he would probably not like that, and I sure as hell wouldn't like someone else to take mine. It's an understandable law that I can't simply take whatever belongs to someone else just because I want it.

Such laws are supported by the population and that is also why they are enforceable. If you see someone breaking into a house, you probably call the police. And even if it's your best buddy that you find killing his wife, you will probably even then inform the police and tell on him. Simply because laws against burglary and murder are something that you probably understand and support. At least if you're like the majority of the population. Of course there are those that don't think such laws should exist (or apply to them), but in general our sentiment seems to be that killing someone or taking something away from him is wrong.

Such laws have a stabilizing impact on our society. We support them, because we understand their benefit to us. And we see the state, nation or country as our ally in our strive to make sure nobody breaks those laws.

It's exactly the opposite with laws that are not rooted in the general sentiment of the population, laws that are not something people understand immediately.

Take prohibition. Prohibition was one such law that had a very negative effect not only on how people react to this law, but how people react to THE law in general. To the law and its physical manifestations, police, politicians and judges. Prohibition was one of the laws people didn't "understand", and worse, one of the laws that they did not support. It was something a very vocal minority pushed for and the quiet majority didn't want to get in the way of. But there was no broad support for it. The results are known. Not only did people ignore that law, but they started ignoring laws altogether. Since, well, if you already broke the law, breaking another one becomes less of a problem. Not to mention: Everyone does it!

This is, btw, also one of the core reasons why the real socialism in the East broke down: People saw a very distinct difference between what they thought was "right" and what the state dictated as "right".

And if we start doing the same, we should prepare for people to act likewise.

Actually it's worse than that.

There are real threats to a country's economic, political or other stability. People who actually want to harm a country or companies in said country. Terrorists as well as people embezzling or laundering money, tax evaders and other criminals that actually cause a noticable, real harm to your country. Who in turn do have a pretty good reason to mask their traffic and route it through various means of VPN and other techniques to shield it from surveillance.

Now, these people are few and far between. A sensibly staffed police force with some background in online security can easily spot them, pinpoint them and ferret them out. Why? Because there is very little reason for Joe Randomuser to have a lot of VPN'ed traffic running. You can actually take a quick look at most "odd" connections and examine them.

This option goes out the window when everyone does it. Yes, they're all actually breaking a law. But a law that has close to zero impact on your economy. And yes, even if you're the US. Compared to embezzlement and tax evasion, the loss to the country due to torrents is negligible. But now you have a LOT more people who will act like criminals and you can't easily spot the real, dangerous criminals anymore.

In Venezuela you need to be in the right party, in the US you need to be in the right circles to make enough dough... what's the difference whether it's not available or whether you can't afford it?

There are a very small number of truly exceptional C?Os and most of those know a single industry very well and do badly when translated to other markets. According to a study that was on Slashdot a couple of years ago, the vast majority make decisions that are no better for the company that a random selection. You can replace most Fortune 500 CEOs with a magic 8 ball and get about the same performance. That's not true of most of the other employees, including the janitors, so why are they paid several orders of magnitude more? Because most of the CEOs are on the boards of other companies and approve large salaries in exchange for the same favour being paid to them.

SWTOR would be my recommendation, too, but I cannot recommend the F2P option at all. Either accept that it's a pay-2-play system or you're in for a very frustrating and very unrewarding ride. The F2P portion of SWTOR feels a bit like a demo version of a game, where you get teased by seeing what you could have ... if you only bought it ... but you must not touch. It's in theory possible to buy the various bit that you cannot access as a F2P player piece by piece but I'd be very surprised if that wasn't way more expensive than the 13 or so bucks they charge per month.

As a subscriber you get a pretty good MMO, which is basically "WoW, back when it was good, in a Star Wars outfit". Frankly, if WoW was more like SWTOR (i.e. if it still had sensible skill trees that offer a bit of variety, if it offered a bit of a way to customize your character outfit and not make everyone look essentially like a virtual clone army if they have comparable gear and if it didn't contain "I-win-button"esque scripting ability) I'd probably move over to WoW instead. But mostly 'cause it is simply quite a bit more polished. Which it bloody well should be, considering they had about a decade longer to get it right...

Reward it or not, but people can only buy what they know about. If I don't know that a certain show exists and that I like it, there is an exactly zero chance that I'll ever go and buy a DVD box of it.

This is especially true in countries where dubbing is the norm (because English isn't quite the language of choice). There you actually have two reasons why people won't buy a DVD box. First, the often incredibly atrocious dubbing (quite frankly, watching Simpsons or Big Bang Theory in German qualifies as torture). I would never have even considered buying a BBT box set if I only knew the German dubbed version. It simply is not funny. The dubbing script is very obviously from someone who neither has a clue about geek culture nor a clue about physics or technology in general. Not only do the jokes get mangled beyond any sense, it's also factually garbled. But I ramble. Bottom line, nobody can possibly consider that funny.

And then there's the time difference. Dubbing takes time. By the time these things are finally properly butchered (i.e. dubbed), not only are the time critical jokes no longer funny because references to current events are not current anymore, you also usually get the "holiday episodes" at some completely inappropriate time. Like the Halloween episode around Easter and the Christmas episode somewhere in mid Summer. That sure hits the spot, I tell you...

This is not really helping to make a selling point. Especially if you're dealing with a show where a key element is suspense and surprise. Can you imagine how interesting it is to watch a show built around suspense and resolve when roughly half a year before you even understand the buildup the resolution is already being discussed on the internet because your country lags behind about half a year?

Not really a selling point either.

I think you overestimate the willingness of people to put up with crap. Especially once they learned that there is another way. People are probably willing to accept various hardships thrown at them by the manufacturers of DVDs and BluRays ... until they learn that it is trivially easy to circumvent those unskipable trailers and other junk that cuts into their movie watching pleasure. It's not even the money, in my experience.

You really think someone who wants to see the latest episodes of his favorite show will let something like that block keep him from doing it? Even the last tech illiterate dimwit manages to type something akin to "how to get around that bloody brit ISP torrent block" into Google search, and then follow the step by step instructions this will almost invariably result in.

Well, in this day and age, pretty much anything beyond bare bone access to webpages and online games is already considered "geeky extras"...

Guess they'll have to route around this damage in the network.

Europe already pays that. Well, almost at least.

I already am, propping up the failing car industry. Might as well do it with a product that has some kind of future.