People "in general" don't want to steal. They're happy to generally pay for something, given that its price intellectually/intuitively feels somewhat justified.

With the advent of digital and globalization, Content publishers have wet dreams when they project their old business model onto the new potential audience. Obviously, it's encountering issues.
The market is enormous, but the price, availability, and (lack of/DRM) ease of use of the legitimate version is prohibitive compared to the ease of use and availability of free pirated versions.

I spend much time in the Philippines, where locals routinely spend 30 pesos (~65 cents) buying pirated dvd's of widely varying qualities. From good dvd-quality screener copies, to horrible in-theater recordings with coughs, people standing up in middle of screen, and poorly synced bad-quality sound.
While they don't have to pay for the making of the movie, they still have to pay for the printing of the CD, creation and printing of a jacket and cd-box, multiple layers of distribution etc. And still make enough of a profit to justify the risks. 65 cents covers all that it seems.
And Filipinos are very poor, yet still are willing to pay a little for entertainment.

Sell movies online between $0.5 and $2 with no/minimal DRM depending on quality/popularity/whatever, and millions/billions will buy rather than pirate. Sell a collector's edition in stores for $30 if you like (With no DRM at that point, since it won't be needed) for those that want/like a physical version.
Offer monthly download/streaming subscriptions Netflix-style for $10/$20/$30 with the best stuff available first in the $30's. Again, no real DRM needed.

Same for music. Make it a few cents instead of a dollar, and you'll find that a whole lot more people don't mind paying for an actual music collection.

In either case, a tidy profit will -still- be made. Not to mention how much MORE can then be made from the derivatives when you tell ad execs that yeah, that 60 cents movie was purchased by 1.3 BILLION people actually. With a neat breakdown in metrics by country, age group and whatever else you make customers fill-out when they sign up.

Books are a bit more tricky. A song takes 5 min to listen to. A movie 2hrs to watch. A book is more in the 5 to 20+ hrs range and is a significant time investment on the reader's part.
I know I skip a lot of free books, even though they're easy to get from Amazon for my Kindle, just because I'm not interested. A good book is worth a good bit more to me than a good movie, but a bad book is worth a whole lot less than a bad movie. So prices ranging from a few cents (you can get the book for a song!) to $6 ?

Studios are trying to make orders of magnitude more $, without providing that much more -value-.
The market is dramatically larger, distribution is dramatically cheaper, prices -should- be dramatically lower. THAT is why people pirate.

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www.gamersloot.net: Gametime cards, Cd keys and game news. No gold sorry!

Considering how many people (me included!) still occasionally whip out D2 for some fun, I -do- expect that this will be HUGE. Enormous really (http://www.gamersloot.net preorder your copy now ;) ).

I was quite disappointed I couldn't get my gf interested because the graphics were so dated for her (ah the young generation!).

I know that we're -still- selling keys for D2 and expansion to this day, and expect we'll keep selling more until D3 is out (and maybe after??).

I'm actually pretty astounded at the fact that Bliz not only supported the game this long, but actually continued -development- for it for over 10 years!! Do you know -any- other "pay-once-and-get-forgotten" games that get patches and actual new CONTENT 10 years later?? (from developers that is, am sure there are plenty still supported by fans/mods) It's hard enough to get devs to fix a few of the more egregious bugs after launch.

I tried torchlight, and it was ok for a while. But just... not the same.

I think I'll start yet another sorc now actually... 'later ;)

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http://www.gamersloot.net/

I moved away from XP about 4 years ago. I wanted a laptop that just -worked-, and the low quality buggy, virused windows machines definitely weren't it. I didn't want to tinker forever with linux, so had to wait until the business could afford a mac (http://www.gamersloot.net , get your Cataclysm key early to beat the rush ;) ). Burning crusade came out, business was good, and off I switched.

Have loved my mac ever since, great support, and the software pretty much just... works. But. I am worried about the direction Apple is heading in. Picked up an ipod since there wasn't(isn't?) much else out there. However when phones came out, I couldn't justify the lock-in of the iphone. Bid my time and jumped on the Nexus one when it came out. Love it.
Interface ease of use is pretty much the same as my gf's Iphone (yeah I know, i'm a reformed geek... don't wanna tinker with linux and have a gf!), yet I don't need to worry that google is going to take away functionalities from it. (And for books, sorry but nothing beats the Kindle. Still using my 1st gen and loving it =b)

Enters Chrome OS. I'm guessing it'll be a -whole lot- cheaper than a macbook/pro and that... it'll work. Employees in the philippines will be able to use those without worrying about the ubiquitous viruses passed on by friends and anyone that plugs in a USB.

The question is, (similar to Android's speedy rise?) how long before Chrome OS is popular and mature enough that all basic/popular programs are available on it? (YM, Skype, image/video tools, games etc). Couple years?

Not in a hurry to move from my M.Pro, but heartened to see Google entering the space. I expect it's just a question of time. While it's easy to criticize, I sure have appreciated Goggle's approach to most things a whole lot more than Microsoft, or even more recently Apple.

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http://www.gamersloot.net/

Many posters rail at "virtual" currency and indicate it is bogus because you can't pay your taxes with WoW gold, or trade it on FOREX.

I would encourage those slashdotters to check up on Philippines Pesos, or even Chinese Yuan.

1) AFAIK You can't pay your taxes in any currency but the legal tender of said country (Euro is an official currency, but can't pay your US taxes with those)
2) You can't exchange certain country's currencies on the FOREX market. If you have Philippine Pesos, you can pretty much only exchange them for something else (including another currency) in the Philippines.

The only difference with most game currency is that those exchanges are not overseen by the "government" (game company), but done on a black market. If Blizz "prints" lots of money (or there is a dupe), value will go down fast. It's happened in many games. A sudden crackdown on gold farmers will drive currency value up. Same with a new expensive gold sink.

With your Chinese Yuan, you can get services in China only. With your WoW gold you can get services in WoW only. I'm pretty sure there's a market for wow gold in nearly every country out there. Likely easier to monetize that, if you really wanted to, than some leftover Chinese yuans you might find in a drawer...

There is well enough activity and services available in MMO's that a lot of those currencies have "real" value and something like an exchange rate. I don't see where the issue is with that though. When you've paid $10 to watch a movie in a theater, you only have the experience of it left afterwards. if you pay $10 to get some wow gold and get a flying mount, you get an experience as well.

Disclaimer: I own http://www.gamersloot.net/ and we -used- to offer in-game gold/services a long while back (now mostly just cd-keys)

Considering how many people were using companies like http://www.gamersloot.net/ to get characters leveled for them as they didn't want to have to click too much, i don't see this becoming too common! =b Then again, maybe that's why those guys dropped the PL thing and just offer keys and such now. Pushed out of a business because gamers became fitness addicts? Who'd have thought!

Actually... I did sign a California house purchase digitally using Docusign, doing it all remotely from the Philippines. It didn't include a mortgage, but I was nonetheless rather impressed.

Hm. I'm not a hardcore geek, but not a basic user either.

I moved to Windows 3.x because I needed the tcp/ip winsocket thing for internet access. Still was running games in dos4gw mode of course. The text typing app in windows was occasionally useful and better than the basic Dos edit thing, but then my old Amiga had a much better interface long before.

I went to Win 95 and that was a tremendous improvement despite all the bugs and the insane headaches getting everything configured. It was a pain but it -was- much better with a lot of things useful in there that I didn't have in Win 3.x. Of course, it broke a lot of the Dos games but hey, I could see that new games would use/need the stuff in Win 95.

98 came out and I pretty much ignored it. Didn't seem to have anything really useful and all games were made for 95/98 and word 95 worked fine thanks.

2k came out and I was given a laptop with it on it at work. Came to hate it when it hard crashed multiple times while I was working on some Word documents and lost everything without giving me a few seconds to copy/paste or even a grayed screen that allowed me to see what I had last typed and write out the outline on a paper or another machine(never had the issue on the last version of 95). Never used it outside of work, number of games didn't run on it anyway.

ME? hahaha

XP came out, and it -did- have a good number of actual improvements over 95(!). I made the switch, there were some bugs and issues but since it was offering me a lot of actual improvements for the basic stuff I was doing, I went through it. Sure was a LOT more stable compared =b

Same story as a lot of others, I read the reviews and decided to avoid vista. Unfortunately, when came time to buy a new laptop (old one went for a swim), couldn't find one with XP. Figured it couldn't be as bad as people said and got a new HP.

Vista Pros: I like the little internet icon that tells me if I'm connected to the network but not the internet.
It came with IE 7 which -is- better than 6 and that forced me to realize it (tabs are useful). That led me to try Firefox but doesn't work with some of the bank apps I use sorry :/
The default search is better than in xp

Vista cons: HELLLLLLLLOOOOO???????????????? What kind of an OS is it that runs out of resources and does NOT tell you when programs try to do stuff and fail???????????
You're sitting there with your usual 12 IE open, couple spreadsheets (openoffice, got tired of having to explain AGAIN to MS that yes, I was activating my legitimate paid-for copy of office xp on a new computer -again- because I changed it), Skype, Yahoo messenger, thunderbird and maybe WoW in the background.
And your coworker walks by and is surprised to see you and asks why you haven't replied to his Yahoo messages. At which point you try to send him a message and realize that you CANT! you get no error message, just... NOTHING! You double click again, and after a while understand that Vista just doesn't wanna do more than what it's currently doing and so is ignoring any requests to do so WITHOUT SAYING IT.
Means that if people send you messages, you don't get them and neither you nor them know about it.

Other cons: It's slow. Machine is a lot more powerful than the $300 HP/wallmart black friday laptop from a couple years back, and yet it's slow. Yes, I run a lot of stuff, but I did that on the older one (had 1.5gig of ram on it, didn't have a problem).
Did I mention I'm cheap and don't even have Aero since i have vista basic so it's not what's making it slow?

And what's up with the step backward on the task manager?? XP, app locks up, you ctrl/alt/del and you kill the app. Vista, app locks up, you do same... and sometimes, it doesn't work!!!! Or gets you to the useless menu about changing pw or switching user or buying pizza and when you click on "task manager"... it locks up again!!
DRM: Now I don't follow all the drm stuff, and I'm not trying to watch HD on anything so far, but I DO know that DRM stuff makes my hackles rise. And I do understand enough to know that MS is doing stuff that'll piss me off at some point because I've experienced it before. And from my understanding, all that DRM comes at a cost, which is to make my powerful machine slow. And that sucks.

So. I bought a mac. Thought about linux, but seemed a bit more complicated and I like my ipod... =b
Unfortunately, yahoo messenger on mac is retarded and doesn't have an option to save conversations (there's the online version, but 1) I have archives I need to transfer and 2) I need to access saves even when not online). And those same banking apps don't work on safari. So I still do the work stuff on the windows machine :/
World of Warcraft runs fantastic on macbook pro though, and the colors are awesome =b And I actually turn the laptop off sometimes when not using it since it's so fast to boot.

There -is- one windows xp con that drives me nuts, which is the utterly retarded way file names are displayed by default, with "hidden known extensions"!!!!!!!!!! Run into it ALL the time when dealing with basic users, who of course will be the ones to click on the nudepicofbushomg.jpg attachement not understanding that if the .jpg shows it means there is ANOTHER extension behind, such as maybe .exe. What the HECK is the benefit supposed to be????? I want to hurt puppies very badly everytime I run across a non-modified xp system :/
Sure, might have to reboot the machine once in a while if I went a bit overboard on the number of tabs and windows and programs I ran same time but otherwise, xp is great. Just wish I could have that little icon that tells me if I'm connected just to the network or the internet though...

Oh, and went and bought 4 laptops from Dell for the biz when they announced they were going to offer xp again.

CONCLUSION: Vista has problems that xp doesn't have. Those problems -may- or may not be solved in the future. Vista doesn't have ANY feature that I want that xp doesn't have (except for that little icon about network vs internet connection, did I mention I like that? =b)
For most users, I expect the same will be true so you are MUCH better off AVOIDING VISTA.