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hell, all you have to do is hit twitter to see people like @aloria (infosec engineer) fully participating in programming.

This statistic shows a timeline with the amount of monthly active Twitter users worldwide. As of the third quarter of 2015, the microblogging service averaged at 307 million monthly active users.

Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2015 (in millions)

I run my own firewall and I actually did block, among some other areas, everything East from my country, including Russia. Whole of Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. The average attack attempts to my web servers dropped from hundreds per week to a couple per week. It's also really nice how you can block inbound and outbound or just inbound traffic.

And yet you let through traffic from the USA? The number one source of internet attacks?

http://www.statista.com/statis...

Article shows California is doing better than the U.S. overall and slightly worse in 4 industries out of 16 employment areas.
http://www.lao.ca.gov/LAOEconT...

Graph here shows that california GDP growth is slightly exceeding U.S. GDP growth in 2012 to 2014.
http://www.lao.ca.gov/Blog/Med...

It fell a little harder in 2008, 2009 than the rest of the U.S.

Seems like this is just business turnover which is happening everywhere all the time.

Personal income growth exceeded all but four out of fifty states in 2015.
http://www.lao.ca.gov/LAOEconT...

http://www.ccsce.com/PDF/Numbe...
2013- California surpasses Italy and Russia to become the 8th largest economy in the entire world.

Looks like California is fine.

see also
http://www.statista.com/statis...

Or maybe Americans watch five hours of tv per day vs 2 hours for Sweden. The three hours difference is way more than I ever spent on homework.

Employee theft in England and Wales

Also, thefts by employees are only reported 30% of the time scroll down to section 6.2.

Or here

Employee theft, while only accounting for 0.7% of crimes overall, was the third largest type of crime by value. While it was the only one of the key offences that dropped in terms of volume and value from the previous year, it remained at its second highest level for nine years.

In other words, the average haul of an employee stealing is much higher than other types of incidents. Makes sense when an employee can arrange to have a skid or a whole truckload of goods disappear.

Strangely, most people seem to disagree with that very idea.

Maybe opinionated old farts living in countries run by Luddites and publishers "disagree". You know, people like you. But you aren't "most people".

In the real world, eBooks have taken off rapidly. http://www.statista.com/chart/...

My mother-in-law takes a fairly new med for her leukemia -- it's about $10,000 for 14 days and has been very effective. That drug would have never made it to market if "big pharma" didn't expect to turn a profit (including cover OTHER research projects).

$5000 of that cost goes to marketing and sales commissions. R&D spending is generally 10-20% sales spending examples I mean, R&D is expensive. Those costs are definitely big numbers; it's just that they're small in comparison to other parts of pharmaceutical spending.

If you wanted something like the B-52, but newer, you could start with the Freight version of the 747 or 787, I suppose. Just add a few doors in the bottom, and buttons or levers to open them, and you're essentially done.

Which already puts you in the $250 to $400 million dollar range without even all the military electronics and communications. Estimated price list for Boeing: http://www.statista.com/statis...

It's manufacturing... Intel employs around 107,600 people to make chips, so...

More drivers.

Who rated this tripe Insightful?

Uber has a ton of infrastructure investment - it's mostly been clearing the way for the company to exist, legally speaking. They've already shown they can grow profits regularly where they are allowed to operate, so that is a way bigger deal than people are allowing for.

Not quite sure how they can be "growing profits" if the company is not yet operating in the black to start with.

User's infrastructure was MUCH HARDER to build out than Amazon's, which is just code and servers... Uber had to deal with real people - and not just people, but government officials.

"Amazon is just code and servers" -- I'll remember that next time the I hear about their sprawling warehouses around the world. And I guess they were able to begin operations in all those places without talking to a single government official, right? Not to mention the ~150,000 people they employ -- directly with W-2's, not as "contractors" as Uber likes to use to skirt many employment regulations. And that drone thing? Nah, FAA just preemptively mailed them their blessing for testing -- no interaction on Amazon's part needed there.

Since you didn't provide the information to back up your statement, I will provide it for you. Minimum wage has been above $10 in today's dollars for about 3 years in the late 1960s. And a resulting decade of runaway inflation was the result, with home mortgage interest rates of 15% and Credit card interest rates in the 30s. At least credit card interest was tax deductible back then.
As for the wages in other countries, in Switzerland, they pay $18.82 per hour, a Big mac costs $6.82. Wage is over 125% higher, and a Big Mac is 42% higher.
In Norway, the wage is $15.40 and the cost of a Big Mac is 20% higher.
In Sweden, the wage is $12.32 and the cost of a Big Mac is 7% higher.
In Denmark, the wage is $14.00 and the cost of a Big Mac is 6% higher.
Some places, the wage is less than in the U.S.
In Israel, the wage is $6.05 and the cost of a Big Mac is 4% less.
The data is pretty consistent. The higher the minimum wage, the higher the cost of goods and services.

Can the electric grid handle charging that many cars every night?

In 2014, the United States produced 4,093 billion kilowatthours of electricity. There are 254 million cars in the United States. It takes about 30 kilowatthoursto charge a completely drained small electric vehicle. Assuming that a car needs to be charged only every other day, this represents 3.75 billion kilowatt hours of electricity every night, or over the year, about 334 times our current electrical usage.

Knowing Google, they will usually abort failed projects. They tried really hard with Google+ but it has failed almost as bad as windows phone so it's about time to abandon it.

Worldwide, Google+ is far from a failure. In fact, it has more users than Twitter.
I think a lot of Slashdot readers' comments are biased by an amerocentric point of view.

http://www.statista.com/statis...
http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/f...

Also the dinosaurs they weren't preventing access in the sense we were talking about. If the municipality was being blocked from offering wifi then a local company had wired up the area. No one prevents access where they can't or won't provide service.

You mean 1.44 billion?

http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

http://www.statista.com/statis...

Population density isn't the issue, especially when you look at the amount of uninhabitable land in Africa (e.g. Sahara Desert). Take a close look at population growth and you'll see why Africa has a migration problem.

To make it a fair comparison, let's also say that $10k of your income relied upon speeding. Would you still try to avoid that $300 fine?

I don't think it's the price; more people than ever have college degrees. Rather, it's the quality of the education they're receiving. Which says a LOT about those who put so much faith and trust in our higher education system.

That may be, but just as myself on my 5 family iOS gadgets, everybody I know uses Chrome

You must not know many people since Apple sold 74 million iPhones and 21 million iPads in the first quarter of 2015 alone. I see plenty of Android out there but the only way you won't see iOS devices is if you have your head in the sand.

That may be, but just as myself on my 5 family iOS gadgets, everybody I know uses Chrome

You must not know many people since Apple sold 74 million iPhones and 21 million iPads in the first quarter of 2015 alone. I see plenty of Android out there but the only way you won't see iOS devices is if you have your head in the sand.

NicBenjamin posting anonymously to avoid undoing mod-points. According to Statista, US eBook revenue in 2010 was only $1.52 Bil or so the year this started. If you asdd in the other years Apple's was doing this you get a total of $7.2 Billion. Since Amazon always had much greater marketshare then Apple, unless their profit margin was above 10% $450 Million represents all the profit they made on eBooks during those years and then some extra.

How is it 'growing'? Tesla's factory runs under capacity and has been doing so since 2012.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

"In December 2012, Tesla employed almost 3,000 full-time employees.[3][26] By January 2014, this number had grown to 6,000 employees."
"Number of employees - 10,000 (Nov 2014)"

3000 to 6000 to 10000. Nope, that certainly doesn't sound like growth. But just in case any of those words were too big for you, here's a graphic:
http://www.statista.com/statis...

" In August 2014 the company announced it, in conjunction with Panasonic, would establish a "gigafactory" battery manufacturing plant in the Southwest or Western United States by 2020. The US$5 billion plant would employ 6,500 people, and reduce Tesla's battery costs by 30 percent."

So in additional to however many other employees they add over the next 5 years, they will then add another 60+% of today's employee count, and in doing so be able to greatly decrease the cost for the most expensive part of their car...the one part that is MOST responsible for pushing Tesla cars out of the price range of the average person. But I'm sure that won't result in any growth, either.

The fault of that lies in Congress.
Spend Middle East War money on NASA and science and it goes a lot faster.

You cannot successfully argue against war itself as a waste of human resources or a needless monetary expense. Sure you can philosophize and get a show of nodding heads in peacetime, but then something awful happens and someone shouts "Remember the Maine!" or "Hitler will invade the UK, then Mexico!" or "Let's get Bin Laden!" and all is moot. Inquiring line items is useful... such as whether ~$60 billion disappeared while out-sourcing the supply line or whether airlifting $40 billion in 'unmarked bills' into Iraq was a great idea.

Be sure to tune in C-SPAN today [Sunday] at 4:00pm ET to see how many senators believe the Patriot Act is a good thing. But I'd bet my bottom dollar that all the NSA rhetoric will center on so-called 'call metadata sharing agreements' with nary a word about full content backbone taps which are the greatest threat.

Government spending is a mysterious process. When it is time for the Fed to mint virtual money for Quantitative Easing, bail out banks by easing their losses, or the Federales to finance wars by raising the trade deficit ceiling and selling bonds to the Chinese we are awash in Magical Unicorn Money. When it is budget time every cent is haggled or omnibussed. Clearly this beast has two heads.

But you have to get more specific than 'military spending'. Pick something, anything and try to start a grass roots movement to attack it. Or better yet, just spend your time 'selling' space exploration in all of its forms. Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn't completely joking when he suggests that a militarized space race with China (or rumors thereof) would jump-start the process. A new Cold War would certainly unlock that Magical Unicorn Money. It may seem odd but weaponizing space is actually a good idea.

But there is something I call the 'Pizza Delivery Syndrome', where someone desirous of something, say a Space Program, will seize upon a money-factoid such as this

cite "Consumers spend around 33 billion U.S. dollars in quick service pizza restaurants each year in the United States. Takeout pizza constitutes the largest share of spending within this category at nearly 15 billion U.S. dollars annually, followed by pizza delivery at around ten billion. This is perhaps unsurprising considering more than 20 percent of U.S. consumers eat takeout or delivered meals at least once a week. While older generations appear less dependent on such services, around 40 percent of 18 to 54 year olds felt that takeout food was essential to their way of life as of November 2014..."

and create, out of thin air, some hypothetical world where every one who desires a pizza is visited by a Fairy Godmother who smiles and asks, do you really want that pizza or could we all fulfill mankind's most glorious dream? Your wish is my command. In this scenario they always choose the pizza, statistics show. It serves as foundation for acerbic commentary on the wretched excess of modern humans. This is a dead end because (on the whole) people would rather talk about pizza than space.

Ask not what pizza lovers can do for you.
Ask what you can do to send pizza into

And there it is the obligatory jingoist retard who can't deal with the fact that the US isn't number one, but more like number eleven. American patriots probably just assumed the second one is a typo for an exclamation point, probably a consequence of their red state public schooling.

Or perhaps the obligatory jingoist retard was trying to be factual.
It was a reasonable thing for the poster to say.
USA's freight rail network has long been acknowledged as the best in the world, but I had to wonder what the status is now.

Question for you regarding freight rail service.
Where did you get that the USA is "more like number eleven"?

So, I looked it up.

A search gave me many USA #1 articles like this:
https://www.aar.org/Background...

And I found that by number of kilometres of rail, the USA (225,000) is double #2, China (112,000)

But then again, there's the amount of freight carried.
Here's a couple of links for rail tonnage-miles:
The trend is clearly for China holding the lead in recent years by about 15%
http://www.statista.com/statis...
http://www.statista.com/statis...

What I could not find was stats for delivery performance (how long to load/unload and travel), or on-time performance.

Question for you regarding freight rail service.
Where did you get that the USA is "more like number eleven"?

And there it is the obligatory jingoist retard who can't deal with the fact that the US isn't number one, but more like number eleven. American patriots probably just assumed the second one is a typo for an exclamation point, probably a consequence of their red state public schooling.

Or perhaps the obligatory jingoist retard was trying to be factual.
It was a reasonable thing for the poster to say.
USA's freight rail network has long been acknowledged as the best in the world, but I had to wonder what the status is now.

Question for you regarding freight rail service.
Where did you get that the USA is "more like number eleven"?

So, I looked it up.

A search gave me many USA #1 articles like this:
https://www.aar.org/Background...

And I found that by number of kilometres of rail, the USA (225,000) is double #2, China (112,000)

But then again, there's the amount of freight carried.
Here's a couple of links for rail tonnage-miles:
The trend is clearly for China holding the lead in recent years by about 15%
http://www.statista.com/statis...
http://www.statista.com/statis...

What I could not find was stats for delivery performance (how long to load/unload and travel), or on-time performance.

Question for you regarding freight rail service.
Where did you get that the USA is "more like number eleven"?

It should probably be pointed out that police aren't in the business of solving crime. Take a look at Clearance Rate.
http://www.statista.com/statis...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

In particular a choice quote from an NPR story:
----
          "In the '60s and '70s, no one thought that the police should be held responsible for how much crime there was," Wellford says. Back then, he adds, police focused on calls for service and solving crimes.
          In more recent years, he says, police have been pushed to focus more on prevention, which has taken precedence over solving crimes — especially non-violent offenses.
          In short, the falling crime rate we've enjoyed may come at a cost: police indifference when you report your stereo was stolen.
----

If it's not the police's job to solve crime, then whose job is it? Apparently it's the victim's job.
Joseph Elwell.

Young people are fleeing FB in droves.

Half of the world's Internet users are active users of Facebook (where 'active' is defined as using at least once a month). http://www.statista.com/statis..., http://www.statista.com/statis...

84% of Facebook users are aged 18 - 29, while nearly half of teen Facebook users say they're using it more than last year. http://www.businessinsider.com...

That doesn't look much like "fleeing in droves".

Young people are fleeing FB in droves.

Half of the world's Internet users are active users of Facebook (where 'active' is defined as using at least once a month). http://www.statista.com/statis..., http://www.statista.com/statis...

84% of Facebook users are aged 18 - 29, while nearly half of teen Facebook users say they're using it more than last year. http://www.businessinsider.com...

That doesn't look much like "fleeing in droves".

Generalizations are always a bad idea, but both of you have some valid points. In the case of Yahoo however, they were on a hiring kick for a few years. 1100 people is not small percentage. It's 8.8% of Yahoo's staff, and double what they hired over the last two years. Seems like mismanagement to me.

Wrong, there's more Linux users than Mac users. Your numbers are faulty because they're based on purchased computers. No one buys a computer running Linux, they repurpose other computers.

Firstly he didnt post any numbers, how can you say his numbers are faulty when you dont know what they are?

So we can take a look at NetMarketShare and see usage share numbers which desktop Linux at 1.34%, you can also see a history on statista which shows desktop Linux usage share at between ~0.8% and ~1.6%. Compare those numbers to the OSX numbers on those sites. I cant find anything to suggest that there are more Linux users than Mac users, could you please point me to the information that you are using to come to your conclusion?

Yep, goes right through to post-secondary too.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/185157/number-of-bachelor-degrees-by-gender-since-1950/

"In 2012, about 0.76 million male and 1.03 million female students earned a bachelor's degree in the United States"

Nerval apparently doesn't understand the difference between relative and absolute, or they'd know it's possible to shrink as a percentage while growing in absolute terms. This isn't what's happening here, but iPad sales are certainly not collapsing, and iPads are really quite an important component of the market
  http://www.statista.com/statis...

Really? I guess their increasing revenues and profit margins that are consistently higher than Apple or Google are signs of stagnant and shrinking markets then! I know it's all 2010ish to talk about the death of the desktop and Microsoft, but the numbers simply don't support such a claim.

The majority of people on the internet are under the age of 18... think about it for more than a second and you'll agree.

I went one better and googled it: http://www.statista.com/statis...

So, not really then.

The trolls seems to vary in age but most are adults. Just head over to YouTube and watch a few of their videos.

Think about it... someone can type words... on the Internet... and you're in an uproar.

That fact that it is only a minority going as far as death and rape threats suggests that such behaviour is extreme and unacceptable to most people, even with the shield of anonymity. Anyway, it goes beyond just typing stuff on the internet. When people post threats along with your home address you have little choice but to take it seriously and secure yourself.

This isn't about children screaming at each other, it's about people making credible threats that they have the means to carry out against. They must have spent time researching the crime to get her home address, it's not just an idle threat.

"Anyone still going to the movies?" Answer: yes.

Thanks for the link! From that data, it looks like Windows Phone is close to parity with iOS when you look at the EU market. The world IS larger than just the US, you know... Also check India where Windows Phone has a larger market share than iOS. It's actually succeeding quite well outside the US...

How is a device that most people have never heard of "eclipsing" the iPhone. It's certainly not outselling it.

How do you figure that Samsung hasn't eclipsed the iPhone? They sell more phones each year by a wide margin (Samsung: 444 million vs Apple: 151 million in 2013), and are on par with Apple when you only count phones that are comparable with the iPhone (about a third of their sales).

When you look at the quality of the phone features, Samsung really has the iPhone beat. I was contemplating moving to the iPhone when they announced their larger models since I have an iPad and would like my phone and tablet to be within the same app ecosystem. But details about the Note 4 and rumors about the S6 make the iPhone look really bad.

Apple does have Samsung beat in marketing and brand awareness, which helps them have far more profit (for now). But with the inferior phones they have produced over the past couple years it is hard to see them continuing their dominance over the next decade. Their tablets are still the best though (IMHO).

The same could be said about pretty much everything. The things you like are incredibly boring and stupid to a lot of people.

Yes, but I'm sure that no one spends huge amounts of their tax dollars supporting his boring recreational activities...

National parks, PBS, National Endowment for the Arts, etc. There are plenty of was the government funds recreational activities.

According to Grantmakers in the Arts, public funding in the arts comes to about $1.14 billion per year. With the NFL receiving $146 million per year, the NFL is still getting a sizeable amount of money in comparison. But with about 1 in 3 Americans watching at least some football each year, football probably entertains at least as many people as the entire NEA funding does, so perhaps it is money well spent.

With the exception of the Buffalo Bills, pretty much nobody gets backed out. Sometimes a bad team has to make a last-minute deal to get tickets sold at a discount (about $0.39 on the dollar to themselves, or at bulk/corporate rates to television sponsors), but rarely do blackouts happen. [Blackout rules also exempt luxury seats and tickets reserved for the visiting team.]

Any sufficiently popular team is perpetually sold out, with long waiting lists for season tickets. Most famously the waiting list for Green Bay is a generation! Get in line now and you children may be able to purchase tickets.

You might not want to spend $500 to take your family to a game, but people still go. Any talks about the decline in attendance are, in short, bunk. The numbers haven't changed much in the better part of a decade - housing bubble or not.
http://www.statista.com/statis...

Since most games are sold out (or nearly sold out), and some stadiums are SRO for events, they seem to be pricing correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

I prefer NFL games on TV too. But as long as the stadium is full, I can't imagine a reason to lower ticket prices.

You will continue to see this kind of brash arrogance and attitude towards consumers across all large companies.

Watch the NFL get their way. Just watch. Then watch them raise prices more. Then watch them demand another percent or two in local sales tax to build their gargantuan stadium in your town. Then watch them charge hundreds of dollars per ticket for the "cheap" seats. Secure decade-long deposits with obscene unbreakable contracts.

And you, the consumer, will take it up the ass.

And there won't be a goddamn thing you can do about. Why? Because even after ALL that, the fucking stadium is STILL FULL, that's why.

As the global population grows and the attitude towards actually trying to prevent or even control monopolistic business practices shrinks due to corruption, businesses will quickly learn one thing. There will ALWAYS be enough customers.

So, in short, FUCK YOU CONSUMER. You'll take it our way, and FUCK OFF if you don't like it. There's three behind you waiting for you to get the fuck out of the way.

Enjoy.

With the exception of the Buffalo Bills, pretty much nobody gets backed out. Sometimes a bad team has to make a last-minute deal to get tickets sold at a discount (about $0.39 on the dollar to themselves, or at bulk/corporate rates to television sponsors), but rarely do blackouts happen. [Blackout rules also exempt luxury seats and tickets reserved for the visiting team.]

Any sufficiently popular team is perpetually sold out, with long waiting lists for season tickets. Most famously the waiting list for Green Bay is a generation! Get in line now and you children may be able to purchase tickets.

You might not want to spend $500 to take your family to a game, but people still go. Any talks about the decline in attendance are, in short, bunk. The numbers haven't changed much in the better part of a decade - housing bubble or not.
http://www.statista.com/statis...

Since most games are sold out (or nearly sold out), and some stadiums are SRO for events, they seem to be pricing correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

I prefer NFL games on TV too. But as long as the stadium is full, I can't imagine a reason to lower ticket prices.

Perhaps it would be worth looking at where all that money comes from, then.

In 2012 US consumers spent $8.4 billion on console games, including your preorders of Medal of Honor Warfighter and Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor.

That same year the Candy Crush crowd spent $6.5 billion on casual websites, mobile gaming and social network based games.

If your criteria of "Gamer" means "spends a lot of money on games", then that's a fifteen billion dollar pile of gamers right there. It's not until you change the definition to mean "only likes the kind of games that I personally like and only in the way that I like them" that you get to pretend that 43% of that demographic doesn't exist.

Where do you got those imaginary numbers from?
Average number of sun hours per year per federal state in Germany 2013: http://de.statista.com/statist...
Who would build a solar plant if the average hours per day is only 2.5h? For how insane and insane rich to you hold Germany? Freiburg e.g. has 1740 sun hours per year, roughly 4.75 per day ... but averages like this are pretty meaningless. If you plan a plant it makes more sense to look at the monthly distribution and consider costs/profits over the course of typical days.
Especially regarding wind, the average helps you nothing to plan the plant.
Capacity Factors are meaningless numbers as well, they only help you to judge ROI (very unprecisely). CFs are basically an invention of anti renewable advocates, however I'm shocked that even General Electric puts CF into the specs of their wind turbines (and wrongly even, I wonder if that is done by the marketing devision alone). CFs are irrelevant because as a grid operator you want to know how much concrete power a plant will produce the next hour, the next four hours and the next 24 hours: the concrete power, not a fancy number. So every plant has depending on location and orientation a specific load curve. With that load curve and the weather forecast, and the metering over the last 24hours the plant operator determines the concrete power production as explained above. There is no CF involved in such a calculation.

Here, the sunniest places of the world. Your 'fantasy numbers' are nearly off by 100% :) http://www.currentresults.com/...

But those places are mostly not suitable for growing crops.

False. Ample food can be grown in American Midwest as it is.

And the hot deserts can also be turned around very nicely. Earth can easily grow a lot more food than it does. It would be nice to waste less of it too...

I think it is the even number rush.

There is no such 2 year cycle on sales. http://www.statista.com/statis...

But the majority of the worlds pollution comes from Power plants and Shipping.

Bullshit. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... Transport accounts for 13% and energy accounts for 26% of global carbon emissions. Even if you managed to eliminate all of those, it would only slow down climate change a little.

There are only a few dozen huge container ships in the world that are producing more pollution than all the cars combine.

Bullshit too. http://www.statista.com/statis...

We could build more nuclear power plants while we wait for Solar to mature.

Nuclear power plants aren't the answer; they are hugely expensive, there is only limited fuel available, and we have no political solution to the waste disposal problem. And solar won't "mature" if the first thing you do is dampen down the world economy through emission restrictions.

We can do something about it.

Why won't anybody think of the children! It would be totally ineffective, it would wreck the world economy, it would hurt people far more than climate change itself, but at least we would feel like we are doing something!

The most effective way of getting emissions to go down is for government to stay out of the way. Fossil fuels are costly and people are highly motivated to use less of it already. If you make it harder for people to ship solar cells, or buy them, or make silicon, or whatever, solar cells will "mature" more slowly or stop maturing at all.

Disclaimer: Android Fanboy

While they may have been the "de facto" device in 2011, it looks like they were overrun by all the various Android tables a while ago and are still in market share decline. For a single device compared against all others they may have the most share, but not by OS. With Apple just catching up to Samsung’s 2012 products this trend will probably continue.

You are also oh so conveniently ignoring one tiny little fact, year over year DEVICE SALES ARE GOING UP! Yes, market share is going down, but that's largely because the smartphone market has been growing so fast, Apple's share of it hasn't been growing as fast as the market has. You want to know whose sales have been dipping recently? Samsungs!. But don't let those silly facts get in the way of your baseless ranting!

Think about all the second/third worlders supporting piracy on Slashdot. The hungarians/romanians/russians saying they pirated everything and then complaining about how no one wants to pay for their own software they make so they're thinking about emigrating...but that everyone should pirate Game of Thrones because media companies who want to make a profit are evil.

Forget about their reasons. Is it a problem that would make Sony unprofitable?

We've had the music industry give up on DRM over a decade ago, and they're still in business, doing better than ever. In fact, the Super Bowl is now making half-time acts PAY for the privilege of playing at the half-time of the Superbowl. All that piracy of music and there is still a huge music industry, still musicians making livings all over the world. Maybe some of the power shifted, but do you doubt that there are just as many musicians making livings today as there were in 1980?

The industry wants to say it's a SERIOUS problem, but all we have to go on is their outrageous estimates of lost revenues, and dire warnings. We had the same dire warnings about the music industry and they turned out to be completely false. I don't need a Playstation 4 if I want to play the latest music from my favorite musician. In fact, there are more ways for me to get that music and get it for free than ever before. Movies are pirated left and right and there's still a movie industry, in fact, it's bigger than ever. More independent movies than ever. More people making a living in the movie industry than ever, in more places than ever. The music industry and the movie industry have surrendered to piracy and lived to tell the tale. Yet, you tell me that somehow the game industry is different.

I call BS.

People can go on how Sony or Microsoft and other companies are evil and information wants to be free and all that.....but really it's just a bunch of people who don't want to pay.

And yet, somebody is paying. Here, look for yourself:

Billboard:

Global digital revenues were up 8% to $5.8 billion, climbing from $5.4 billion the previous year. Performance rights revenue was the fastest growing sector in the music industry, rising 9.4% to $943 million, up from $862 million in 2011. Synchronization grew 2.1% and totaled $337 million, up from $330 million. Global revenues from physical was $9.4 billion, a 5% decrease on 2011’s total of $9.9 billion.

And,

Statista:

Filmed entertainment revenue in 2013 was $88billion

That's billion with a "b". And the projections through 2018 are all up up up.

http://www.statista.com/statis...

All in all, the entertainment industry in the US made $632billion in 2013. So somebody is paying. Piracy my ass.