I don't get why there are so many posters blasting this review. The entire point of a review is to give the reviewer's opinion (check), support that opinion (check), and give the reader an indication of whether he would agree or not (big-ass check).
This is the first slashdot book review in living memory that didn't read like a poorly-done eighth-grade book report. It was a great review!
Reasonable plans for a space elevator with near-term materials call for launching the entire thing in one shot with one of today's heavy-lift systems. You most certainly don't need cheap launch to build a space elevator.
(Disclaimer: I could have forgotten something, and in any case we are still talking about things that have not been invented yet, although it does look to be practical pretty soon.)
I've never heard anybody blaming NASA's engineers, we all blame NASA's managers. But the blame does go to NASA. They never had any sense of compromise, realism, or incremental development. This "everything or bust" attitude got us to the Moon real fast when everybody wanted to, and then it hasn't taken us anywhere else in over thirty years. Apollo was a magnificent achievement, but it was ultimately a stunt. The Shuttle is a stunt without an archievement, it's just a joke with booster rockets. We could have much better launchers if NASA's management had bothered to make the case for reusable rockets, or placed actual development as a priority over keeping excess personnel employed. They came up with a joke of a space station in order to justify the shuttle, whose only real purpose in life is to be neat (look, it's reusable, isn't that cool!) and keep lots of NASA people employed.
Look at what the Russians did with less money and less technology. We went to the Moon six times and never went back. They kept Mir in orbit, functioning well, always manned, etc., for about fifteen years. Even after the USSR went thunk and the goverment ran out of money, they kept things going. There's no reason NASA couldn't do similar things if they actually took a realistic view towards their goals, instead of this all-or-nothing crap they keep doing.
Hmm. I had all the stuff you listed (no color screens, loading from tape, etc.) except the 100-pound computer, and I have no clue who Robert Smith or Steven Morrissey are. Did I miss something really important?
I was specifically talking about native speakers, where the answer is most certainly no. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=E NG gives the totaly number of native English speakers as 341 million as of 1999. It's safe to say that the US, with a population of 290 million, contains a comfortable majority of those. That same site gives the total population of English speakers, native and non-native, at 508 million, and I think the US gets a majority even there.
If I go to the park and dump rubbing alcohol in the grass, nothing will happen. There's not enough, nobody will even notice.
If everybody in the entire city went to the nearest park and dumped a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the grass, it would be very noticeable.
It is not a requirement that your individual vote be able to change the election. With many things, whether it's pollution or 'punishing' a company by not buying from them, individual actions don't matter until there's many of then put together. This does not invalidate the importance of the individual action.
Sorry, "the rest of the world"? Most of the rest of the world doesn't speak English. In the English-speaking world, most native speakers are American.
Re:This is the same Dvorak...
on
Online! The Book
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
John Dvorak is a professional troll. What various slashdotters only dream of, he lives. What is a troll? Someone who writes something deliberately provocative to make people angry and respond. Accuracy doesn't even show up on the list of priorities. Dvorak has figured out how to make a living as a troll. Instead of trolling in forums, he trolls in his columns and books. Even though everybody knows that what he writes is crap and has no connection with reality, it still pisses people off enough that they read it, and point it out to their friends.
Replace "bricks" with "cells", and you have just made all life impossible. We know that self-replicating machines are possible, because we are surrounded by them everywhere all the time. It may be difficult, but it is obviously not a "fundamental obstacle".
The US isn't simultaneously whining about getting handouts for electricity and food. North Korea is free to do whatever they want if they wish to remain completely isolated, but this thread was about them having no electricity. Because their Great Leader is so fucked up, and their economy is so fucked up, their only real chance for either enough food or enough electricity is outside help. And outside help will not be forthcoming until they abandon their nuclear weapons program and stop shooting missiles through the airspace of neighboring countries during tests.
This seems extremely farfetched. I'm not aware of any disease that ever went from only being transmissible via direct blood sharing to being airborne. Do you have any examples of this ever having happened in the past?
The air is an extremely hostile environment compared to blood. A virus needs to be well-protected to survive it, and AIDS doesn't have the protection. Evolving enough protection isn't just a matter of waiting for a cosmic ray to hit the wrong spot.
Perhaps if they would halt their nuclear weapons and long-range missile programs, the other nations of the world would consider the case in a more favorable light.
Mostly because you can get SARS, and then die from it, simply from having been in the same room as someone who's infected. (Or at least can be transmitted through nothing more than casual contact; the popular image is that it takes practically nothing to hop from one person to another.) With AIDS, on the other hand, you have to actually share certain bodily fluids with someone who's infected. In other words, you can remain celibate and lead an otherwise normal life, and modulo infected blood or needles, you have no chance of contracting AIDS. And, of course, since the most AIDS cases happen because of consensual sex or drugs, lots of people have the attitude that it's their own damned fault.
SARS spread quickly and easily and killed a large proportion of its victims within weeks, which is a formula for rapid disaster. AIDS spreads slowly and difficultly and its victims continue living for years, which results in a much slower, calmer disaster. People don't worry about bad things if they take that long to happen.
I thought I was pretty clear about this, but apparently you missed it; when I was talking about Japan's military philosophy and its dependence on the US, I was talking about the entire period from the end of the second World War until today. I agree that Japan depends much less on the US than before. But it still depended on the US before to maintain its pacifistic, small-military philosophy, and it still depends on the US today for nuclear support.
The worst Linux exploit of the year: an obscure kernel vulnerability that allowed one person to gain control of one box, disrupting one small OS group for a few days.
The worst Windows exploit of the year: a hole in the RPC services (which you can't turn off) that allowed a worm to gain control of millions of Windows boxes, disrupting the entire internet.
How does this make Linux equally bad as Windows, then?
Japan does not spend six percent of its GDP, it spends six percent of its budget. This works out to about one percent of its GDP.
In terms of absolute dollar figures, you're right that Japan outspends North Korea by a good amount. Japan spent $40 billion in 2002. North Korea spent $5.2 billion, which is not anywhere near 'next to nothing'. Particularly when you consider that North Korea doesn't really buy wepons from overseas. Their economy is seriously fucked up, but their prices will be low, and particularly paying soldiers is going to be a much lower cost; a dollar figure is not going to be an accurate indicator of military power. Aside from the nuclear weapons end of things, North Korea does not, of course, pose a threat to Japan, since they don't have much of a navy. I mentioned them only as an example of military spending. North Korea's military in nothing to laugh at on the ground, though. Just ask South Korea, or the US's 30,000 sacrificial troops in South Korea who are there pretty much so that they would be killed by the north if anything ever happened.
And of course you're happily ignoring the other examples of the US and the USSR.
This is the wackiest conspiracy theory I've seen all day.
How exactly are the big pharmaceutical companies "leaning on" Google? Talk of Google's IPO has included mention of the company's value, which is several billion dollars. They aren't a small company that anybody can just push around. The only "leaning" tactic I can think of that would work would be a fleet of armored cars, loaded with green paper cargo, driving to Google's headquarters and unloading.
There are really two separate eras to consider, the Cold War time and then after the Cold War.
During the Cold War, Japan depended on US muscle just like a lot of other countries. They were next to two major Communist powers. Japan had just finished up doing all manner of unspeakable things to the people of one of them, and they had just been roundly crushed by the army of the other, so things were not too friendly. Things weren't so good on the convential front already, and then when you throw nuclear weapons into the mix (USSR having them from 1949, China getting them in 1964) the situation doesn't look good. However, despite living next to two nuclear-armed and relatively unfriendly neighbors for twenty five years, Japan never built any nuclear weapons, nor was the size of their conventional force comparable to what would be needed for good security absent the US.
Post Cold War, both Russia and China are fairly friendly, so no worries there. However, North Korea either has or will shortly have nuclear weapons. Until somebody builds a working missile-defense system, the only way to defend against nukes is deterrence; apparently Japan has enough faith in the US (and, somewhat less, in other nuclear powers around the globe) to not build any nuclear weapons for themselves, even though they certainly have the capability.
Six percent of the budget going to the military is not a particularly high figure. For example, the US spent about 3.2% of its entire GDP on the military in 1999, and the USSR spent around 15% of its GDP in the 1980s. North Korea spends an unbelievable 34% of its GDP on its military.
I can easily believe that Japan's conventional military is currently sufficient to guarantee its security, but I don't think it was during the Cold War. And sitting next to a crazy, soon to be (if not already) nuclear-armed neighbor, they have remarkable restraint to not begin producing nuclear weapons themselves.
On the other hand, I like the model PBS uses. I like Nova, the News Hour, and a number of other shows on PBS, so I pledge regularly. The result is well written and well produced TV with quality I can count on every day of the year.
Every day except when they're running a pledge drive, that is. Then you only get to watch half your show, interspersed with commercials that are longer and more annoying than anything on "regular" TV. PBS is supported by advertising just as much as other networks, it's just their ads are more direct. Instead of "buy this product so the company that sells it can give us money" it's very plainly, "give us money please!"
I guess you could look at PBS as the shareware of TV. Their price is lower (less ad time, less money going from viewers to advertisers) but they get almost all of it, instead of a small percentage. Pledge drives are nag screens.
My boss was telling me about an experience she had when she was just starting out as a teacher sometime in the 70s. She was going to have an inspection from her boss on her performance in the classroom. She was all set up and ready to go, with a (then-new, high tech) tape recorder to use with the students for their English class. Well, her boss got there and said, "You don't have one of those infernal tape recorders, do you? If people keep using those, pretty soon they won't need teachers anymore, and it'll put us all out of business!"
Well, surprise surprise, thirty years later, tape recorders are used regularly, but teachers are still in demand. Computers are just more of the same.
Japan, up until the past year, was more-or-less the opposite, where politicians could score points by arbitrarily constraining the JDF in some abstract way.
Don't forget that the only reason Japan could get away with this kind of behavior is because they have the big, bad US military standing behind them. If Japan had been standing alone for the past 57 years, a few hundred kilometers from China, North Korea, and the USSR, restricting their military's power would have been a serious career-limiting move for any politician.
Comparing the UK's train system to the American system and saying that it's great by comparison is like saying that McDonald's food is great when compared to poo.
The American system is total crap, but that doesn't mean the UK system is great. I've never used the UK system, but your description doesn't sound so good. In France, if a train is more than a couple of minutes late, they actually get on the PA and say "we're sorry for the delay, please don't hate us". Ten minutes late is nutty. I've only been more than ten minutes late on a French train twice. Once it was because there was an accident on the tracks, I think involving somebody shuffling off this mortal coil. Your (rough guess) figure of 9 out of 10 trains being on time means 10% are late, which seems really high.
And then, of course, there's the TGV. Paris to Marseille in three hours. Whee.
You can divide the costs of a game into two pieces; one-time costs and per-unit costs. One-time costs include things like paying your programmers to code, electricity for the building they work in, marketing, etc. Per-unit costs are things like printing the manuals/booklets, making the cases, stamping the CDs. A pirate doesn't really have any one-time costs, he only has to pay per-unit costs.
The problem comes in when you see how the costs are divided. A modern game will cost millions of dollars in one-time costs, but it costs maybe fifty cents per unit to actually duplicate the disc and produce the packaging. This means that, unless the game is popular beyond all belief, the one-time costs dominate, and so the game's price has to be set much higher than the per-unit cost in order to make money overall.
The thing is, once your one-time costs are paid for, they're done. No more worries. Introducing games into, say, China, comes with nearly no one-time costs. They have a bit of marketing to do, and they'll probably want to do a translation, but these are very cheap compared to the original production costs of the game. Since those have already been paid for by customers in Japan, the US, and Europe, you can sell the game at a much lower price, the per-unit cost plus a markup.
Pricing is a fundamental difficulty in industries like this, including software, music, film, and drugs, because in all of these industries the one-time costs are way higher than the per-unit costs. But the market doesn't like paying a large markup. People know that the $12 CD they just bought only cost 25 cents to make, and they don't like that.
All of these industries see pricing structures like this. You spend a lot of money to create a product, then sell it at a very large markup in your primary market, which consists of people used to paying higher prices. Once your one-time costs are paid off, you can sell the same product for a much lower price in your secondary markets, and continue to make a profit. This happens with software, drugs, and media.
This would make sense if China were poor, but it's not. It's poorer than Japan, the US, or Western Europe, but it's not a particularly poor country. There is an enormous middle class with as much disposible income as your average middle-class American (as measured by the exchange rate, not compared to the cost of living). The absolute salary of a middle-class wage earner in China is lower, but the cost of living is incredibly low, so there's a lot left over. China is the second largest economy in the world, with a GDP of $5.7 trillion. A lot of that is due to the enormous population, true, but compare with India, which has nearly as many people, but a GDP of only $2.66 trillion. Africa and China are not even remotely comparable. You are correct that a US-like price will lead to few sales, but incorrect about the cause. It's not because nobody can afford it, plenty of Chinese people can. But buying a shiny round piece of plastic for $50 is looked on as total insanity. You can buy a nice DVD for $1 on the street, and games are priced similarly. Nobody will buy real games with pirated versions available at those prices, no matter how rich they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get why there are so many posters blasting this review. The entire point of a review is to give the reviewer's opinion (check), support that opinion (check), and give the reader an indication of whether he would agree or not (big-ass check).
This is the first slashdot book review in living memory that didn't read like a poorly-done eighth-grade book report. It was a great review!
Reasonable plans for a space elevator with near-term materials call for launching the entire thing in one shot with one of today's heavy-lift systems. You most certainly don't need cheap launch to build a space elevator.
(Disclaimer: I could have forgotten something, and in any case we are still talking about things that have not been invented yet, although it does look to be practical pretty soon.)
I've never heard anybody blaming NASA's engineers, we all blame NASA's managers. But the blame does go to NASA. They never had any sense of compromise, realism, or incremental development. This "everything or bust" attitude got us to the Moon real fast when everybody wanted to, and then it hasn't taken us anywhere else in over thirty years. Apollo was a magnificent achievement, but it was ultimately a stunt. The Shuttle is a stunt without an archievement, it's just a joke with booster rockets. We could have much better launchers if NASA's management had bothered to make the case for reusable rockets, or placed actual development as a priority over keeping excess personnel employed. They came up with a joke of a space station in order to justify the shuttle, whose only real purpose in life is to be neat (look, it's reusable, isn't that cool!) and keep lots of NASA people employed.
Look at what the Russians did with less money and less technology. We went to the Moon six times and never went back. They kept Mir in orbit, functioning well, always manned, etc., for about fifteen years. Even after the USSR went thunk and the goverment ran out of money, they kept things going. There's no reason NASA couldn't do similar things if they actually took a realistic view towards their goals, instead of this all-or-nothing crap they keep doing.
Hmm. I had all the stuff you listed (no color screens, loading from tape, etc.) except the 100-pound computer, and I have no clue who Robert Smith or Steven Morrissey are. Did I miss something really important?
I was specifically talking about native speakers, where the answer is most certainly no. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=E NG gives the totaly number of native English speakers as 341 million as of 1999. It's safe to say that the US, with a population of 290 million, contains a comfortable majority of those. That same site gives the total population of English speakers, native and non-native, at 508 million, and I think the US gets a majority even there.
If I go to the park and dump rubbing alcohol in the grass, nothing will happen. There's not enough, nobody will even notice.
If everybody in the entire city went to the nearest park and dumped a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the grass, it would be very noticeable.
It is not a requirement that your individual vote be able to change the election. With many things, whether it's pollution or 'punishing' a company by not buying from them, individual actions don't matter until there's many of then put together. This does not invalidate the importance of the individual action.
Sorry, "the rest of the world"? Most of the rest of the world doesn't speak English. In the English-speaking world, most native speakers are American.
John Dvorak is a professional troll. What various slashdotters only dream of, he lives. What is a troll? Someone who writes something deliberately provocative to make people angry and respond. Accuracy doesn't even show up on the list of priorities. Dvorak has figured out how to make a living as a troll. Instead of trolling in forums, he trolls in his columns and books. Even though everybody knows that what he writes is crap and has no connection with reality, it still pisses people off enough that they read it, and point it out to their friends.
Replace "bricks" with "cells", and you have just made all life impossible. We know that self-replicating machines are possible, because we are surrounded by them everywhere all the time. It may be difficult, but it is obviously not a "fundamental obstacle".
Amnesty International probably does not have the same priorities as the original poster.
The US isn't simultaneously whining about getting handouts for electricity and food. North Korea is free to do whatever they want if they wish to remain completely isolated, but this thread was about them having no electricity. Because their Great Leader is so fucked up, and their economy is so fucked up, their only real chance for either enough food or enough electricity is outside help. And outside help will not be forthcoming until they abandon their nuclear weapons program and stop shooting missiles through the airspace of neighboring countries during tests.
This seems extremely farfetched. I'm not aware of any disease that ever went from only being transmissible via direct blood sharing to being airborne. Do you have any examples of this ever having happened in the past?
The air is an extremely hostile environment compared to blood. A virus needs to be well-protected to survive it, and AIDS doesn't have the protection. Evolving enough protection isn't just a matter of waiting for a cosmic ray to hit the wrong spot.
Perhaps if they would halt their nuclear weapons and long-range missile programs, the other nations of the world would consider the case in a more favorable light.
Mostly because you can get SARS, and then die from it, simply from having been in the same room as someone who's infected. (Or at least can be transmitted through nothing more than casual contact; the popular image is that it takes practically nothing to hop from one person to another.) With AIDS, on the other hand, you have to actually share certain bodily fluids with someone who's infected. In other words, you can remain celibate and lead an otherwise normal life, and modulo infected blood or needles, you have no chance of contracting AIDS. And, of course, since the most AIDS cases happen because of consensual sex or drugs, lots of people have the attitude that it's their own damned fault.
SARS spread quickly and easily and killed a large proportion of its victims within weeks, which is a formula for rapid disaster. AIDS spreads slowly and difficultly and its victims continue living for years, which results in a much slower, calmer disaster. People don't worry about bad things if they take that long to happen.
I thought I was pretty clear about this, but apparently you missed it; when I was talking about Japan's military philosophy and its dependence on the US, I was talking about the entire period from the end of the second World War until today. I agree that Japan depends much less on the US than before. But it still depended on the US before to maintain its pacifistic, small-military philosophy, and it still depends on the US today for nuclear support.
The worst Linux exploit of the year: an obscure kernel vulnerability that allowed one person to gain control of one box, disrupting one small OS group for a few days.
The worst Windows exploit of the year: a hole in the RPC services (which you can't turn off) that allowed a worm to gain control of millions of Windows boxes, disrupting the entire internet.
How does this make Linux equally bad as Windows, then?
Japan does not spend six percent of its GDP, it spends six percent of its budget. This works out to about one percent of its GDP.
In terms of absolute dollar figures, you're right that Japan outspends North Korea by a good amount. Japan spent $40 billion in 2002. North Korea spent $5.2 billion, which is not anywhere near 'next to nothing'. Particularly when you consider that North Korea doesn't really buy wepons from overseas. Their economy is seriously fucked up, but their prices will be low, and particularly paying soldiers is going to be a much lower cost; a dollar figure is not going to be an accurate indicator of military power. Aside from the nuclear weapons end of things, North Korea does not, of course, pose a threat to Japan, since they don't have much of a navy. I mentioned them only as an example of military spending. North Korea's military in nothing to laugh at on the ground, though. Just ask South Korea, or the US's 30,000 sacrificial troops in South Korea who are there pretty much so that they would be killed by the north if anything ever happened.
And of course you're happily ignoring the other examples of the US and the USSR.
This is the wackiest conspiracy theory I've seen all day.
How exactly are the big pharmaceutical companies "leaning on" Google? Talk of Google's IPO has included mention of the company's value, which is several billion dollars. They aren't a small company that anybody can just push around. The only "leaning" tactic I can think of that would work would be a fleet of armored cars, loaded with green paper cargo, driving to Google's headquarters and unloading.
There are really two separate eras to consider, the Cold War time and then after the Cold War.
During the Cold War, Japan depended on US muscle just like a lot of other countries. They were next to two major Communist powers. Japan had just finished up doing all manner of unspeakable things to the people of one of them, and they had just been roundly crushed by the army of the other, so things were not too friendly. Things weren't so good on the convential front already, and then when you throw nuclear weapons into the mix (USSR having them from 1949, China getting them in 1964) the situation doesn't look good. However, despite living next to two nuclear-armed and relatively unfriendly neighbors for twenty five years, Japan never built any nuclear weapons, nor was the size of their conventional force comparable to what would be needed for good security absent the US.
Post Cold War, both Russia and China are fairly friendly, so no worries there. However, North Korea either has or will shortly have nuclear weapons. Until somebody builds a working missile-defense system, the only way to defend against nukes is deterrence; apparently Japan has enough faith in the US (and, somewhat less, in other nuclear powers around the globe) to not build any nuclear weapons for themselves, even though they certainly have the capability.
Six percent of the budget going to the military is not a particularly high figure. For example, the US spent about 3.2% of its entire GDP on the military in 1999, and the USSR spent around 15% of its GDP in the 1980s. North Korea spends an unbelievable 34% of its GDP on its military.
I can easily believe that Japan's conventional military is currently sufficient to guarantee its security, but I don't think it was during the Cold War. And sitting next to a crazy, soon to be (if not already) nuclear-armed neighbor, they have remarkable restraint to not begin producing nuclear weapons themselves.
On the other hand, I like the model PBS uses. I like Nova, the News Hour, and a number of other shows on PBS, so I pledge regularly. The result is well written and well produced TV with quality I can count on every day of the year.
Every day except when they're running a pledge drive, that is. Then you only get to watch half your show, interspersed with commercials that are longer and more annoying than anything on "regular" TV. PBS is supported by advertising just as much as other networks, it's just their ads are more direct. Instead of "buy this product so the company that sells it can give us money" it's very plainly, "give us money please!"
I guess you could look at PBS as the shareware of TV. Their price is lower (less ad time, less money going from viewers to advertisers) but they get almost all of it, instead of a small percentage. Pledge drives are nag screens.
My boss was telling me about an experience she had when she was just starting out as a teacher sometime in the 70s. She was going to have an inspection from her boss on her performance in the classroom. She was all set up and ready to go, with a (then-new, high tech) tape recorder to use with the students for their English class. Well, her boss got there and said, "You don't have one of those infernal tape recorders, do you? If people keep using those, pretty soon they won't need teachers anymore, and it'll put us all out of business!"
Well, surprise surprise, thirty years later, tape recorders are used regularly, but teachers are still in demand. Computers are just more of the same.
Japan, up until the past year, was more-or-less the opposite, where politicians could score points by arbitrarily constraining the JDF in some abstract way.
Don't forget that the only reason Japan could get away with this kind of behavior is because they have the big, bad US military standing behind them. If Japan had been standing alone for the past 57 years, a few hundred kilometers from China, North Korea, and the USSR, restricting their military's power would have been a serious career-limiting move for any politician.
Comparing the UK's train system to the American system and saying that it's great by comparison is like saying that McDonald's food is great when compared to poo.
The American system is total crap, but that doesn't mean the UK system is great. I've never used the UK system, but your description doesn't sound so good. In France, if a train is more than a couple of minutes late, they actually get on the PA and say "we're sorry for the delay, please don't hate us". Ten minutes late is nutty. I've only been more than ten minutes late on a French train twice. Once it was because there was an accident on the tracks, I think involving somebody shuffling off this mortal coil. Your (rough guess) figure of 9 out of 10 trains being on time means 10% are late, which seems really high.
And then, of course, there's the TGV. Paris to Marseille in three hours. Whee.
You can divide the costs of a game into two pieces; one-time costs and per-unit costs. One-time costs include things like paying your programmers to code, electricity for the building they work in, marketing, etc. Per-unit costs are things like printing the manuals/booklets, making the cases, stamping the CDs. A pirate doesn't really have any one-time costs, he only has to pay per-unit costs.
The problem comes in when you see how the costs are divided. A modern game will cost millions of dollars in one-time costs, but it costs maybe fifty cents per unit to actually duplicate the disc and produce the packaging. This means that, unless the game is popular beyond all belief, the one-time costs dominate, and so the game's price has to be set much higher than the per-unit cost in order to make money overall.
The thing is, once your one-time costs are paid for, they're done. No more worries. Introducing games into, say, China, comes with nearly no one-time costs. They have a bit of marketing to do, and they'll probably want to do a translation, but these are very cheap compared to the original production costs of the game. Since those have already been paid for by customers in Japan, the US, and Europe, you can sell the game at a much lower price, the per-unit cost plus a markup.
Pricing is a fundamental difficulty in industries like this, including software, music, film, and drugs, because in all of these industries the one-time costs are way higher than the per-unit costs. But the market doesn't like paying a large markup. People know that the $12 CD they just bought only cost 25 cents to make, and they don't like that.
All of these industries see pricing structures like this. You spend a lot of money to create a product, then sell it at a very large markup in your primary market, which consists of people used to paying higher prices. Once your one-time costs are paid off, you can sell the same product for a much lower price in your secondary markets, and continue to make a profit. This happens with software, drugs, and media.
This would make sense if China were poor, but it's not. It's poorer than Japan, the US, or Western Europe, but it's not a particularly poor country. There is an enormous middle class with as much disposible income as your average middle-class American (as measured by the exchange rate, not compared to the cost of living). The absolute salary of a middle-class wage earner in China is lower, but the cost of living is incredibly low, so there's a lot left over. China is the second largest economy in the world, with a GDP of $5.7 trillion. A lot of that is due to the enormous population, true, but compare with India, which has nearly as many people, but a GDP of only $2.66 trillion. Africa and China are not even remotely comparable. You are correct that a US-like price will lead to few sales, but incorrect about the cause. It's not because nobody can afford it, plenty of Chinese people can. But buying a shiny round piece of plastic for $50 is looked on as total insanity. You can buy a nice DVD for $1 on the street, and games are priced similarly. Nobody will buy real games with pirated versions available at those prices, no matter how rich they are.