People are getting upset that EVE Online will require SM 2.0 and later SM 3.0 will be required. They whine and cry on the forums, threatening to quit, when an upgrade to a compliant computer would only be ~500USD.
Yes, $500 is pocket change, since clearly people can use their EVE-honed mad capitalizt skillz to make millions in real life. Kinda reminds me of this quote from the webcomic Jack: "Mr. Star is right! If we all work together we can take him. After all, he's only God."
Of course one might wonder why a space trading sim requires advanced shaders, rather than merely uses them to deliver more eyecandy if they're present, but that's another discussion.
Here's an example. The US government probably prevents you from selling your open source software to Cuba or Iran. If I read section 7 correctly, that counts as a "condition imposed on you". So really you lose all rights to using that code?
No. After all, you have no duty under the GPL to distribute to Cuba or Iran in the first place. The GPL only states under what conditions such distribution must occur if it occurs: you must give them the source code, which stays under the GPL, so they have all the same rights you did.
Now, if the US government forbade you from giving the source to Cuba, then you couldn't distribute to Cuba at all. However, you could still distribute to anyone else, who could then distribute to Cuba.
If you take something without the intent to pay for it, you are a thief.
I have no intention to pay for all the oxygen I've taken from the air during my life. Perhaps you meant "take something that belongs to someone else"? But that still doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article, which was about copying, not taking. Please explain?
If the company is foolish enough to pay the execs based on short-term gains which ultimately cost them billions, the company loses. Everything works itself out.
Except that the shareholders win. After all, in a highly liquid stock market they can simply sell their stocks as soon as the short-term gains cause the stock price to temporarily rise. This means that for the shareholders, the best kind of exec is exactly the kind who sacrifices long-term viability for short-term gains; the shareholders get the gains and let someone else deal with the mess. Consequently, this kind of behaviour gets rewarded again and again, and repeated by execs of every company until they are all looted empty and the economy collapses, which is happening now.
So no, it doesn't work itself out. In the current market it is the best strategy, and thus one that a rational actor will engage in again and again, and a fine example of a tragedy of the commons. In order to stop it, we'd need to make the market less liquid, but I can't think of any way to do that which wouldn't cause more problems. Yet stop it we must, or keep facing the rather unpleasant results of parasite economy over and over again.
Another possible fix would be to somehow twist the market towards favouring small companies over large ones. People tend to have more emotional relationships to small companies, which are often run by the very people who found them, and this deters rational but destructive behaviour. Again, I can't think of a way to do this without causing unintended side effects.
What breaks this system is when the company makes horrific decisions and the taxpayers bail them out.
No, what breaks this system is that only the sucker left with the stock when the company folds pays the bill, rather than everyone who took part in the looting. Bailouts make the problem worse, of course, since they remove the risk completely, but the problem would exist even without them.
Now we're paying the huge salaries and there's no penalty for bad investment. Guess what that creates? (Hint: not "valuable jobs and products.")
The problem is that it is possibly, even easy, to take short-term gains and have someone else suffer the long-term costs. No one believes that they'll be the one holding the stock when the sucked-dry husk of the company finally gives up the ghost, and in all likelihood they're right. It's simply that with all other companies also in bad state, there will be - and was and is currently happening - a cascade effect of failure.
Taking short-term gains over long-term ones in a highly liquid market is not a bad investment, but a pretty good one. That's why everyone is doing it. It's simply one that causes the whole market to collapse when everyone is doing it.
Cheap labor has been crucial to economic growth in the US. Typically this was immigrant labor in the past. Now we've reduced the flow of cheap labor to a trickle, and it's killing our economy.
Cheap labour means great profits to the owning class and everyone else working themselves to death. I, for one, don't want to be forced to work 16-hour days just to be able to afford food, no matter how good that might be for economy.
We should welcome hard-working and bright immigrants with open arms... not bar the gates against them simply because they are foreign or different. Competition for jobs will improve the US workforce. It will free up labor to do more valuable jobs.
These more valuable jobs require specialized skills which the newly laid-off worker doesn't have and very likely can't afford to get. This then results in cut-throat competition for whatever jobs he can do, which in turn results at the very least in a paycut and quite likely with outright unemployment, leading to a lower quality of life.
But it's certainly an improvement from the investor's point of view.
The answer to this is not protectionism. It's the opposite -- reduce our labor costs so we can export to the countries we offshore to. Then we both benefit.
Well why don't you go to your boss the first thing and suggest your wage gets lowered? Show us all the benefit of being paid less for more work!
Protectionism doesn't harm the economy, quite the contrary: it benefits me and most citizens of a developed country doing it. The only ones who it doesn't benefit are those who don't work for a living; since that means the rich and the powerful, you can rest easily: our economy isn't going to be protected.
But copying, until recently, was a useful proxy for "obtaining value". It's like a toll road. You're not paying for the value of "pass through this gated entrance"; you're paying for the entire value of the road. The entrance is just a convenient place to meter it.
Hmm... That's a good point, actually. The question is: how do you meter copying - and, more importantly to me at least, derivative works, since those are what really advances culture by building more on top of what has come before - without letting the original creator control what is done with it? Because if you do give them control, you'll have the biggest problem of current model: you don't have the freedom to use the content as you will - a notion which began the Free Software Movement, BTW.
The true irony here is that if such a way was found, then Rule 34 alone would move more money than the whole Hollywood combined.
And I suppose that the printers should be paid just once too, no matter how many copies they produce?
Well, yes. Why should I pay the printer again for my copy just because he prints another one?
You wouldn't be saying that they deserve to make money for ever and ever over the work of others, without giving the creator of that work their cut, would you?
Now that you mention it, my local supermarket keeps on benefiting from the work of those who build it, yet they only got paid once. Should the builders sue for their fair cut of the profits their hard work made possible?
"The estates of the directors of the company were confiscated and used to relieve the suffering of the victims, and the stock of the South Sea Company was divided between the Bank of England and East India Company. A resolution was proposed in parliament that bankers be tied up in sacks filled with snakes and tipped into the murky Thames."
What a sweet, quaint notion. Nowadays we tip the heads of such companies into bathing resorts instead, at the expense of their victims of course. Call me old-fashioned, but I like that proposition.
That means less gets spent which means companies have less money to pay thier staff with which means layoffs or paycuts which means even less gets spent (both by those who have had them and by those who are afraid they will be next) and the cycle continues.
Here in Finland there are huge ads saying, loosely translated: "Don't save us to recession!" They even have a picture of a piggy bank with vampire teeth on it. It's kinda cute, actually;).
That's how you know it's really, really, really bad. Much worse than I thought. In fact I think I need to reduce my spending and try to save up some more money.
If it wasn't for the monopoly, Microsoft would have been dead between XP and Vista. Six years between incremental product releases? Instant death in any *normal* industry.
Decremental product releases. Almost everyone prefer XP to Vista. "Has Windows XP" is a selling point nowadays, judging by computer ads. All of which, of course, only reinforces your point, but is noteworthy nonetheless.
... and of those of us highly skilled, in debt and just graduating from college? Glad the boom was fun for y'all, but some of us showed up a little late to the party.
To put it bluntly, it was stupid of you to take loan for college when you knew there are people in India and China able to work for less. Education is an investment, and you invested in a horse you knew would likely lose. Worse, you invested borrowed money - which you can't afford to lose since it's not really yours - in this way.
What you should had done was get a law or management degree. Being a producer doesn't pay off in globalized economy; but for parasites, it's almost always a party. Your best bet now is to try to asskiss yourself popular, and work on a bullshit degree at night school. That, or pull the old disappearance trick; you'll leave your papers behind, but it's not like they'll do you any good anyway.
That immediate and infinite growth model that has been adopted lately has done tremendous damage to our economy as a whole. The idea of slow and steady growth with a solid foundation has all but been abandoned by most firms. When you start focusing on how tall you can stack the blocks instead of how stable your block tower is this is the kind of shit that happens. It is a poison that spreads because when even a few firms start down that path investors will be lured into that trap away from the firms that are focusing on stability.
What trap? In a highly liquid stock market that's the best strategy for an investor. Suck the company dry, dump the stock before anyone realizes it's on the verge of collapse, and repeat the process with some other company. It's a game of musical chairs for the economy and when the music stops, it falls on its ass.
Anytime the union decides to strike, the auto companies have a choice to let the unions have their way or go out of business, because they can't produce anything (strikebreakers are against the law), so they accept the contract that the UAW dictates to them.
Every time a corporation asks it employees to vote for a pay cut, said employees have the choice of letting the corporation have its way or be fired. This seems to be fine with various right-wing people. However, as soon as people form a union and turn the tables, it's suddenly a bad thing. Some of them even want to have the unions banned, despite otherwise supporting the right to freely associate. Weird.
Because of the capital intensive nature of the automobile business (factories, supply lines for Steel, etc.) the big 3 have always given in to the union instead of moving to a state that will allow them to negotiate with the union on equal terms.
Seems to me that the union and the big 3 are on equal terms then, because if car business is so capital intensive, then if the big 3 go bankrupt there won't be any replacements to work for for their employees.
Mutually Assured Destruction. Can't get more even than that.
Unfortunately, that would decrease the pace of production 20% and that's a huge sacrifice when you're trying to keep up with the Goliath that we're competing with.
If you're having trouble meeting the demand, why are you laying anyone off? Shouldn't you rather be hiring more people?
Or is this another case of "let's squeeze them harder to earn our bonuses"?
If I'm interpreting his comment correctly, he is saying that he wants to see a progression in quality over the 10 year lifespan of the PS3. The first games will take little advantage of the HW, but as time goes on and developers become more acquainted with the platform they create games that take more advantage of those HW features.
But that's an absurd strategy: it means that PS3 will be behind an otherwise equal, but easy to program for, competing consoles for almost its entire lifespan, and only catch up with them just before becoming obsolete.
It sounds like a post-release justification for a massive blunder.
Coming up with a justification that makes you seem like a far bigger moron than the original blunder did doesn't really help safe much face.
How does someone like that get to be a CEO? Or is this just another confused and misleading Slashdot summary?
You mean like/. moderation system perhaps? -Sure you get to say anything, but no one gets to read it much outside/. group think.
Bullshit. Not only is your post still readable by anyone who wants, but you also aren't subjected to any kind of punishment. The worst that can happen is that Slashdot no longer accepts further posts from your IP adress. So troll away;).
As evidence I link to a post of mine, which got modded Troll by a coalition of buthurt atheists and theists - in itself quite an accomplishment - but nevertheless I'm here making this post.
If climate change can literally destroy the planet, shouldn't we understand it before we act?
Climate hange cannot destroy the planet, the life on it, or even the human race. It can - and very likely will - simply make things extremely uncomfortable (= billions die) for us, as growth zones of various plants change and weather patterns become chaotic for the duration of the change.
However, those who most profit from not cutting fossil fuel consumption will be able to use those profits to shield themselves from the consequences, so resistance is useless.
There are dozens of open source graphical MMO projects out there already. Name one that has reliable servers and an active, sustainable playerbase.
That's the problem right there: servers. Someone needs to run them, and that costs money. FOSS MMO happens as soon as someone figures out how to run the server P2P - a very hard problem, as it requires dealing with the inevitable variety of versions and cheating - and not a second before.
Google's option is pretty creepy. Any of my loved ones that dislike me enough to put my face to my personal details on a remote server are in trouble...
Bah, this is nothing. Just wait until someone comes up with a way to turn facial characteristics into a string, which can be stored into a database. That would let the system to automatically deduce the likely identity of everyone on each picture by cross-correlation with social networks and such. And even if they can't get your name, they'll still be able to get that you're a close friend or family member of unnamed persons X and Y, who in turn are friends with some other, named persons.
Advancing AI means that total information awareness is coming. It's just a matter of time before you can't take a shit without Google noticing. Skynet was a fuzzy kitten compared to what will happen...
Ironically enough, the same tool could be extremely valuable to economists and planners of all kind, giving detailed statistical information about the habits and movement of humans. It's only the control freak league which makes it a threat. Truly a modern-day Tree of Knowledge...
A vendor means money flow. Non-DRM can, and does, open itself up to free transfer of a product with no money being involved. That's a bigger headache than dealing with vendor lock in when you're trying to make a profit.
DRM doesn't stop this from happening, thought. If your work is any good, then DRM will be circumvented - by copying each page by hand if need be - and free copies will float around.
Besides, as a customer, I'd like to point out that your biggest problem is convince me to invest my time, not money. Assuming I'm making minimum wage - Hell, even assuming I'm living on unemployment - and calculating the worth of my time that way reveals that buying a book is far cheaper than actually reading it. And even assuming that I'm an absolute book nut who just doesn't want to do anything but read every waking hour, and have inherited enough that I don't have to work and can afford as many books as I want, even then there's far more books out there than I can ever possibly read. Why would I pick yours?
Given all this it is irrational to worry about illegal copying. If anything, getting your books included into some torrent will increase, not decrease, your sales, because it increases the chances that Joe Pirate will read said book. This in turn will increase the chances that Joe buys a book of yours the next time he sees them somewhere - because, after all, books are cheap and superior in comfort to computer display, not to mention the hassle of searching for it online. Finally, and most importantly, if Joe reads his book, he might mention it to his friends, which in turn helps make your name familiar to them.
If I ever begin a literary career, I'll be pushing my books into P2P networks myself. Mindshare is how you generate an audience and sales, and having people download your stuff is how you generate mindshare. A download is not a lost sale, it is a future sale in the making.
The one thing that bothers me is that it sounds like mere allegations are enough to count towards the "three strikes". I'm hearing about account terminations etc. and I am not hearing much about the burden of proof.
The point of "three strikes" laws is to strike fear to the hearts of people: you could be next. They have the same basic idea than suicide bombing: of course bombers can't cause much actual destruction, but they could strike anywhere, anytime, and get anyone, so they make people scared, even if the statistics show that you have more chances of being struck by lighting.
In other words, "three strikes" laws are a form of terrorism, and putting burden of proof on the accuser would hinder this purpose.
It's stealing in a moral sense, not a legal sense.
If one assumes that copyright is moral, then yes. If one assumes that copyright is immoral, then no. If one makes no assumptions about the morality of copyright, then it comes down to whether one considers breaking law immoral in itself.
For the vast majority of people, breaking copyright is right there with jaywalking at 3 at morning: technically illegal, but not bloody likely to hurt anyone. And that's just for straight-up copying; but what about derived works? What about sites like fanfiction.net? Are they morally wrong? They certainly are in gross violation of copyright law, being full of derived works.
And often times, people get what they deserve. Pirated software often has malware inside it. Since it's not vetted by the vendor, nobody's going to turn you in for boobytrapping your warez.
Actually, since pirate groups usually strip off the DRM malware added by the vendor, pirated software tends to be safer. An off-the-shelf software might disable your CD burner or copy of Daemon Tools, but I've never heard of a rip from a reputable warez group doing anything like that.
Anything that's offensive will be blocked, so the aussies will stick to watch flowers and waterfalls and only happy news on the web.
Both the Fremen and Aiel would likely find images of waterfalls offensive. All that water wasted on a spectacle. Besides, don't some species of fish travel upstream to lay eggs? Clearly, only a pervert would show such obscene scenes on public television!
In essence, there are two levels of publication -- once by the AP to news outlets, and once by the news outlets to the public. No "hot news" provision means that the AP's customers (the news outlets) don't need to pay the AP, or even attribute stories to them. Thus, the AP can't pay reporters, and we have even fewer reporters to dig up the facts.
Actually, given all that you wrote, wouldn't the demise of AP mean there would be more reporters to dig up facts? Because without AP, a newspaper wouldn't have the option of "simply paying their subscriptions to the AP or Reuters or another news service, then copyediting the AP article", and thus would be forced to keep their own reporters to get news.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, $500 is pocket change, since clearly people can use their EVE-honed mad capitalizt skillz to make millions in real life. Kinda reminds me of this quote from the webcomic Jack: "Mr. Star is right! If we all work together we can take him. After all, he's only God."
Of course one might wonder why a space trading sim requires advanced shaders, rather than merely uses them to deliver more eyecandy if they're present, but that's another discussion.
No. After all, you have no duty under the GPL to distribute to Cuba or Iran in the first place. The GPL only states under what conditions such distribution must occur if it occurs: you must give them the source code, which stays under the GPL, so they have all the same rights you did.
Now, if the US government forbade you from giving the source to Cuba, then you couldn't distribute to Cuba at all. However, you could still distribute to anyone else, who could then distribute to Cuba.
I have no intention to pay for all the oxygen I've taken from the air during my life. Perhaps you meant "take something that belongs to someone else"? But that still doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article, which was about copying, not taking. Please explain?
Except that the shareholders win. After all, in a highly liquid stock market they can simply sell their stocks as soon as the short-term gains cause the stock price to temporarily rise. This means that for the shareholders, the best kind of exec is exactly the kind who sacrifices long-term viability for short-term gains; the shareholders get the gains and let someone else deal with the mess. Consequently, this kind of behaviour gets rewarded again and again, and repeated by execs of every company until they are all looted empty and the economy collapses, which is happening now.
So no, it doesn't work itself out. In the current market it is the best strategy, and thus one that a rational actor will engage in again and again, and a fine example of a tragedy of the commons. In order to stop it, we'd need to make the market less liquid, but I can't think of any way to do that which wouldn't cause more problems. Yet stop it we must, or keep facing the rather unpleasant results of parasite economy over and over again.
Another possible fix would be to somehow twist the market towards favouring small companies over large ones. People tend to have more emotional relationships to small companies, which are often run by the very people who found them, and this deters rational but destructive behaviour. Again, I can't think of a way to do this without causing unintended side effects.
No, what breaks this system is that only the sucker left with the stock when the company folds pays the bill, rather than everyone who took part in the looting. Bailouts make the problem worse, of course, since they remove the risk completely, but the problem would exist even without them.
The problem is that it is possibly, even easy, to take short-term gains and have someone else suffer the long-term costs. No one believes that they'll be the one holding the stock when the sucked-dry husk of the company finally gives up the ghost, and in all likelihood they're right. It's simply that with all other companies also in bad state, there will be - and was and is currently happening - a cascade effect of failure.
Taking short-term gains over long-term ones in a highly liquid market is not a bad investment, but a pretty good one. That's why everyone is doing it. It's simply one that causes the whole market to collapse when everyone is doing it.
Cheap labour means great profits to the owning class and everyone else working themselves to death. I, for one, don't want to be forced to work 16-hour days just to be able to afford food, no matter how good that might be for economy.
These more valuable jobs require specialized skills which the newly laid-off worker doesn't have and very likely can't afford to get. This then results in cut-throat competition for whatever jobs he can do, which in turn results at the very least in a paycut and quite likely with outright unemployment, leading to a lower quality of life.
But it's certainly an improvement from the investor's point of view.
Well why don't you go to your boss the first thing and suggest your wage gets lowered? Show us all the benefit of being paid less for more work!
Protectionism doesn't harm the economy, quite the contrary: it benefits me and most citizens of a developed country doing it. The only ones who it doesn't benefit are those who don't work for a living; since that means the rich and the powerful, you can rest easily: our economy isn't going to be protected.
Hmm... That's a good point, actually. The question is: how do you meter copying - and, more importantly to me at least, derivative works, since those are what really advances culture by building more on top of what has come before - without letting the original creator control what is done with it? Because if you do give them control, you'll have the biggest problem of current model: you don't have the freedom to use the content as you will - a notion which began the Free Software Movement, BTW.
The true irony here is that if such a way was found, then Rule 34 alone would move more money than the whole Hollywood combined.
Well, yes. Why should I pay the printer again for my copy just because he prints another one?
Now that you mention it, my local supermarket keeps on benefiting from the work of those who build it, yet they only got paid once. Should the builders sue for their fair cut of the profits their hard work made possible?
Or you could simply define that "!ptr" means "ptr is not a valid pointer" rather than "the value of ptr is 0".
From the South Sea Bubble article:
What a sweet, quaint notion. Nowadays we tip the heads of such companies into bathing resorts instead, at the expense of their victims of course. Call me old-fashioned, but I like that proposition.
Here in Finland there are huge ads saying, loosely translated: "Don't save us to recession!" They even have a picture of a piggy bank with vampire teeth on it. It's kinda cute, actually ;).
That's how you know it's really, really, really bad. Much worse than I thought. In fact I think I need to reduce my spending and try to save up some more money.
Decremental product releases. Almost everyone prefer XP to Vista. "Has Windows XP" is a selling point nowadays, judging by computer ads. All of which, of course, only reinforces your point, but is noteworthy nonetheless.
To put it bluntly, it was stupid of you to take loan for college when you knew there are people in India and China able to work for less. Education is an investment, and you invested in a horse you knew would likely lose. Worse, you invested borrowed money - which you can't afford to lose since it's not really yours - in this way.
What you should had done was get a law or management degree. Being a producer doesn't pay off in globalized economy; but for parasites, it's almost always a party. Your best bet now is to try to asskiss yourself popular, and work on a bullshit degree at night school. That, or pull the old disappearance trick; you'll leave your papers behind, but it's not like they'll do you any good anyway.
What trap? In a highly liquid stock market that's the best strategy for an investor. Suck the company dry, dump the stock before anyone realizes it's on the verge of collapse, and repeat the process with some other company. It's a game of musical chairs for the economy and when the music stops, it falls on its ass.
Every time a corporation asks it employees to vote for a pay cut, said employees have the choice of letting the corporation have its way or be fired. This seems to be fine with various right-wing people. However, as soon as people form a union and turn the tables, it's suddenly a bad thing. Some of them even want to have the unions banned, despite otherwise supporting the right to freely associate. Weird.
Seems to me that the union and the big 3 are on equal terms then, because if car business is so capital intensive, then if the big 3 go bankrupt there won't be any replacements to work for for their employees.
Mutually Assured Destruction. Can't get more even than that.
If you're having trouble meeting the demand, why are you laying anyone off? Shouldn't you rather be hiring more people?
Or is this another case of "let's squeeze them harder to earn our bonuses"?
But that's an absurd strategy: it means that PS3 will be behind an otherwise equal, but easy to program for, competing consoles for almost its entire lifespan, and only catch up with them just before becoming obsolete.
Coming up with a justification that makes you seem like a far bigger moron than the original blunder did doesn't really help safe much face.
How does someone like that get to be a CEO? Or is this just another confused and misleading Slashdot summary?
Bullshit. Not only is your post still readable by anyone who wants, but you also aren't subjected to any kind of punishment. The worst that can happen is that Slashdot no longer accepts further posts from your IP adress. So troll away ;).
As evidence I link to a post of mine, which got modded Troll by a coalition of buthurt atheists and theists - in itself quite an accomplishment - but nevertheless I'm here making this post.
Climate hange cannot destroy the planet, the life on it, or even the human race. It can - and very likely will - simply make things extremely uncomfortable (= billions die) for us, as growth zones of various plants change and weather patterns become chaotic for the duration of the change.
However, those who most profit from not cutting fossil fuel consumption will be able to use those profits to shield themselves from the consequences, so resistance is useless.
That's the problem right there: servers. Someone needs to run them, and that costs money. FOSS MMO happens as soon as someone figures out how to run the server P2P - a very hard problem, as it requires dealing with the inevitable variety of versions and cheating - and not a second before.
Bah, this is nothing. Just wait until someone comes up with a way to turn facial characteristics into a string, which can be stored into a database. That would let the system to automatically deduce the likely identity of everyone on each picture by cross-correlation with social networks and such. And even if they can't get your name, they'll still be able to get that you're a close friend or family member of unnamed persons X and Y, who in turn are friends with some other, named persons.
Advancing AI means that total information awareness is coming. It's just a matter of time before you can't take a shit without Google noticing. Skynet was a fuzzy kitten compared to what will happen...
Ironically enough, the same tool could be extremely valuable to economists and planners of all kind, giving detailed statistical information about the habits and movement of humans. It's only the control freak league which makes it a threat. Truly a modern-day Tree of Knowledge...
DRM doesn't stop this from happening, thought. If your work is any good, then DRM will be circumvented - by copying each page by hand if need be - and free copies will float around.
Besides, as a customer, I'd like to point out that your biggest problem is convince me to invest my time, not money. Assuming I'm making minimum wage - Hell, even assuming I'm living on unemployment - and calculating the worth of my time that way reveals that buying a book is far cheaper than actually reading it. And even assuming that I'm an absolute book nut who just doesn't want to do anything but read every waking hour, and have inherited enough that I don't have to work and can afford as many books as I want, even then there's far more books out there than I can ever possibly read. Why would I pick yours?
Given all this it is irrational to worry about illegal copying. If anything, getting your books included into some torrent will increase, not decrease, your sales, because it increases the chances that Joe Pirate will read said book. This in turn will increase the chances that Joe buys a book of yours the next time he sees them somewhere - because, after all, books are cheap and superior in comfort to computer display, not to mention the hassle of searching for it online. Finally, and most importantly, if Joe reads his book, he might mention it to his friends, which in turn helps make your name familiar to them.
If I ever begin a literary career, I'll be pushing my books into P2P networks myself. Mindshare is how you generate an audience and sales, and having people download your stuff is how you generate mindshare. A download is not a lost sale, it is a future sale in the making.
The point of "three strikes" laws is to strike fear to the hearts of people: you could be next. They have the same basic idea than suicide bombing: of course bombers can't cause much actual destruction, but they could strike anywhere, anytime, and get anyone, so they make people scared, even if the statistics show that you have more chances of being struck by lighting.
In other words, "three strikes" laws are a form of terrorism, and putting burden of proof on the accuser would hinder this purpose.
If one assumes that copyright is moral, then yes. If one assumes that copyright is immoral, then no. If one makes no assumptions about the morality of copyright, then it comes down to whether one considers breaking law immoral in itself.
For the vast majority of people, breaking copyright is right there with jaywalking at 3 at morning: technically illegal, but not bloody likely to hurt anyone. And that's just for straight-up copying; but what about derived works? What about sites like fanfiction.net? Are they morally wrong? They certainly are in gross violation of copyright law, being full of derived works.
Actually, since pirate groups usually strip off the DRM malware added by the vendor, pirated software tends to be safer. An off-the-shelf software might disable your CD burner or copy of Daemon Tools, but I've never heard of a rip from a reputable warez group doing anything like that.
Both the Fremen and Aiel would likely find images of waterfalls offensive. All that water wasted on a spectacle. Besides, don't some species of fish travel upstream to lay eggs? Clearly, only a pervert would show such obscene scenes on public television!
Actually, given all that you wrote, wouldn't the demise of AP mean there would be more reporters to dig up facts? Because without AP, a newspaper wouldn't have the option of "simply paying their subscriptions to the AP or Reuters or another news service, then copyediting the AP article", and thus would be forced to keep their own reporters to get news.