He argues that somehow piracy caused innovation in the music industry, and thus the piracy of hollywood will somehow usher in a new era of innovation in streaming video. In some respects its true that Napster brought about innovation in digital music... BUT IT HASN"T STOPPED PIRACY!

There is a ton of more streaming options today, which is great for lawful netizens, we do have a lot of great options. But that doesn't excuse pirates from ethical obligations.

You don't have a right to someone's property just because you think you should.

Maybe I should just take refuge in your fancy-house just because I think it would be morally just because you have a nicer house than I do.

Thats essentailly the argument pirates make, and it doesn't hold water.

Yet, up to last year, HBO was saying it was good for business because it made even more people talk about it.

I wish they made up their mind if it's good or bad for business once and for all.

To further your analogy, it costs me approximately $0 to make an exact copy of fancy-house, it travels over the internet to you, and what you do with your copy doesn't affect me in the slightest.

I am very willing to give you a copy of my fancy-house under such a scheme, and you are completely welcome to do with it whatever you want.

Either don't pirate, or pay for your media. People shouldn't steal.

Maybe they should be patient and wait until the films come into the public domain if they're too cheap to pay.

The unethical people in these equations are the ones who try to bend the world to their whims of "intellectual" order. They see no problem with violence on human beings over literal duplication of information. Economically speaking, a lesser degree of unethical behavior surrounds only people who duplicate data who would have paid for said content. A minority of content spreads worldwide on that basis. Hundreds of millions of teenagers and adults getting online can barely afford an internet connection if even a personal computer. Meanwhile, the amount of content and producers exponentially increases. They are not "completely unethical" for taking part in fleeting, frivolous entertainment -- the vast amount of it they wouldn't deem worthy to purchase in place of other choices. Everyone's situation is different. Rarely in the human condition is something "completely unethical", especially in the context of data and non-violent actions. Streaming services like Spotify are a good start. They respect the nature of information more. They try to appeal to hearts and minds. That's healthy.

Then there are industries where net positives exist along with piracy. Growing the size of a user/fan base becomes an added dependency of future success. Industry sets adoption. Adoption sets industry. Piracy by individuals is tolerated or even internally respected, while only the piracy of moderate and large businesses is targeted. The world, for instance, was awash with Windows cracks and serials in the 90s and early 2000s, having a tremendous impact globally on people who couldn't afford it or who wouldn't buy it. In the absence of such piracy, such as by a hypothetical corporate-fascist state putting people to death or by magical DRM, Linux would be in millions of more households by now.

Personal desire for privacy is wholly separate from whether or not your duplicating a house harms me. It's baffling logic to suggest otherwise. But I'll play along. In this hypothetical, you value some data and I don't want you to have it. Therefore, our interests clash. Acknowledging reality on my end would mean attempting to safeguard the data from you. That means taking realistic measures to do the opposite of making it free or widely available for a price.

There's an intellectual world. There's a physical world. Ethics is not particular laws subjecting people at arbitrary points in time. Ethics is discussion of real-world damage and recourse. It's philosophy that must be perpetually debated before it swirls down a corporate drain along with any other semblance of "justice" flushed with it to churn out prisoners and chilling effects. Caring about reality starts with recognizing reality. Duplicating binary information is easy. Information can spread across the world in seconds. Some obstacles are effective at earning support and capital from information. Other obstacles are not effective. Security is generally weak. Some people are naturally curious and hungry. Some people suck. Most people are generally good. That's reality. People who have disposable incomes often want to encourage the producers they value -- with money, without friction. That's why crowdfunding exists.

Or to riff off of the classic New Yorker cartoon: On the Internet, nobody knows that you may be the next great inventor.

Caveat: Thanks to Google's ubiquity, it's not wrong to use a pseudonym if you're really worried about your basic questions coming back to haunt you :)

Not that I like it, especially these days. These kind of things should be fixed properly.

There are some things I feel Cortana does that Siri and Google Now does.

Every morning Cortana gives me the weather, appointments on my calendar, news stories and how long my commute will take given the current traffic conditions. It also learns when I normally leave for work, so about 10 minutes before I usually leave, I get an update on how long it will take to get home given the current conditions.

To me, Cortana is more like an assistant. You can set stuff so its off limits and she will ignore, and likewise, tell her to remember certain reminders like you pointed out.

Do either Google Now or Siri have these features that actively learn stuff about your preferences?

Things like these are a much more useful part of it than voice detection, I very rarely interact with it via voice, and tend to just do searches through my normal browser. It also hooks into Gmail and can give you reminders about things like flights you've booked, although that raises questions about privacy, and whether you really want Google to be trawling through your emails.

Eh, it also does it at really inappropriate times.

About 30 minutes after I get into the office it starts telling me how long it'd take me to get home, and that card stays up in Google Now until I actually do go home!

I haven't used Cortana, and have only had disappointing experiences with Siri (after coming from Google Voice Search); how does the performance on Google Voice Search Compare? I wonder if the performance rankings are just a complete reversal of the quality rankings; If so, I wonder who's closest to the sweet spot?

Have you tried it on iOS 8 since it came out? They finally added streaming voice recognition, which speeds it up a lot in my experience. Previously, it waited until you were done speaking to initiate the upload, which added a pretty big delay to any response.