Exactly! Well said BlueFish.

I have a major issue with these kind of bullshit 'piracy loss' figures, for all the reasons you have just listed.

I have a PlayStation 3, and unlike the majority of gamers in China, I buy the real games, because number one I want to support the developers, and number two I want to be able to play online.

But BluRays are different. I don't have the option of being able to buy real BR's anywhere in Beijing. What's most scandalous is that companies like Sony sell their BluRay players officially in this country, even though they know it's next to impossible to find real discs for them. If you ask a member of staff in a Sony store where you can get discs for the players they sell, they will just look at you blankly and shake their heads.

So yeah, give me a choose, and I won't buy pirated things. But without other options, piracy will happen. And as is, these companies have no right nor grounds to complain about piracy. Get off your asses and complain to the WTO about China not allowing easier sales of your goods Hollywood, not about customers who would buy your stuff if they had a chance!

Not to bring down the collective sarcasm of holier-than-thou's, but where's the proof? For one thing, these stats seem to assume that if people in China couldn't buy pirated goods, they would go buy real ones. That's not at all true. The majority couldn't possibly afford the real ones. Then, the stats themselves are questionable. Let's just take this one:

"$250 million: how much the six major Hollywood lose in sales per year."

Maybe I don't know anything about it, but isn't the cost of piracy that people pay pirates for fake goods instead of paying the original company for real ones? So explain to me how Hollywood is losing money on movies in China. They don't sell their movies and DVD's in China–both because the government only allows a handful to be shown, and because the few legitimate outlets that sell a bare minimum of legit Hollywood movies charge way more than the average Beijinger is able to afford for a movie. If one goes online in Beijing–to legitimate sites–to try and purchase or rent a movie, those sites tell you that your "region" is not supported. That's not China's government blocking things: that's the movie industry's choice not to allow their movies to be sold and rented to the Chinese.

So if Hollywood doesn't sell their movies here, how are they losing money by Chinese pirates making those movies available? It's not a choice between pirated stuff and real stuff. There's no choice at all.

I'm not saying that there aren't other issues with piracy! There are the physical dangers inherent to everyone involved in that sordid underground business. There are international trade issues and problems with China not keeping it's end of bargains with the international community. There's the issue of Chinese pirates selling their stuff in places where the real thing actually is available. But I'm always confused about how this sob story about the poor Hollywood film makers losing all this money is supposed to be such a strong reason for people in Beijing not to buy pirated DVD's. Explain to the foreign community where they can buy legal copies of Hollywood movies (post 1960's, please) and I'm confident they would mostly respond. But no one is ever going to succeed by insisting that everyone just give up movies and TV entirely, because pirated ones are the only ones available.

(Before you all descend; I use a vpn to connect to trick iTunes and Amazon into thinking I'm in the States, and hence legally rent or buy movies. But not everyone can afford to do that, and not everyone can be expected to be willing to wait 2 days to watch a movie while it downloads at 5kb a second.)

No.

i want try ,,,i love greentea ,,all food with greentea taste i will crazy on it

They are not a real McDs they are a Chinese rip off.

@matt10, were you there on a weekday? That might explain the easy-seating. colour me jealous, btw!

RE: bread allure - I think the trick is to ration the ice-cream, i.e. flipping over the top cube and burying the ice-cream in the middle. We ended up with three cubes without ice-cream, and that was alright. What else did you get?

I wouldn't wait 2 hours to eat at Green Tea but I was in that mall around 2:00pm (missed lunch) and I got seated without a wait. Some of the dishes missed but the majority were pretty damn good. Nice value, which might explain the lines.

That bread allure could really use more than one scoop of ice-cream. It's surprisingly good but after the first few layers you are basically eating buttered toast cubes.

The poutine was great last time but the Wings are on a rapid decline. A unappealing sticky sweet sauce has replaced the awesome spicy buffalo flavor. Its a shame - no more awesome wings in Beijing.