I think you're being overly pessimistic.

"anybody with a broadband connection can get his music for free while contributing nothing to him".

And yet, not everyone did. He made a large sum of money. Radiohead outright let people pay nothing if they chose with In Rainbows, and yet they made more money on that album that they did with their previous traditional CD Hail to the Thief. I'm perfectly technically capable of getting anything album for free if I wanted to, and yet I don't. I've bought three albums just this week. So perhaps consumers of music have more complex motivations than just trying to get what they want for free.

Now I paid far less for these albums than I would have in the past because I bought them through digital download services (iTunes, Amazon). The cost of music is being driven downward, is this is going to cause artists to make less money. But that's good for fans of music. This plus the "long tail" means we're going to have less multi-millionaire megastars and more $60k/year Jonathan Coultons. I'm fine with that, and I'm betting most musicians would be too. Some people no doubt will just get their music for free. But enough people won't that musicians will still be able to make a decent living, even if the days of "rock star excess" may be numbered.

As to the decline of the PC gaming industry, that's caused less by piracy and more by having an inferior product than the consoles. Your average gamer wants to buy a console and have it run everything they want to play for years, rather than having to buy a new video card several times over that same period and play constant driver compatibility games. And even among the die-hards who will always prefer PC games, new distribution methods like Steam are making the piracy question moot.

Well *of course* their purpose is to get "giggles from the converted". I can safely say there are no atheists who expect the FSM to get a Christian to renounce God. There are, IMO, two things people like Dawkins believe they are accomplishing:

1) They're creating a sense of solidarity for atheists. "There are people out there like you, so you can come out of the closet." It's not right to call it the atheist "Benedict Option" since they aren't trying to disengage with the world, but they are trying to create a safe communal space in which to operate.

2) They're trying to showcase the aspects of religion that atheists believe to be absurd, not to convert the true believer, but to persuade the average pseudo-religious western citizen. The people who say they "believe in God" because they were taught to, but haven't actually given the matter any serious thought.