Johnny

@Yant: Not to put words in his mouth, but I think Mister Jack has been pretty clear in that he thinks he should not decide who lives or dies, and it's up to the mother what she does with her pregnancy. (Jack, if I got this wrong, I apologize.) You're asking questions that are irrelevant to such a position because the question assumes that the person you're asking is of the opinion that he should decide who can have a child and who can't.

I have not said a word about souls. Are you deliberately trying to put words in my mouth, or are you just illiterate? Please point out where in my argument I am making a leap of faith, if you can. I am not arguing that a fetus is not alive. I am arguing that it is very much alive, but so was the sperm. And so is cancer cells, like Dean earlier pointed out. It is not a question of morals or ethics whether something is alive or not. That can be objectively determined. Whether you value that life, however, is a question of moral and ethics. I am however arguing that the fetus is not what we'd call conscious. Which, as far as I know, is correct according to the current knowledge of science. No, aborting the resulting fetus will not make the horrible act of rape go away. Keeping it, however, is putting an incredibly unfair responsibility upon the victim's shoulders, and that child could forever be a reminder of the time she was raped. While abortion does not magically make it better, keeping the child could make it much worse.

Just because you're trying to argue it doesn't make it strictly speaking open for debate. I could try arguing that the earth is flat, and if I did I'd hopefully be called on my bullshit like I'm calling you on yours. As I said, the difference is that you're meddling based on nothing but religious or semi-religious bullcrap. You are allowed to keep your beliefs, but they do not trump science in real world issues. You can't push your personal beliefs onto other people's lives like they were facts. This is completely bonkers. Are you expecting people to not have sex at all? That's not going to happen. Ever. Humans do not work like that. Furthermore, a broken condom is about as much of a choice as getting raped is...

@Yant: You can't be serious. Heard of a broken condom? That happened to the sister of a friend of mine recently. Abortions tend to happen in accidental pregnancies, not planned ones. My comment is based on that all the "moral" reasoning I've seen against abortion is scientifically crap. Life starts way before conception and consciousness as we know it starts after you're allowed to abort. You may be able to make an argument for when life becomes human life, but saying that it is debatable when a fetus becomes alive is completely ridiculous. I do not like the idea of abortion either. It feels instinctively as a thing we should avoid, to me. However, trying to force someone who isn't ready to take on this truly lifechanging responsibility using arguments that are scientifically wrong is, to me, indefensible. You're meddling in other people's lives, possibly destroying all plans for the future someone has. That's a life too, the life of the parent. A life that already has achieved consciousness as we know it. I'd go as far as calling such meddling evil. Not to mention that we're as a species already dealing with the problem of there being too many of us. So unless you have a reason for not wanting to let other people abort, which is more grounded in reality than religion, what I said before still applies.

Honestly, this may sound like an oversimplification and also pretty harsh, but I think it's the only way to go about it: Don't like abortions? Don't get one, and stop trying to make the same choice for everyone else.

I would say no. Abortion is a very serious decision and I don't think anyone would make it lightly. Calling it toying with people's lives is demeaning the incredibly difficult position that women with unexpected pregnancies are put in.

Story was the wrong choice of words. As you can see, I edited my post, although not quickly enough apparently. It's about making the buyer feel like he's getting a full product. This can be very hard to quantify, I know, but cutting out such a major piece as catwoman's portions guarantees that it won't feel like a full product at all. Additionally, I feel it's silly to excuse one instance of deus ex machina (bad storytelling) by pointing out the same brand name has made worse offenses in the past.

Personally I don't care when the content is developed or whether it's even on the disc or not (though others will disagree). What I do care about is whether the game feels like a complete product without the DLC content. I don't like DLC that you need to play to feel like you've gotten a complete experience. By those criteria, the catwoman lock-out is bad. I also remember some game (don't remember which one) having the final chapter as DLC, which is just mind-boggling to me. Edit: in response to Thursday: I do not think by any means the Catwoman sections were unimportant to the core games. Granted, I did not complete Arkham City since Games For Windows Live fucked out and removed my saves, but as far as I played it was a really major part of the game and one of the most impressive additions going from Asylum to City. The Mass Effect 2 complaints I thought were pretty silly. My personal theory is that the planned DLC content's rooms were in the game because it'd be fairly silly to have the rooms appear out of nowhere when you bought the DLC. Furthermore, there are many ways to reward customers without locking pirates out of content via online pass style deals. Steam is great at this with how easy and painless it makes buying games. Also, take a look at The Witcher 2.

It's not like saying shoplifting is a competitor to Walmart. The effort and stakes for a pirate is nothing like that of a shoplifter, nor is shoplifting as common or largely accepted as piracy is.

Re: Yantelope's stuff about inconveniencing pirates: I can only speak for myself, but as both a pirate and a customer the amount of times DRM has gotten me to buy a game is zero. The times it's been a pain for me as a customer are numerous. In fact, when I pirate to try out a game, if your DRM actually manages to make the pirated version unplayable, that will only annoy me and make me less likely to check out and possibly buy your game. I must say it's completely spot-on that what companies need to do is make paying a superior experience to pirating. That's not only related to DRM either. For an example, the pirated version of Mass Effect 2 is in my opinion superior to the legit version because the system that was used to handle the DLC was terrible. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to access the DLC that came with the steam version, by which point I had lost interest in playing the game.

Does steam mobile even support skinning?

Personally my top gripes is that it doesn't recognize my physical qwerty keyboard's return key as "send" and that it doesn't make links out of url's. Oh and that steam guard thing too. That's retarded. Beta software and all that, I just hope they fix the issues soon enough.

They actually sell pre-owned PC games here, as long as it's not multiplayer-only or something like that.

New console games cost around 75-80 euros in Sweden and drop in price very slowly. I can't afford new console games outside of rare exceptions. If used console games were to disappear, I'd either stop buying consoles or just start pirating them.

Something like that, yeah. As I said, I'm not entirely sure that it's a good idea, and I have no idea how long that time period should be.

I'm not sure how your two questions are related, to be honest. I think hoarding licenses you never plan to ever use again is bad, no matter who's doing it. Although I'm not entirely sure about this, I do think it would be better if unused licenses would become usable by everyone. I think the correct term is public domain, although I'm not sure about that either. As for your second question, "Should we be able to sue for the rights to Star Wars because George Lucas has promised he will never make another one?" I'm not sure where this question is coming from. Nobody has said anything about suing anyone. As already mentioned, I do think that IPs that go unused should be usable by anyone who wants to do their own interpretation of it. I'm sure many will disagree with this however.

The problem with that is that most game devs don't have the resources to develop and distribute their game without publisher support. Besides, I don't know why you're acting like it's Swingin' Apes studios that are complaining about it at this moment. The discussion is not whether they willingly signed the contract or not. The discussion is whether it's right that big game publishers can hoard licenses they never intend to use, all in the name of protecting creativity.

I'm confident that they are aware they are full of shit. That's classic pirate bay.

In regards to the jimquisition video, he has a point about IP law being a bit shit as it looks currently, and I like him apologizing for his previous PIRATES ARR THIEVERIES rant. Then he jumped into full Sterling style and concluded that publishers are all evil.

Because those are the kind of underhanded tactics that leads to a meaningful discussion, amirite?

I would buy the argument that it's a honest mistake, if it was just this thing, and similar things happened in the other MMOs I've followed and/or played. As it is, EA/BioWare is being really really quick with the ban hammer and in general the way the community is being managed has been the cause for many a facepalm. EDIT: That's not to say other MMO devs don't make mistakes. Once in a while you see someone bringing up a shitstorm over a ridiculous ban on the wow forums, for example. But it's far rarer than with SWTOR, and that's a game with many more players.

This sounds like the best/worst idea.

Well, I'm not surprised. Big new MMORPG, critically acclaimed, selling like crazy, spotlight is on EA Bioware... and shit like this happens.

... Thursday, I hope you realize that "I'm 12 and what is this" is a meme, not a statement about the poster's actual age. To give a comparison, I've seen that same meme posted countless times on the WoW forums, and Blizzard doesn't ban the posters for it.