as it's the only drug that causes more harm to others than to the user.

Um. No.

Alcohol, by itself, will do no more damage to others than any other drug. Even if you drink every day for the rest of your life, if you choose not to drive or otherwise reckless acts, you will more than likely never hurt a single other human being (The liver damage incurred will kill you, but that's another story...)

If your kid sucks in school it is because you are a shitty parent

That can be right .... to a point.

Some schools are genuinely terrible as places of learning, and that will affect a child's ability. And a parent in that situation doesn't have a choice in the matter of what school your kid goes to, unless you have the cash to go to a private school or are lucky enough to get into a charter school.

DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO!

I don't care. What I care about is that I have all these games that won't run. Sony chose incompatibility; they chose poorly: I choose to abandon Sony.

Sensible enough. That's what markets are all about. More power to you.

I highly doubt it, but again, it has become irrelevant to me: Sony intentionally did me a large financial injury, and I decline to do further business with them.

This is where you fly off the deep end. Sony intentionally injured you financially? what?

You realize that Sony is under no legal or moral obligation to keep selling the PSP or supporting the UMD format forever just so you could always rely on a replacement PSP if yours broke down, right? Especially when either wasn't all that successful from a sales perspective.

It's a shame the taxpayers of California will have to foot the bill on this, and not the reckless politicians who put this silly law in the first place.

Some pretty interesting and pretty detailed analysis of the memo here.

I'm inclined to say the memo is probably fake given all the weirdness surrounding it, and given who the "leaker" is.

The "licensing" of a song bought on iTunes and licensing a song for use in a commercial or video game are 2 very different processes, so it would depend on how licensing is defined in their contract. In practical terms, the label could argue pretty easily that they are different.

But, if "license" is defined vaguely or broadly enough in the contract itself this could be very bad for the labels, given they usually hand out generic contracts to almost all their artists, this could very easily snowball.

What is the point of marketing then, if not to make your game more appealing to the masses?

that's the real problem with copyright. make it extremely strict (so that things like gameplay are included where they are not currently)

Are you fucking serious? Do you really want Wizards of the Coast suing every RPG that uses random chance to determine the outcomes of events, even if it is *only* for a decade?

If anything, cases like this call for MORE, STRONGER intellectual property laws.

No. Fuck no. Big companies abuse IP laws enough as it is. Why in the name of Zeus's butthole do you want more and stronger laws.

The big guys shouldn't be able to just copy the little guys and then suck up the users.

You have no god given right to have users play your game. If someone makes a more appealing game and they take your users away, well, tough shit.

Also, if we did have your way, what constitutes "copying"? In this case it's pretty obvious that Zynga game is essentially a knock-off, but how "different" do 2 games have to be to satisfy you in a legal sense for you to consider it not copying?

So the proposed solution to combating the government's attempts to censor the internet is ... pass an constitutional amendment which gives the government more control over the internet.

Um, ok.

Auto Insurance is mandated by state governments, not the federal government, and is irrelevant to the health care issue.

It is further made irrelevant by the fact that, as stated millions of times when this fallacious analogy is brought up, there's a difference in being mandated to purchase insurance in conjunction with another product (you don't buy a car, you do not need car insurance), vs. being mandated to purchase something for simply being alive.

And how do you determine that you don't like a game? Pirate it before buying?

Read reviews? Ask your friends who may have purchased said game? Is it too much to ask to do some fucking research? Do you just go to a store and buy a video card without looking at the specs, or if your power supply can handle it? If you're in the mentality that I have to buy a game on DAY 1 or the world will end ... well sorry to say but you're going to get burned from time to time.

A lot of games are starting to have open betas. Even if you never get a beta invite, usually someone prominent on youtube does and ends up posting videos (something I think played a very strong role in Starcraft 2's success). Sometimes a game will even have a free demo you can download.

It's certainly not the same experience as try-before-you-buy pirating, but you can certainly make an informed decision without resorting to that nowadays.

That sounds perfectly reasonable. If everyone else has to pay to access certain content, why shouldn't it work that way? Why should the one person who doesn't buy the content be specially exempted because his friends paid for the content?

but it can land you a job as assistant to the Narn ambassador

I'm pretty sure you meant assistant to the Centauri ambassador.