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.

It's where the money is for the organizers, and only those in Korea.

Players on the other hand, are reaping much more benefits from SC2.

Video games and other software also have these price discrepancies as well in Australia, and I'm sure that's not the only market where this is going on. Why is Apple's case special?

Hell, the concept of pricing things differently across regions isn't some strange or novel concept that's hasn't been tried before. Yeah it's stupid, but ultimately companies will charge what the market will bear.

I'm sure droid os phones are available in Australia. If Apple's pricing pisses you off that much buy one of those instead.

No, you won't. Surprisingly, they have decided not to charge people for it.

" WE will never allow PvE to PvP transfer,"

Once BC hit, the notion that PvP leveling was "harder" was a bit overblown. The way the soloing experience is now, the difference is almost non-existent. Blizzard at the end of the day decided that the convenience of making it easier for friends to get their characters on the same server than maintain this fiction that leveling on a PvP server is harder than PvE.

As for Blizzard themselves selling items in the AH, I doubt it'll ever happen. Blizzard wants player participation in the AH. That's where there real money maker is going to come in for them: making sure there's a good volume of transactions.

Let's say for example, blizzard decides to release a sword for all players to buy. That sword will probably have an infinite supply, since Blizzard is the one selling it. Sure, blizzard will make quite a bit of money, but at the same time they will lose money from all the players that will no longer place their swords on the AH. After all why bother placing your sword on the AH when players are just going to buy the Blizzard one instead. Ultimately, more player fueled transactions will mean more money for them in the long run.

There's also some potential legal quandaries to take into account as well. Since Blizzard items would be of infinite supply, they would have an inherent advantage over player found items. Also given that Blizzard has immense control over how often items drop in the game world, this screams of foul play potential. This would be a market that is run by blizzard involving real money that would be potentially rigged in a way that blizzard items would have a huge advantage over player items. I'm not sure of what specific laws that would run afoul of, but I can't imagine that not causing some sort of legal problems.

As another example, let's say I find a super rare sword that regularly auctions for $2000. Then the next day as I'm about to put it up on the AH, Blizzard put up a sword with better stats that anyone in the game can buy for $25. I (and others who are in possession of swords that used to sell for more) could in theory sue Blizzard over that. We probably wouldn't win but the potential legal headaches probably wouldn't be worth it to Blizzard every time they released an item into their AH.

So don't worry yourself about blizzard selling items themselves. It probably won't happen.

These are digital texts books. They have near zero cost of reproduction. Is 80% less really that good a deal when you take that in to account?

Compared to spending hundreds of dollars every semester for bulky physical books that will only be useful to you for maybe 4-5 months tops? Yes, oh my god yes it's still a really great deal.

As someone else already stated, this is just another model of artificial scarcity generated for commercial gain.

Students could potentially save a few thousands on their book expenses over their 4 years of college thanks to this. But that's fucking horrible ... because there's profit involved?

I don't really see the logic in renting any digital product unless it happens to be an actual service.

If it's significantly cheaper than buying the actual product outright and it's something I know I only need temporarily, I think it's pretty logical. I don't know about you but I would have loved to have the option of renting digital books when I was in college.

I am not trying to troll but if one really wanted to stir the pot with this ruling just mention that it would allow data mining of individuals who have taken the morning after pill or other similar ones (I don't know if they exist)

This is a bit of straw-manning of what the actual case was about. From another article on the subject.

Pharmacies are required by state and federal law to get that information when they fill prescriptions. They sell the information, without patient names, to data mining companies that, in turn, provide drug makers with a detailed look at what drugs doctors choose for their patients..

The data-miners aren't going to know who is taking what, only what pills doctors are prescribing. This makes the "privacy" argument on the other side lose a bit of luster. I could admit that people could use this data to help find out who is actually taking what, but there are probably other ways of legally preventing marketers from connecting the dots. Furthermore, the law did not restrict the doctor prescription data from being released at all, only that certain types of people couldn't use it for certain types of purposes. The majority found this law to be very selectively targeting specific uses of information to pass constitutional muster, and I think I agree with that.

It is a time honored practice of the police to pile on excessive and nonsensical charges at anyone they arrest.

Notice whenever you hear someone arrested in the news, it's for based on one real infraction but somehow that always multiplies into 6 or 7 different charges.

What was all that a while back about PC gaming being dead?

What I don't get is why game makers still insist on doing their hardest to prevent the used game market from existing.

They aren't preventing the used game market from existing. They are simply trying to to get a cut of the profits from used game sales.

That's true, but keep in mind it was easier to do that for Mass Effect because aside from the customization of your character, you could only be human.

They'd probably have to hire 6 voice actors for Dragon Age to cover the 3 races and gender combinations. It'd just feel weird if they were all done by one male and one female character.