I worked with a rockstar once. Well, he played in a moderately successful cover band anyway.

The value of an agent to me is the difference between what I can get and what the agent can get, minus the amount the agent skims off the top. The worse I am at negotiating, the larger the difference is... but the greater the amount the agent skims off the top. Most likely outcome: the agent, whose entire compensation is based on separating me from as much cash as possible, manages to take more than that difference and I get screwed while thinking I got a good deal.

Well you see that's kinda begging the question of wether or not video games are art in the first place; I'm a real skeptic on the question, I really don't think most video games rise to that level, and I'm pretty sure that if something isn't art, if its purely a commercial good, it may be regulated. This is basically consistent with US law and custom on the issue -- films in the US, for example, weren't entitled to 1st amendment protections until the 1950s.

Which is to say that this is no longer consistent with US law and custom.

Does Madden NFL 15 really deserve the same benefit of the doubt as Lolita? Does Electronic Arts really have the same moral rights as Ai Wei Wei? I think if a video game is going to be protected by "those who believe in free expression," the people making the video game, at a minimum, should have to cop to the fact that the game is actually trying to express something, but a lot of people on the gamer side of things seem convinced that video games are just "fun" and shouldn't have to "mean" anything.

If they don't express anything, there's nothing to censor. If they DO express something (even something banal) they're protected.

Leisure Suit Larry.

ITYM "Softporn Adventure".

This is a consequence of believing that video games are Art.

Really? Because I haven't noticed any sort of outcry lately against painters and sculptors about how their works are horribly sexist. When there have been such outcries, they've rightly been countered by those who believe in free expression, even if free expression involves naked bodies, degrading imagery, etc.

The idea of some sort of sexism rating for art is laughable. The idea of a "rating" is only because of the commercial aspect, not the artistic one.

A *real* woman wouldn't be mindlessly chasing her prince charming... she'd be building a tyrannical empire on her own power, maybe displaying the severed head of Prince Charming on a pike next to her throne built of skulls, and have a horde of male slaves who would...

Sure, but if Galadriel had taken the One Ring it'd be a whole different movie.

Since any portrayal whatsoever of women, or no portrayal at all, can be deemed "sexist", and that same portrayal or lack of portrayal can be deemed "not sexist", depending entirely on who made the game, it will be a very simple rating -- 100% sexist if made by a man or a woman who is not a third-wave feminist. 0% sexist if made by exclusively by third-wave feminists.

It's not illegal at all. As long as Apple doesn't claim that using the 3rd party SSD voids the warranty on the machine as a whole, they're in the clear. They're under no obligation to warrant the 3rd party SSD works.

Don't forget Ebola. The Ivory Coast grows a huge amount of the world's cocoa. It is right next door to Liberia. Most of the labor to harvest the cocoa crop is migrant labor from Liberia. Ivory Coast has closed its border with Liberia in response to the Ebola. So, the cocoa crop there is not going to be harvested unless the growers figure out another source of cheap labor. Stock up on chocolate now.

I've got a solution: boat lift from Mexico and Central America.
(before you get excited, it'll never happen; for political reasons Puerto Rico can't get enough labor to harvest coffee, and it's right nearby... a boat lift to the Ivory Coast is way too expensive)

To be fair, they removed all the "lets get girls to code and leave boys out in the cold" stuff pretty quickly. Perhaps they thought this might discourage contributions from about 50% of the population.

Nice thing about billionaires is it really only takes one to make a crowd.

I don't know who it is, but I'm morally convinced there's a CSS joke in there somewhere.

A prius is putting over 3000 lbs of force into a few square centimeters of roadway surface.

About 30 pounds per square inch. Doesn't sound so bad that way, does it?

The bottom ~40% are paying net zero or less than zero. Come back for the upper brackets when you've solved the little issue of almost half the population free-riding on the other half.

In the UK, cars are taxed on the amount of CO2 emissions generated.

Why not just tax petrol? Petrol burned is directly proportional to the amount of CO2 actually (not theoretically) emitted. This band system for efficiency is unnecessarily complicated.