<pedantic class="extra-pedantic">Punctuation should be outside of parenthetical remarks unless they form a complete sentence, which this probably doesn't. I cannot parse your second point as a valid sentence. You also missed other spelling errors ("ellipse" vs "ellipsis"), and phrasing errors (I assume that GPP did not actually intend to suggest the person he was replying to had misplaced incomplete sentences, but that is what he wrote). </pedantic>

Indeed.

No. They derive from the second law of thermodynamics, which assumes very little...

Check your local consumer protection legislation. Here in the UK, the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations apply (which is an implementation of an EU directive, so other EU countries should have very similar regulations), and state that the following categories of contract term are unfair and therefore cannot be enforced:

* Terms which have the object or effect of [...] making an agreement binding on the consumer whereas provision of services by the seller or supplier is subject to a condition whose realisation depends on his own will alone
* Terms which have the object or effect of [...] permitting the seller or supplier to retain sums paid by the consumer where the latter decides not to conclude or perform the contract, without providing for the consumer to receive compensation of an equivalent amount from the seller or supplier where the latter is the party cancelling the contract
* Terms which have the object or effect of [...] enabling the seller or supplier to alter the terms of the contract unilaterally without a valid reason which is specified in the contract;

AFAICT, any one of these would prevent Valve from behaving as you fear.

My suspicion is that Valve are legally obliged to make it work, although I don't believe any court has made such a decision yet.

Not entirely. Like the US, the EU has two parallel legal systems (equivalent to federal and local laws). ECJ has the responsibility for final determination on the meaning of the equivalents to federal laws, but has no say over interpretation of local laws. The way it typically works (and I believe did in this case, although I haven't read the documents so am not certain) is that a local court realises that their case depends on interpretation of a 'federal' law, and refers a question of how to interpret that law to the ECJ, who send them back a response saying how it applies in their specific case. There is also a right of appeal directly to the ECJ if you feel a local court has misapplied the law.

... and, as a previous court opinion held:

It makes no difference, in a situation such as that at issue in [Oracle vs UsedSoft], whether the copy of the computer program was made available to the customer by the rightholder concerned by means of a download from the rightholder’s website or by means of a material medium such as a CD-ROM or DVD. Even if, in the latter case too, the rightholder formally separates the customer’s right to use the copy of the program supplied from the operation of transferring the copy of the program to the customer on a material medium, the operation of downloading from that medium a copy of the computer program and that of concluding a licence agreement remain inseparable from the point of view of the acquirer.

i.e., the distinction between licensing and selling a copy is a distinction without a difference.

Taken from DIRECTIVE 2009/24/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 23 April 2009 on the legal protection of computer programs. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:111:0016:0022:EN:PDF

2. The first sale in the Community of a copy of a program by the rightholder or with his consent shall exhaust the distribution right within the Community of that copy, with the exception of the right to control further rental of the program or a copy thereof

I don't think it would, no. The problem is that EU law's equivalent of the US first sale doctrine applies here, meaning purchasers of Steam games have a legal right to transfer them to others. The law makes no mention of applying charges for the transfer, so it would appear as though Valve has a legal obligation to honour such transfers with no charge.

[citation needed]

A license is a piece of virtual property that may be bought and sold. Why would doctrine of first sale (or, rather, the principle of exhaustion, which is the name used for the equivalent concept in european law) not apply to them?

See, specifically, the analysis here.

Read the post you're replying to. "if you use Steam with DRM [...]". FTL is marketed as a DRM-free game, so is clearly not using Steam with DRM, so the rest of the post doesn't apply to it.

Not really, no. For an argument to be a No True Scotsman fallacy, you have to shift your definitions in order to exclude the item(s) under argument. In this case, however, communism was quite adequately defined a long time before the USSR/PRC came into being, and it is quite clear that neither of them match the original definition.

They may have said that, but unless it's actually part of their terms and conditions they may find themselves unable to actually do it. When a company reaches the point where its officers realise that it is likely to enter bankruptcy, it becomes illegal to dispose of company assets in a way that does not provide an adequate return for either investors or creditors. If Valve faced bankruptcy, they would legally be required to keep Steam in a position where it could be sold off to a competitor until after they were no longer in control of it.

No, it isn't. MS's layout has curved tables along the sides of the store, and lacks both the table and video screens on the rear wall. Also, their lighting appears to protrude from the ceiling while Apple's is integrated into the ceiling. There's also an additional middle row of tables that would possibly prevent it from being infringing even by itself.

Not just that -- that calculation explicitly states this: "The purpose of this exploration is to point out the absurdity that results from the assumption that we can continue growing our use of energy." She then goes on to use it as a basis of saying that because our energy use is going to carry on growing, we can't use solar power... she basically missed the entire point of the article. Yes, solar power can't continue providing for growing energy use at the current rate for more than a couple of hundred years. But neither can any other technology -- within 400 years, those same calculations and the assumption of using a 100%-thermodynamically efficient process to produce power from some stored energy reserve put the temperature of the Earth's surface at a level that would wipe humanity out (i.e., average surface temperature exceeds 60C).

If you don't care, why release it on a public web site? Just storing it on your local system is easier.