Thing is, Square remains profitable. FFXIII, as much as I think it's a pile of doggy doo-doo sold incredibly well and now has a sequel coming out. However Square is losing us gamers who want good gameplay AND good stories (stories about angsty, stereotyped 'teenagers 'spending lengthy bad drama sequences blaming each other for stupid things don't appeal to me, I'm talking about you, FFXIII).

I would say if they don't get it right soon, it's not that they will go broke, but the Final Fantasy line will be delegated to the likes of the Transformers film franchise. Brain-dead high budget movies that make their money on fancy visuals for the kids, while the rest of us who want a bit of a hearty meal rather than another plate of potato chips (made from pressed starch, not real potatoes) look elsewhere.

Actually I take that back, what has happened to Final Fantasy is maybe more akin to what Lucas did to Star Wars. He had something so ludicrously profitable that he could make three genuinely terrible high budget films and still make a killing off of them, while retaining the popularity of the franchise.

I don't even care about nostalgia. I just want solid RPGs that are enjoyable to play. FFX for example wasn't perfect, but it had a fast-paced battle system and went out of its way to keep things varied and hold my interest with everything from the in-battle character swapping, the constant banter of the characters, the grid system that let you plan char development in advance, little touches like a wide variety of battle music.. so it succeeded in holding my attention. (It did the minigame thing far better than VII IMO). At least that game had some substance to it. And it did fairly well overall in terms of reception and response. FFXIII though... shudder.

Hardware indeed. It's not even just the specs, it's the quality control. After 15 years of attempting to record and produce music/sound design on PCs, I've had nothing but problems with piss poor hardware, chipsets (making the simple act of recording audio often fraught with difficulty), horrid firewire implementation, and stability. Things that gamers (of which I am one but not exclusively) would never notice. Since buying a Mac, I've never had a problem. Software side, OSX has lots of useful features built right into the OS, like the ability to send MIDI time sync over wifi. There's lots of reasons most of us who create media content end up switching to Mac in the end. My troubleshooting time has dropped to a fraction of what it was when I created content on PCs.

Actually I take it back. PCs are good. I like PCs because their inferior quality control keepeth me gainfully employed:

I administer about ~80 PCs (laptops and desktops, HPs, Lenovos and Dells) at my day job (and have been for about 7 years now) We also have about ~30 Macs that are used pretty much every day for media creation. I can unequivocally say that in my experience we've usually had to give away our mac hardware or recycle it once it gets to be about 7-8 years old. It refuses to die. I've lost count of the number of PCs that we've had bizarre hardware problems on right out of the box, and I can't remember the last time we had to send a Mac back for servicing. I'm pretty sure we did once, but it's pretty rare.

"Society recognizes important biological functions of women like pregnancy and makes allowances for them, even though they may have a real and detrimental impact on their companies and coworkers. Why shouldn't we tolerate the actions of men that may be detrimental to some coworkers?"

Let's break down this analogy into it's components.

1. Woman getting pregnant, takes sick leave. Replaced by temporary replacement, comes back to company weeks or months later depending on location. Loss to company==rather minimal, perhaps some training for replacement. Long term net gain to company==greater than short term loss. Good relations between company and experienced employee, employee, contributes to a good work environment and relations.

2. "actions of men that may be detrimental" by this I assume you mean repeatedly hitting on women after they have said no or other kinds of harassment. It's simple intent, cause and effect and consequence. The man is directly and willingly causing discomfort to a co-worker when he does not have to. Being pregnant is not harassing fellow co-workers after they have said no. It is not touching them inappropriately. It is not directed at anyone. Someone harassing someone else is not comparable in any way to a woman being pregnant.

"Making a joke, flirting, having "inappropriate" screensavers.. all of that leads to men being terminated when it's actually rather harmless."

Actually no it's not things like that in themselves, I've seen plenty of work environments with such things happening all the time. It's when they go beyond the borders of tolerability and start to more or less bully others who have typically usually already asked that the harassment cease.

"How you connect something like that to lack of free will is beyond me. Similarly, men can obviously stop themselves from flirting, making suggestive eye contact, watching girls walk by, etc. But they still want to. Why shouldn't they be allowed to?"

Once again a good chunk of the above activities can be done in ways that don't actually harass the other person. It's really easy to do if the guy actually cares at all at how his actions affect others. Otherwise he comes off as a social troglodyte.

Men's traits can absolutely provide benefits to society but they still have to be tempered with intelligence and awareness. Aggressiveness in itself is a neutral thing, it can be constructive or destructive, it depends on how it is directed. Also, not all men are aggressive, and a lot of women are naturally quite aggressive. There's rules of thumb for the sexes but they are bell curve averages, not iron-clad rules.

I pointed out two obvious ad hominem statements and denying them doesn't mean they aren't there. Firstly, which branch of feminism are you concocting a straw man of? Sex-positive feminism, the kind that in many ways contributed to the legality of sex work and pornography? Second-wave feminism, the kind that brought to light the false popular belief that women did not have orgasms? Or how about the suffragettes that fought for the right to vote?

If you're running the 100 meter sprint and the person in the lane next to you has to run 150 meters just because she's a woman, you've no reason to feel proud of the chevrons you've earned, and when you decry the other person as entitled because the crowd says 'Boo! Unfair! Give her a 50-meter head start!" you've not a leg to stand on. The only bias that exists right now is a bias that makes women have to work twice as hard as men to get anywhere. Denying it does not make the mountain of empirical evidence that shows it exists, not exist, any less. It's as plain as day to the rest of us that it exists. Even this entire board is full of expressions of that systemic bias: men who think women owe them sex, men who think women still belong in the kitchen, men who think it's perfectly ok to harass women, while women are sexually abused and harassed at rates far higher than men. Women are discouraged from getting anywhere throughout their lives. It is systemic. That is reality. Because you have not had to endure it does not make it cease to exist.

You're also forgetting that it is both men and women who have come to these conclusions, because we have seen the evidence, rather than getting all childish and prissy when evidence offends our sensibilities (like Intelligent Designers). Men still frequently run the higher-up positions that make the kinds of decisions that impact women. Women by far are not in the majority of higher leadership roles.

Until the race is fair your cries come of suspiciously like "let them eat cake."

If you're arguing there's a multiplicity of issues then yes of course there is. It's perfectly possible to hit on someone and not have it be harassment, if both are OK with it. It's absolutely possible to glimpse at someone whose totally hot without staring at them like a creep. A simple 'good morning!' can work wonders. There's a huge difference between that and the extremes of harassment.

What this argument forgets is that there are two human beings involved. If someone is hitting on a female and she has clearly said 'No' and expressed her discomfort, when he continues to hit on her, he reveals this: 1. That he really does not care less that he makes her uncomfortable, therefore why on earth would she want to have anything to do with him? 2. By continuing to make her uncomfortable, he is revealing that it is all about his own personal gratification, hence, he is using her. In other words, he is not empathizing with the woman, just projecting himself.

Also, in saying that men must be free to do the above, you're claiming that men really cannot help themselves in the face of their urges, which is basically claiming that men cannot control themselves, that is, they have no free will. Fact is, the majority of men and women do agree that they both can control themselves. That is why we now have laws regarding harassment, and we have laws that issue restraining orders. At the same time neuroscience has demonstrated that there are a percentage of people who are missing the part of their brains that allow them to understand how their actions affect others or those areas of the brain are severely reduced--we call these personality disorders. All the more reason to have protection from those kind of people.

Lastly, when a woman can't be expected to get anywhere in life except by sleeping with guys, she is indeed being used as a sexual object, because the kind of guys who treat her that way really don't give a rat's feces about her as a human being, they simply expect her to give them pleasure. Once again, claiming that this is what makes a man a man and a woman a woman is a false claim, because that is not actually how all men and women behave. Still though there is enough men out there who treat women this way that it is a very common problem.. they fail to realize that one can appreciate attractive women without using them or making them feel uncomfortable, but they fail to realize this because they don't actually care about what the women feel, they only really care about themselves, and it's as clear as day to everyone else.

That argument about pregnancy is a faulty analogy, because a job exists to provide mutual benefit between employer and employee--employers invest time and training and benefits into their employees in the hope they will stay around and contribute to the company. Harassment only exists because it is a one way street that gratifies the one doing the harassment.

The saddest thing is, knowing as many female victims as I do, and knowing how high the percentages are, your comment tells me you place your own emotional comfort above the real physical discomfort women endure

You have only dodged my argument and facts by employing an obvious logical fallacy, you took offense when called out on your logical fallacy and claim your taking offense 'proves' that men have it rough. Your tactics are identical to that of fundamentalist creationists who take offense and claim the science world us out to get them, when called out on their obvious fallacies and denial of facts. Until you have the ability to refute my facts directly rather than dodge them by playing the victim card, you do not have an argument.

Sums up what? A girl wearing a tshirt is exactly how the same as the iron clad evidence showing the high rates of sexual harassment, and worse, employment inequality, etc?

Nice attempt to change the subject by employing an obvious argument from ridicule btw.

Love how you once again try to make the Piltdown man into something that it is not, when it was publicly discredited so long ago, and was already under suspicion because it didn't even fit into evolutionary models.. of course you can find people who wrote phds on the subject.. big deal.. evolutionary theory does not, and never hinged on the existence of the Piltdown man, a few theses written on it mean nothing other than that scientists were doing their jobs exploring every nook and cranny.. or some scientists like the hoax's creator were more profiteers than scientists.. man these fallacious arguments are so old and tired...

You seem to be confusing people, politics and human nature with scientific methodology to prove a point that is obvious-- there's lots of corrupt opportunistic human beings out there, there are fanatics and fundies, liars with agendas, and crackpots. That's why we have the tool of the scientific method to weed the nonsense from the useful facts. If science disproves and discards, that is because it is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. Even the methodology itself changes with time, such is the job of philosophy and critical analysis.

Interesting, I wonder if it largely depends on the location, after all liberal and conservative can mean quite different things depending on where you are.

Interesting, thanks for posting, every now and then I hear from someone with a similar experience..

No, the AC is saying men cannot control themselves. That's the lack of free will bit. It's not just rape, it can be harassment, really, any idiotic behaviour from some guy who claims he cannot 'help himself'. There's s huge difference between asking someone out on a date and acting like a douchebag.

Secondly what I mean is, I know what it means to have a high drive, and guess what, I don't blame women just because I get turned on, nor do I harass them or annoy them. I make no excuses for men who do either.

There's nothing wrong with asking someone out on a date. There's everything wrong with treating other human beings with disrespect and using them as objects for one's own gratification. Urges are no excuse.

I've a low tolerance for logical fallacies. Science is about falsifiability. It's about finding models that work better than other models. That some might treat it as a religion is human nature, not science. Also, if it moves slowly that is because it is cautious and methodical.

I have a low tolerance for obvious logical fallacies and misrepresentation. For example the ad hominems, the tu quoque in claiming AGW is false because Al Gore lives in a big house, is irrelevant to whether AGW is true or false. I've never watched his movie because scientific journalism does not appeal to me. I read studies. Second fallacy, appeal to false authority. What Al Gore thinks is irrelevant to whether AGW is true or not.

Final fallacy, misreading Climategate, an error that is trivial in the face of the whole and has no impact in the bulk of evidence, something that AGW deniers have blown into a mountain. Anyway this debate is pointless. Straw men of scientific methodology, of theories, and fallacies and conspiracy theories and are boring. I've better things to do.

Yep, that's how it works with humans, sad but true. All things being equal it amazes me everyday that the majority of us aren't out skinning each other alive and beating each other over the head with sticks to solve problems. Maybe humanity slowly learns something? I await, with baited breath.