I only jumped into Civ 5 after Gods & Kings shipped, by which stage most of the kinks had been hammered out. Beyond Earth is supposedly using the Civ 5 engine, which is in much better shape these days, so hopefully it'll ship with fewer bugs than Civ 5.

I'm afraid that Disney's Legal Department nix'd the Mos Eisley cantina. They were concerned about liability for grievous bodily harm.

Well... yes, it's almost certainly untrue, but I'm pretty sure that Mr. Miller did not expect anyone to take the statement at face value, mainly because it's patently impossible. You're familiar with hyperbole, correct? The next two sentences explain what the team actually read, so it's not like there can be any…

The first sentence is clearly hyperbole - as you indicate, in this day and age it's possible to find more than a lifetime's worth of sci-fi reading and watching in a matter of hours. The following two sentences clarify how the team actually went about choosing what works to consume.

Your ellipsis elides a key detail. The full quote reads:
Before the actual production on Beyond Earth started, the design team devoured every scifi novel and movie that we could find. People have done a great job of creating these lists of canonical scifi. Collectively, the team had read all of them. . .

Health insurance is a good example. Because of group discount rates, tax treatment, etc, an employer can often provide a better health insurance policy, cheaper, than if they simply gave the employee more money and the employee tried to buy one on the open market using after-tax pay.

Indeed it was - four year olds are essentially immune to criminal prosecution!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_o…

I once saw a Kotaku poster making the following arguments on the same day in two different threads:
1. Women who cosplay in highly sexualized costumes are "asking" to be sexually harassed, and
2. Women should stop complaining about excessively sexualized attire in video games and comics.

Sauron persuaded Celembrimbor to make nineteen Rings of Power, and had a hand in sixteen of the nineteen. Sauron then forged The One Ring in secret, designed to control all the other rings. When the Elves figured this out, Sauron attacked them, and tortured Celembrimbor to death to discover the location of the various…

The American Museum of Natural History has an exhibit on Pterosaurs running right now, and they went with the position that Quetzalcoatlus (one of the biggest Azhdarchids) did indeed fly. It's a great exhibit, if you're in the NYC area.

...or, men could work on getting their decoding ability up to par, and reap the benefits of being able to more accurately gauge women's sexual interest. I'm not sure why you're so keen to put the entire burden on women here.

Your sense is incorrect. I have never had a problem with a man or woman believing that I was sexually interested when I was not. But that's far from surprising, as there's plenty of empirical evidence that women are, on average, both more accurate at decoding men's sexual interest than men are at decoding women's…

And I'm sure that the women in your life think you're very brave, too, the way you pick fights with "girly feminists" about what women should or should not do when caught off guard by a date's noxious behavior.

Bullshit. She told him it was inappropriate, said she wasn't into it, and used a joke to change the subject. There is nothing "mixed" about that - that's a clear signal of discomfit to anyone who's actually interested in reading the signals of another. (Of course, sexually aggressive men are notoriously poor at…

Got it - it sounds like we're pretty much in agreement. A lot of these men get away with crossing lines over and over. In a better world, they'd be called out for it more frequently, but unfortunately not all women are well equipped to do so.

I agree that it would have been better for Dodai to have firmly and unequivocally called out her date for the unrequested image, rather than trying to jokingly shrug it off.

Are you seriously suggesting that, if you fail to object to clearly inappropriate behavior immediately, then you have forever waived the right to object to that behavior? What would be the purpose of such a rule?

I've lived in two non-tipping countries, and traveled in a few more, and I've never noticed any worse restaurant service in non-tipping countries compared to the US. More order-at-the-counter style cafes, certainly, but not any worse service in the places that employs serving staff. But then, that's just my anecdotal…

Doesn't the chocolate melt when you put the boiling water in?

It's not just better enforcement - I have to give a shout-out to Know Your IX (http://knowyourix.org/) and sister organizations for raising awareness of Title IX in the first place.