Not to mention the impossibility of the average kid (or adult for that matter) parsing the phrase "phantom menace."

It's not the handling it's the whole package. The 900/93 is an awesome everything car with huge cargo area, decent mileage and the feel of a luxury sports car. What else offers that?

Wow. Well, this is proof of the old saying - can't remember it exactly - something like "There's no idea so bizarre that it doesn't have its own constituency." Internet comment streams make that all too clear. On the other hand this really helps explain why there are fans of Ewoks and the Prequels.

Are you a performance artist trying to conclusively prove that there is no absolute standard for "bad" in matters of taste? I mean if we can't all agree that the Star Wars Holiday Special is perhaps the most purely horrible, terrible, awful, so awful it sort of transcends itself and can be enjoyed ironically thing in the known universe of culture, then I have little hope for our species.

In the immortal words of Foghorn Leghorn, I say, I say, slow down there, boy! Do you have a bone to pick with the idea of addiction as a disease as opposed to a personal failing? It's a legitimate topic for debate, but the poster didn't make a statement one way or the other. Or are you a WoW fanboi leaping to its defense reflexively? Because the poster never really disparaged the game either, just his own experiences playing it.

There has to be some kind of award that this post deserves. (Not to mention the girlfriend.) Mod this up. Is there an 'amusingly horrid' designation?

Well, until this derivative is identified, we are stuck with anecdote. I think this post really says it all and your answer doesn't even begin to refute it:

I keep waiting for someone in this thread to come up with something other than information technology. What else have you got? Routine space flight? In the 60s/70s there was already routine manned spaceflight TO THE MOON.

No one is saying the information revolution isn't amazing, it's just that, well, what else have you got.? You're giving all these details about the explosion of the internet, and yeah, you're right. But look at the 1900->1950 range and you can list multiple major astonishing technologies that weren't there at the beginning and were mature by the end. We've gone from the age of Jules Verne to the age of, I don't know, Bill Gates?

Welcome, Pollyanna, you must be new here. Every day there are multiple posts on slashdot that should be labeled "still ten years away". I'll celebrate the blindness cures and magic windshields as soon as they are proven to work enough to actually be used outside of studies.

What's your point (assuming there is one)? Because this has been discussed before it should never be discussed again? Do you disagree with the thesis? If so why? Your comment is part of the problem, not part of the solution, because it adds nothing but irritation.

An auto mechanic who has only a hammer is inferior to an auto mechanic with the same skill at car repair who has a full garage of tools. Words are tools for thought and if your vocabulary is stunted you are, in effect, dumber than someone with the same "IQ" but a much wider vocabulary. So be careful who you accuse of bigotry. They might accuse you of blind political correctness.

Mod parent up please. This is exactly why my wife and I quit WoW. We both have real jobs and limited time to play. We enjoyed WoW for the first 20 levels where continuous varied content is available in a geographically dense area, but once the quests had us skipping all over the planet to do repetitive tasks it started to feel like work. If we could only play for 3 hours it felt like we spent most of the time dealing with the game equivalent of the DMV. And forget dungeon crawls, much less raids.

The first 2-3 books are phenomenal must reads if you like fantasy. But beware the 4th book. It is boring and is clearly Martin treading water in some kind of record-setting writer's block. It's almost entirely about minor and annoying characters. My guess is that he did that so as not to upset anything in the larger plotlines he is procrastinating on until the next book, if he ever finishes it.

What, you don't want slow moving scenes about Hot Pie and Lommie Greenhands?

I hear they're going to open a restaurant in the new one!