I agree completely about Episode One being a kid's movie. But, I also feel obliged to point out that some fans have fixed it with a version called "The Phantom Edit". If you google it, you should be able to find a copy. Be aware that there are multiple copies (I've seen at least 2 versions); the one that I really enjoyed was made by MagnoliaFan78@hotmail.com and is titled "Episode 1: Balance of the Force (in the opening scroll). It tells a much darker story (in addition to cutting out the Midichlorians and all of the "yipee"s), by reversing the audio for most of the aliens and subtitling them. I was shocked to, by the end of the movie, find that I had actually enjoyed Jar Jar's contributions.

Funny... this is what I hear whenever a user asks me for help...

I second this; credit reports have a distressingly high chance of being bullshit. My Experian report (I wonder if it's Experian that tends to have the most problems?) got merged with another man's (who happens to have the same birthday/birth city as I do). Everything that either of us did went onto this monster credit report and it took literally 6 months and many letters to sort out. I started by simply pointing out that all of that other man's activity was not mine and requested that they remove it from the report. They countered with the statement that I did not exist. News to me.

In the end, it turned out that our monster report was under the other man's SSN (which they happily sent to me, as well as every detail of his personal information I could ever not want). After I pointed this out to Experian (and explained that they had merged two people onto one record), only *then* was their crack team of investigators able to determine that they had merged two people onto one record. And by that point I was so exhausted at the system that I was just happy to have it fixed, regardless of the fact that I had had to do their damn job for them.

Wow, bitter much? I've been happily married for 5 years now and disagree with every one of Sycodon's points.

Sex does not stop just because you get married; if you had a strong sex life while you were dating, you will have a strong sex life whilst married. You'll still have time to game and to pursue your interests, just as she will still pursue hers. Marriage, when it comes right down to it, changes nothing. It's merely a symbol that two people, who already know that they love each other and want to spend their lives together, use to let the rest of us know those facts. Marriage changes nothing.

Kids, on the other hand, change everything...

Your "changing rule set" option could be automated, to a fair extent. Make it so that NPCs are also patrons of shops and they have certain needs (the NPC population of a city needs to buy X baked goods, Y smithed goods, etc.). If one profession (say smithing) gets unbalanced and too viable, more players will migrate towards it. This will create a glut in the market and a shortage in the other professions. As there are always NPCs who need a certain amount of resources from those other professions, those items increase in value and thus the market is corrected. I hope.

It's not always a question of abandonment. As so many people have said, if the addict doesn't want to change, nothing in the universe will change him. At a certain point, it becomes a matter of protecting *yourself*. Seeing someone I love hurt herself is probably the single greatest pain that I've ever experienced. You can express your feelings, love and support them, but if they don't want to change they're not going to. If you have to experience that pain enough times, it will break you. "Abandoning" them is not about callously leaving them to their own demons; it's about ensuring that you're still standing and able to help them, when they are ready to accept that help.

What if they do name it Colbert, and then next year Colbert is found guilty of serial killings and child molestation? There's a good reason not to name such achievements after living people...

Let me say up front: I am not a creationist by any stretch of the imagination, however I do hold to a vague sense of religion. I've always wondered *why* some creationists take such offense at scientifically established facts (common origin of life, etc.), rather than accepting them in a non-confrontational way into their world view.

For example, look at the common origin of life (as seen in the fact that so many different animals have so many similar genetic markers). Life is very complicated; a biosphere even more so. The older religious (and still desperately held to) "theory" is that "sky daddy" hand crafted each bit of life to exactly suit the needs of the ever changing biosphere on Earth.

Recent trends in engineering have taught us that evolutionary design techniques (aka emergent algorithms) are a fantastic way to build things. You get better results faster through adaptive live/die iterations than if they were designed solely by hand. Given that, I would think it makes perfect sense that any deity would use evolutionary forces in order to populate the planet - it would simply be a better design. It's more resilient (self correcting, as the generations pass), simpler to set up and would yield better results than if all life were custom built.

Then again, incorporating such thoughts into their belief structure would require an ounce of free will, which seems to be a trait that is being selectively bred out of the deeply religious...

Funny... I always thought it was the other way around. If an observation contradicts the dominant theory, I thought the theory should be revised, not the observation.

Says one of us high UID slashdotters who must've started interacting in the geek scene relatively recently. People aren't born geeks; they are born curious and learn to be a geek because it's interesting. I can see this book being very useful for a starting geek; someone who has that curiosity and has realized that technology is a fun thing to learn about. How about we accept new geeks into the community rather than showing them the venom that festers here?

Another application that you may want to look at, also from VMware, is ThinApp (previously Thinstall). Rather than providing virtualized hardware to a guest operating system which then runs "native" applications, this approach provides a virtualized operating system to the applications.

Basically, rather than actually installing your apps onto the system that you're running, you're installing them into a differential file that references your host system. You could install each version of the app, each in a different thin wrapper, and thus the changes that each makes would be suppressed from the other (as each would only be making changes in their own differential file).

Sadly, it is far from a free technology...