I believe any hopes for a Spaceballs sequel died with John Candy, unfortunately.

True, I don't have any concrete statistics to throw around in this case - I just have my own first-hand experience. In the past 6 months, a shocking number of people affiliated with a guild that I am a part of have had their accounts compromised exactly as I have described (somewhere around 15 to 20). I play on a low population RP server in a lower population guild for the lower population faction, so I could only imagine how this trend would play out on a larger, more end-game focused server. But let's err on the low side and say about 100 people get compromised every 6 months per server as I described. Across all WOW servers (241, I just checked), that would be 24,100 people every 6 months. If only 10% of the cases were specifically to sell the ill-gotten gain back to others for real world money, that's 2,410 people who have had there characters flat out ruined for cash - every 6 months. Just food for thought the next time you whip out the old credit card with plans to buy your umpteenth epic mount - do you really know where that gold comes from? No. You don't.

What you fail to understand is where a significant number of gold suppliers get the gold that they pass on to you - by compromising the accounts of others, robbing the character blind, disenchanting everything they can't flood the auction house with, pulling everything they can from any associated guild banks, then setting up the character as a gold/resource farmer and shuffling all the rewards over to a 3rd party account until the actual owner of the account realizes they're not in control any more and contacts Blizzard to go through the dance of character restoration. Heck, the less moral ones will even go out of their way to target players that just made a purchase from them, because they know they'll have a better return on investment. By purchasing gold from gold suppliers, you are directly impacting the experience of other players in a way much more severe than most people realize.

What's that wooshing noise?

I would die a happy man if I got to see a good rendition of Deus Ex on the silver screen before I went.

The problem with tutorials or other assistance with learning how to level your class (either solo or in group) is that you end up with a leveling build, rotation, and habits that will not work in end-game. Anyone who knows anything about how WoW works will tell you the first thing you do after dinging 80 is respec.

I'd think that if Dr. King did rise from the dead, he'd be too preoccupied with an insatiable desire for brains to offer any real constructive input on the matter.

True. I'd like to see someone put this machine up against a currently accepted RNG routines and see which one produces more 'believably random' results.

Because any developer worth their weight in salt will tell you that RNGs are not truly random.

No, I've not played UO, so I'm basing my points on what I've heard second-hand about it. I'm sure it did a number of things right considering the popularity of it at the time, and some of what you've described does sound like it would make for an enjoyable experience. However, I have played a number of other MMOs in my day and I've found fairly consistently that the ones that had player-driven content as the focal point tended to fall flat over time - granted poor execution is a big part of that (for example, SW:G).

I might be the odd man out here, but I look at what you've said about UO and it's lack of predefined content as dulling it down. It makes the game inaccessible to the casual player - the ones that make up the majority of WoW's player base. The point of the quest chains in MMOs like WoW (I'd think) is to give players a reason to explore the world, otherwise they'd sit around in the highly populated zones bitching about there being nothing to do. The ones going out to explore & create their own content will do that anyway, as they are the more involved players. But they are not the norm, they are the exception. A game that requires that will put too much onus on the players to make the game enjoyable, and as such will have a much reduced player base.

The only reason we are able to detect life on Earth is due to proximity - so you're just as guilty of jumping to conclusions as the GP. We've found planets that differ wildly from Earth because the easiest planets to detect are the fuck-all-huge ones. Just because we haven't observed Earth-like planets yet does not mean they aren't all over the bloody place. They're just rather hard to spot with current technologies.

Nothing that complex. It simply passes the TCP state from one nic to the other. I don't know the gory details of how that all happens behind the scenes, but it's pretty impressive to watch it happen - in our lab at work we tested this functionality on multiple guest OSes simultaneously and didn't lose a single packet, even when pulling the power chords out of a number of components (including one of the ESX servers).

The crucial part is the 'across three generations' bit - I can tell you from first hand experience that VMWare ESX has problems performing live migrations across CPUs with different steppings even within the same generation, so the fact that AMD pulled it off across 3 distinct generations without having to utilize cobbed-together solutions like EVC is a pretty big deal. Or, at least it is to me.

So is the Library. I don't see why I should put any more faith in the written words of an anonymous stranger simply because it is on paper rather than on my screen. Books can be (and often are) just as biased or distorted as anything found on the 'Interweb'.