It scares me to no end that you got modded "Informative" for that post. Too late? Too late for what? You honestly think ISIS is going to march into Europe and plant their flag in Paris?

ISIS exists because both Syria and Iraq have had their own internal struggles. Using the chaos of those struggles, they managed to seize military equipment and take control of land. The people they are a threat to are the civilians in the region that have no way of fighting back against them. They'll never manage to take on Isreal, Iran or Turkey

Nothing good will happen when Western Nations fight ISIS. The only good that will happen is if nations in the region actually stand up to them and deal with the problem

I think the point that was being made is that optical will eventually replace all electrical connections. It was not saying the only jump to be from Silicon -> Optical, but rather will ultimately be replaced by Optical as a faster medium just like the advances we saw by deploying Fiber Optic cables (and the more recent push for optical-based network switches to replace existing electrical). Realistically the full Optical transition is still years away and you are likely correct that we will move to on of the other transitional architectures that are still electrical-based in the mean time.

Starting off the You must embrace your robotic overlord indoctrination early on?

Note: I am a currently GW2 player and like the game. Hoping to put some context around the above's comments for people who haven't played the game.

1) The game play did majorly switch between GW1 and GW2. They reimplemented the class system, created a whole new skill system and a bunch of other things. Some of this were a disappointment to me as well, as they removed the "Monk" class and you no longer had the ability to have a Main and Secondary class for each character. Beyond that though, I found the rest of the changes to be an improvement for the most part.

2&3) At any given time, you have 10 skills on your character. The first five skills are defined by what weapon combination you are currently wielding. Every Necromancer using a staff will have the same five skills. You then have a slot for a healing skill, three slots for utility skills and one slot for an elite skill. On top of this you also have a "trait" system, which modifies your skills or gives you bonuses for certain types of actions (steal HP on crit, your AoE skills get bigger, etc). I find this is where most of the customization comes into the game, while in the original GW you simply just dumped points into various stat pools to make the associated skills stronger.

It does suck that you can't move your weapon skills to different slots. Some of the skills i use far more often than others, and it would be nice to have those as one and two all the time, instead of two and four on one set of weapons and five and four on a different set of weapons. The rest of the skills (6-0) can be put on different keyboard commands though, as most people I know make "Q" their heal skill and "E' their elite skill. Overall I think that after you play awhile, you just get used to it. I constantly shift back and forth between my two weapon configurations on multiple characters and no longer have issues, but it did take awhile to learn.

4) There are two storylines, your personal story line and the "Living World Storyline". I agree about the personal storyline. After about level 40, I became rather disinterested in it. GW2 for the past year has been pushing out bi-weekly updates that push the "Living World" story forward and this one I have enjoyed immensely.

5) This is the one that I have to disagree with, unless we have very different versions of grinding. Basically anything in this game will give you XP. Craft a new item? Explore a new location? Do a jumping puzzle? Congrats, you got XP for all of that, on top of any killing that you have to do. So leveling I never felt was a grind, as I had a choice to basically do whatever I wanted in game and I would level up for doing it.

As for equipment... everything in the game is craftable. Legendary items do take a lot of grinding to acquire, but they are meant to showcase the dedication of the player. Between Karma rewards given by the vendors when you help out a location and the ability to craft equipment, I've never had to either grind or spend real money to get equipment. I've gotten so much crafting stuff just by running around and salvaging stuff that I make stuff just to throw it into the slot machine for a chance to get a precursor item.

Really? My internet through Comcast is great and I get the speeds I pay for, but only during non-peak times much like non-rush hour traffic on the roads. However, the speeds are abysmal on nights and weekends much like rush hour traffic to and from work.

We can add as many lanes as we would like to the expressways (internet backbones, e.g. cogent) to try and ease congestion, but at the end of the day it is the exit ramps (ATT/Verizon/Comcast/TWC/etc cross-carrier connections) and the local "last mile" roads (ISP to home) that still trigger contention within the system. Unless we improve the infrastructure at all levels, we will always encounter a bottleneck.

Sorta like these conglomerates? Just to name a few :)

• ConAgra
• Kraft
• Nestle
• Proctor&Gamble
• Diageo

Perhaps that was in part due to CGI Federal SVP in charge of the Healthcare.gov project, Cheryl Campbell, testifying before the House of Representatives September 10, 2013 that the project was still on track [video - Testimony starting around 36m20s.] & [pdf]. While some of the other organizations present during this testimony were flagging issues, the primary contracting organization was communicating that the project was still on track and would be ready for the October 1, 2013 launch.

If the key players in the project are communicating an "all clear" up the chain, it is difficult for anyone outside of these organizations to ascertain possible issues as they are not receiving information about the regular day-to-day. The Government's response (contracting Google/Redhat/Oracle) to the situation once they learned the truth was a management-base response to them finally receiving real information. Had Middle Management (Read: CGI Federal) properly communicated the issues earlier, the Government may have been able to enact a gauged response earlier that could have avoided the debacle.

And now you know why they invade us in all the movies. Every time you mod funny, you give an alien a heart attack

Exactly. It's just a parasitic relationship.