As is always the case in this argument it pretty much boils down to "who starts the fight?"

I feel your pain. There is a part of me that really wants to play this game, but after the fiasco that was SWG, I have zero interest in ever giving SOE money ever again. The only thing I can see about this that looks good is that it will pull a lot of "shiny new toy" players away from cataclysm and maybe make it so that every single PUG doesn't end in the tank and/or heals don't get in a huff and quit half way through.

Is the Rose Atoll in American Samoa really in all that much danger? That's the southern most point in US land.

I suppose this is a good thing. Honestly though, I'm not entirely sure why this is considered news - the government has long been opposed to knock-offs of most things. It's a nice buff to the security community, but is so hard to detect that the over all effect is likely to negligible.

I'll take a stand and say, "meh."

As a Michigan native, I can tell you for damn sure that there are cities near me with 20%+ unemployment. If you count under employment, It's probably significantly higher than that.

Well, to be fair, if someone finds my wallet, it's got my name and address in at least 3 visible locations. The "partially crippled" phone might not have been quite so easy to sort through.

I used to work for a public school system that had a very similar training repayment program. I was required to take X amount of training hours, and could elect to pay for them myself or have the district pay. If I paid, then I could quit at any time with no financial repercussions (aside from loss of a job...) but if if the district paid, I had to agree to work for them for at least 3 years. If I quit any time before the 3 years were up, I had to pay 100% of the training costs.

The really messed up part was that they claimed that people would be responsible for their previous training costs even if the district fired them within that 3 year window. It turned out that they tried it a few times, and ended up getting smacked down in court every time. The clause was still in the contract, but by the time I worked for them, they never attempted to enforce it any more.

Woosh.

Classic!

I can just see the disaster that is "having an inappropriate conversation" being put to the test.

Defendant "Your honor, all I was doing was talking about which blue cheese tastes best as a pasta sauce."

Judge "Well, that may be the case, but you were on a technical forum. 2 years in Federal Pound You in the Ass Prison."

I've heard this complaint more times than I can count. Space ship noise is a narrative device. For example, in a drama, the audio is sourced from multiple places. If the camera cuts away to another scene and a character from the prior scene continues to speak (as a narrator or whatever), nobody freaks out, but heaven forbid that the audience is processing audio from multiple perspectives in sci-fi. To stop the problem from bothering me, I prefer to think of "space noise" as being heard by microphones on each ship. It doesn't bother me at all to think that people in the torpedo bay can hear a torpedo firing or that engineers can hear the warp drive power up. We're just hearing the interesting noises from all of those separate locations all at once. No big deal. Also, it's boring as hell to actually watch the movies where there's no noise in space.

Ironically, the issue with Death and Taxes disbanding was the huge lag in time between the major updates. From what I've heard, a large number of their higher-ups were disillusioned by the fact that they were having so much trouble beating Sunwell. "But... But... We're uber! Forget it. I quit!" kind of mentality.