I find it likely that we are the quiet majority, actually.

If the quiet majority thought the first flick was bad and the later ones even worse, how do you explain the fact that each installment was more successful than the last, up to Return of the King being the second highest grossing movie in history? Purely on the grounds that it was "over-hyped, and a lot of people just got swept up in it"? If only it were so easy to gross nearly three billion dollars!

Face it, the trilogy was an immense artistic, critical and commercial success - you just didn't like it. That's just opinion, it doesn't make you wrong. Claiming that the quiet majority also didn't like it, however, does make you wrong.

Basically, this whole article is an excuse to drive page hits to this guy's blog

Luckily most of us don't actually click through to the article, then.

When it comes to "Wheel of Time", you can divide the audience into two groups: people who don't like the series, and people who used to like the series but don't any more. That second group, however, has a large subgroup of people who don't like the series anymore, but who feel they have invested so much of their life reading it that they need to grind through in the hope of reaching a conclusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost_dilemma may be instructive.

I have heard from some reliable sources that Facebook and Twitter's backend applications are poorly written.

Given the quality of Facebook's developer API (it's horrible), I'd be amazed if the back-end of the actual site wasn't poorly written.

I use Astraweb as its currently the best unlimited monthly payment going

If you want to actually use Usenet for conversation, Astraweb's NON-unlimited plan is the way to go. 25 GB costs $10 and will probably last you the rest of your life. I know I haven't made much of a dent in the 25 GB I bought years ago.

Making it a really good game on a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power is an honest development effort.

I guess it would be, since Doom wasn't even a really good game on a platform that did have a keyboard and mouse and an excess of processing power. Most overrated title in the history of gaming, a far greater example of "style over substance" than any more modern pixelshader-fests.

I still think either anyone must have the right to edit, or that whole Wikipedia experiment has failed.

Wikipedia is a project to produce a free online encyclopedia. It is not an experiment in anarchism, democracy, free speech or anything else. You might like to read What Wikipedia is not, and hopefully come to realize that the whole Wikipedia experiment fails only if it fails to produce a free online encyclopedia.

running 2 instances of the same game at the same time will be very difficult if not impossible for many games. Most will check to see if multiple license keys are in use at the same time with online play, and to my knowledge, installing 2 copies of the same game on the same computer using different keys is not something that will work either since that is a use that was never designed into the games

Bear in mind that the games mentioned by the questioner are MMORPGs, which generally are friendly towards running more than one instance on one PC. You need two subscriptions, of course.

HTML by itself just isn't a marketable skillset anymore.

Absolute garbage. I work with a couple of HTML specialists, well, to be fair HTML/CSS/Javascript specialists, it's an extremely marketable skillset. As others have pointed out, "doing HTML" isn't a matter of slapping down some tables in FrontPage or Dreamweaver anymore, the expectation is there that they will be able to produce solid well-optimized pages that work flawlessly in all the bastard stepchild old browser versions, as well as the standards-compliant ones. And the guys I work with can do that, they can do it well, and their skills are extremely marketable.

If you read my first post again, you'll see that I think it means very little.

The overreaction is in believing that your situation is in any way different today to how it was yesterday, BEFORE this guy got thrown in jail for owning a modem.

Complaining that this case "puts all admins in danger", or that you can now be thrown in jail for owning a modem, is a hysterical overreaction.

I posted this in response to the Groklaw Summarizes the Lori Drew Verdict article, but it's 100% valid here as well:

Look, the fact is, if The Man wants to get you, The Man will get you. It doesn't matter what the laws are, exactly - they'll find something to hit you with.

That was true before the Lori Drew trial (Terry Childs charges), and it's true now. The precedents set by this case in no way make being on the internet (owning a modem) one bit more "risky". If you don't do anything to bring down the wrath of The Man, you'll be fine. And if you do, you're screwed, online or off.

If someone is bent on killing you and the only means you have to defend yourself is with deadly force, is it wrong to exercise that force?

The thing is, by enlisting in the military, you are not saying "I am willing to exercise deadly force to defend myself from people bent on killing me."

You are actually saying "I am willing to exercise deadly force to defend myself from people bent on killing me. I am also willing to exercise deadly force to murder innocent civilians if it is profitable or politically advantageous for the incumbent government for me to do so."

If that conflicts with your personal moral code, you should not enlist in the military. Because you never know what orders you might be ordered to follow. For every Pearl Harbour there's a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road with her skin on fire.

So for example I closely self monitor my cap. Which means at the beginning of the month I download like a whore. However nearing the end of the month, I might download a lot less, being aware that I am running out of cap. At the end of the month I might not download at all, because I have no cap space left at all. What does this mean? Huge bandwidth demand all front loaded on any given month.

I don't know how these guys are planning to do it, but my (Australian) ISP implements each customer's cap based on the monthly anniversary of their connection being activated. So mine goes from the 8th of each month to the 7th of the next month. As a result, there's no network-wide pattern of people using their cap early in the month (or using it all late in the month so they don't "waste" it).

As an aside, they also provide a toolbox page on their website where you can see your cap usage (broken down as finely as an hourly level), and see exactly where you stand. I'm honestly boggles that any ISP would implement a cap and not provide such a measurement.