Excuse me, but how is this tagged 'Idle'? And what's with the Planet Of The Ape jokes which is derivative of complete fiction?

This is a real country with a real populace.

Seems like a significant research technique for an original scenario, mutation jokes be damned.

Yeah, stick it out for a while and do what you can, you will learn a LOT more than you already have and will help develop your own crib sheet of tips, tricks and best practices. I've worked as an employee (not contractor) for two companies that were train wrecks waiting to happen. One wrecked (stayed there 9 months) the other was bought (stayed there 2.5 years, left a year before the sale). At both places I made good friends who I still have to this day and who've gotten me more work since then, not to mention good recommendations for my CV. One of those leads recently morphed from an amazing 8 month contract where I learned a LOT with a great company that has now hired me to work remotely (that's right, home office in my soft pants.) The CEO actually founded the company under the principles of 37 Signal's manifesto Getting Real (read that.) Dream Job if I ever knew one.

In my case, 10 years of weird contracts and small company employment disasters got me yards more than any 3 year IT BA and quitting will ever get anyone.

overnight, same 'sector' delivery has been touch and go for 5+ years here in new england. Used to be that we could send a birthday card the day before a normal delivery day and it would arrive on time. Not so much the past few years, and it's never really annoyed me either.

Would rather they drop Satyrnday delivery in favor of keeping up with regional deliveries, even if they are 1-2 days.

There's nothing wrong with using a 'free' email account to register for domain services or any other product or service for that matter. I would however recommend some recursion, i.e. create a unique freemail account with a very high security password and set it up to forward (while still saving emails) to your master email account(s). Of course, it's a good idea to rotate a high security password on your master email account(s) as well. It's not rocket science, it's security. These crafty bastards have been at it for a good 10+ years now. If you haven't been paying attention to current security flaws on the intertubes and get hacked then you are part to blame, too.

Do you rotate high security passwords at least yearly? Monthly would be a better idea. Do you use a password agent/app to manage your passwords? There are dozens available, try one or two with a Really Good Password. Do you keep multiple, offsite backups of your encrypted password file? Make sure it's well encrypted with a 10 to 16 byte password that you can realistically memorize and rotate it at least once a year.

I remember thinking the same thing, and then I thought, was that a point he was trying to make? An allegory to today's society of manipulative secondary officers / secret masterminds manipulating simpletons into high office and after?

Once that thought kicked in, I re-watched the prequels and carefully noted the plot points and political dialogue. There is a lot in there that completely passes over the heads of the common viewer/voter who are just waiting for the next lightsaber fight. Maybe Lucas piled so many special effects on the thing to detract from the actual storyline? A storyline that could have been told in a much better way, but maybe that was also the point.

You realize US citizens have Sarah Palin looming on the horizon. The fact that she don't know sh*t about US politics or history and isn't sore on the eyes must have a million GOP high-rollers chomping at the bit for election. What a wonderful puppet to master! And they sure as hell know the voters will go for whatever they see on TeeVee, because it's the truth, dammit!

In about 10 years some undergrad will write of the hidden gems in the 'oft-maligned Star Wars prequel trilogy.' Perhaps not like they've been doing with Kubrick's stuff, but I bet it will be pretty close.

and I thought the in-laws visiting with their two pre-school kids was foreboding enough...

Gotta mod this up, as it was the same for me. True story: discovered The Hobbit in 1984 visiting a friend who's family was housesitting an old New England farmhouse. In one of the summer guest rooms I found a 1965 paperback version of The Hobbit, the Ballantine Books edition with the pink border and the simple watercolor of Hobbiton on the front. The thing that got me was the map in the beginning and the occasional art throughout. I was hooked. I had to smuggle it home because anything D&D related was strictly taboo in our uber-christian family, and so it took me a while to get through it. I tried to convince a good friend of mine at the time to read it, so psyched about all the adventures contained within, but he could never get past the first chapter of hibbity hobbit nonsense. Still not sure how I got through it the first time, but man, once you are at Chapter 3 there is no going back.

To address some of the nonsense comments above about a movie adaptation, LOTR could have easily been 6+ two hour movies, albeit 50% boring and rife with backstory flashbacks required just to depict the passages within. I think the Jackson team did a fine job with the trilogy content, and even threw in a bit of the Silmarillion just so it made some canonical sense. The modifications and attention to the very understated female elements of the novels were some of the better changes they made for the movies.

* SPOILER *

That said, there is easily enough content for two feature length movies in the Hobbit. In my many re-reads of the book, I was always looking for more information about the Party's journey from Under the Mountain to Laketown, which seemed far too quick, because it was. There was a bit with song and poem and a shapeshifting lumberjack sort at the edge of Mirkwood. And oh boy, I can't wait to see Mirkwood, the wood elves' kingdom, the hall of the Wood Elf king! Apparently Legolas was from the elves of Mirkwood and there at the time of Bilbo's initial passing but never actually made an appearance in the novel; I am sure team Jackson could make excellent use of this fact if they can get Bloom back for another round. Laketown could be fun, too.

The prose isn't great for the epic battle in the fields outside (below?) Erebor where several of the Party meet their end. But I feel that segment, as with many other passages in The Hobbit, truly deserve a proper depiction, especially for such a marvelous tale told well before its time.

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I went to a Benihana in Atlanta, Georgia (US) after a day at Dragon*Con a few years back and it was alright. 3 stars.

Sue me for that, bitchez!

Possibly, but remember the Kinect has depth sensing capabilities and has much higher resolution. I am willing to bet the patent(s) applied for by Microsoft incorporate this detail.

en breve:

way too much VERTICAL white space = please tighten up the vertical spacing by at least 50%

the left sidebar is way too sterile and unattractive = needs better hover / highlighting and styling - please put on your thinking cap, visit the web-i-verse and derive something logically beautiful; that can be my only hint.

everything else is awesome = much faster 'web 2 ... OH!' experience.