Thanks for building one of the great places on the Internet. I can't imagine the hours I've spent reading Slashdot over the years.

Thank you and good luck!

I've had similar problems mostly due to people signing up for things using my email address. One was a guy signing up for Match and giving them my email address and another one was a guy signing up for a job site.

The one on the job site was a guy with my same name across the country that I'd never met so I called him up (I had his resume which had my email on it as well) and helped him fix his profile.

The Match one was a lot more irritating; those people are really spammy. I might have logged in and changed his response address to YouFail@DatingOnMatch.com since they sent me a password in the sign up e-mail. That individual has gotten a lot better about signing me up for things since.

For other e-mail that looked like they might be important to people I've tried to contact the sender. Everything else just gets deleted.

I suspect that is what this bit in the the summary was implying (The whole thing was just over 2 lines):

"But traditionalists shouldn't panic yet — paperbacks are still the king."

The thing is, currently news isn't from limitless sources, it is from limitless distribution channels.

There are only a few organizations doing actual journalism at the national and international level. If the NYT pairs this change with restrictions or increased cost for other papers picking up a Times story and republishing it on the web this could work out quite well for them.

We have reached the point where we really don't need every local newspaper pretending to be doing national and international news. If you go pick up a local newspaper in most cities it's pretty easy to see that most non-regional stories are actually just being redistributed from one of the major papers. For print that made sense. Once the information is online, simply pointing back to the original source seems a much better way.

Unless you are dealing with customers outside of your company's staff don't do it.

Problems with Mandatory Uniforms:
1. They make you look like an external vendor. You may soon be come one.
2. Unless other teams have some uniform requirement your staff will resent it.
3. Your team is already among the the lowest paid in the company. Don't make them feel like the janitors.
4. Mandatory is something that really rubs people the wrong way.

Presumably, you already have some sort of dress code. If IT looks like slobs enforce what you already have.

An alternate suggestion: If you already have a dress code of button-down shirts or ties, just give your help desk guys some company/IT logo shirts polo, button-down, t-shirt, or whatever and say these are also acceptable as part of the dress code. You'll see them fairly regularly if they aren't horrible without going the route of making them mandatory. Hell, going this route the team may see getting the shirts as a good thing.

I can hardly wait to be in the zone chat with a couple thousand users all looking for groups on different server instances. I have very mixed feelings about this idea.

That said, I agree that asking for help in zone chat is the obvious, intuitive and easy option unless you fear chatting with people in the first place.

Nothing really.

It is a classless system. A Full respec allows you to change every decision made about the character from the moment you created it. Changing your 10 previous choices is fairly reasonable in cost. If you haven't realized you screwed something up in 10 levels well that is a different issue altogether. I will admit, you can make a completely unplayable character with this system. However, if you've built that you probably didn't make it to 40 anyway and your respec fee will not be as bad as the worst case.

More than encouraging people create Alts I think the expensive Retcon system discourages people from chasing FOTM specs. That is not a bad thing at all.