Porcupine Tree's most recent album has an excellent 15 minute epic on this subject, titled "Time Flies". Check it out if you're bored one day and in the mood for some excellent modern rock.

My friends and I conducted a sort of experiment a while back. We created an online Facebook identity that was completely over the top - the goal was for him to be a stereotypical college burn-out.

None of the photos we tag of him reveal his face - we find pictures of normal college activities (parties, football games, etc.) and tag a guy who's turned the wrong way, standing in the distance, or whatever. There are about 100 of these photos and none of them are of the same person.

I think he currently has more Facebook friends than I do. Girls will constantly accept his friend requests, especially if they have at least one friend in common. Each time we chat with someone we use his created persona and 99% of the people never call us out on not being a real person. I can't count the number of times a girl has accepted an invitation such as the following:

"heeay gurl u comin 2 ma paaartay?"

We've acquired dozens of numbers (never used, obviously) and made vague promises to meet up with these girls.

It's scary, really. Imagine how easy it would be for a predator to create an online persona that is NORMAL? When this guy, who's status is regularly updated with lines such as "ayyy yo cause when i git crunk i like to toke...yaa digg??/? ahhaahaahh", is able to have even one successful conversation.

I had an interview at Geek Squad back at the beginning of summer. I didn't do well - and I'm rather glad. One of his questions was what I thought of free software. Being a naive young lad who has never worked in sales, I foolishly stated my position. I told him that I think it has a lot of advantages, and have often used free alternatives and/or open source software. His response to this - "How hard would you work for free?" It was a little shocking how he completely disregarded the benefits of the free software community. He then made it very clear that Geek Squad employees who mention free software to customers are often at risk of being fired. I can only imagine that this "hidden cost" referred to in TFA is far from hidden in the eyes of places like Best Buy. If people knew about all this cool free stuff that was out there, who would you rip off? Where would you find spyware-infested PCs that you can charge an arm and a leg to fix?

I feel like we should be paying you for that comment if the time was really that valuable. Then again, I can't help but feel... In the time it took for you to browse through TFA and comment: I probably could have popped the CPU in, mounted the cooler, inserted the memory, and started to screw the motherboard into the case. You're practically done! Granted, I'm not denying the convenience of a prebuilt machine. But to me, building my own systems and tinkering with them is a hobby. I don't envy whatever your profession is if you can't find the time for a bit of nerdy leisure.

Wouldn't have happened if they had ordered that netbook with Linux pre-installed!

As stated in the summary, a hazmat crew was sent in. So yes, the people cleaning the fridge were okay.

I haven't seen any news stories yet that focus on the numerous Vista users, myself included, who are happy with SP1.