This is true of Doritos, but the last can of Pringles I opened said on the side that there are at least 100 chips in it.

Firefox tries to reflow the text. It fails when sites either let the text panel become twice as wide as the screen or let the navigation panels expand to fill the screen. Then you get a little tiny column of text in the middle. Slashdot does that a lot. The navigation panel on the left and the info panels on the right like to squash the stories. The current version of Slashdot is much better than the one from a couple of years ago in that respect at least.

I always thought there could be some fun in an al-Qaeda game where you have to bypass a pile of security and pull off the biggest possible terrorist attack. It could be a co-op multiplayer game where your friends take on different terrorist roles. It would need to be cleverly designed for infiltration that doesn't involve constantly shooting people to be fun.

Add in things kids do. Too much caffeine, too much alcohol, too many late-night gaming sessions, probably some drugs, etc. Stressing yourself out with fun can hurt during crunch time. I was bad at that in high school until half way through grade 11 when I decided to go to bed at midnight every day no matter what. That oftne meant I got a bit less homework done or played fewer games, but I felt a lot better. The things in your list mix in nasty ways with the things in mine.

Oh they did indeed mind them. There were the guys who got shut down for cloning Battle.net (for either Starcraft or Diablo II purposes iirc) and they made sure to shut down the server being run by my brother and his friends. Vivendi Universal isn't a nicer company than Activision.

If you're going to fix the bugs anyway then why not take the money and put it into an organization you do support?

Dell learned the hard way about cutting out the discs. They never shipped one-button recovery discs like Compaq used to. Instead it was always the Windows disc, the "Dell Resource CD" and some more driver/software discs.

In 2005 or 2006, I forget which year, they stopped shipping the discs by default because they decided the built-in recovery worked well enough. I started working there in 2006 and they realized they needed to start shipping discs again. We used them for fixing problems or of course just reinstalling when all was lost, so we ended up sending them out like candy. If we needed to use one and we realized the customer had an old version of the XP disc without the latest service packs we would send a new one. We also sent them if the customer asked.

Why Dell didn't also supply discs that did what the recovery partition did I can't guess accurately. They never seemed to mind sending out endless replacements for the numerous discs you needed to do everything manually (assuming they had discs available).

I haven't used a new Dell machine since 2008, so I can't say anything accurate about what they include now.

You don't. So what? Nobody said you need one. They said Microsoft has nothing to offer the people who do think they need one. Keep your Windows box (I know I will). They aren't going anywhere for a while.

Cue the "If Microsoft Had Designed the iPhone" Photoshop contest!

I always encouraged customers to call their credit card company's fraud number as soon as they were done with me if I learned they purchased one of those scams. How many followed up I don't know.

My friend's dad also bought a rogue antivirus one day. He refused to believe it was fake. We quietly removed it and decided to let him deal with the consequences of giving his card number to con artists. Some people are just too much effort.

William Hartnell had one: Episode 7 of "The Daleks' Master Plan" in 1965. It was a farcical addition to a way-too-long serial.

That's a very non-googleable computer. That fact made me sad. Does that make me sad?

Perhaps they took that into account, thinking they might clean that up a bit while they go along. It would make no sense at all for most businesses to do something like that, but Google makes strange business decisions.

100,000 points if you can trick them into wrecking their software, their phone or flicking that voltage switch on the back of their workstation. (I wonder what the sentence would be for such an awesome crime.)

I think I had an easier time giving people things than you did. Despite not working in hardware support I once had to send a customer a new computer because hardware hung up on me when I did the transfer to get it replaced (mentioning I had the L2s on board). They'd tried to fix it three times and utterly failed.

The worst transfer from India was a lady looking to buy a spare part. She and her husband had a desktop where the power button broke. They wanted to buy that part that has the button, the LEDs and the little, colourful wires. So they ordered it twice and each time got the front face plate. So they tried again and instead of hardware sending her to spare parts she got me. I offered to check the part # she was given just in case. It was wrong. So I spent 30 min looking for the correct part.

When I was about to send her to spare parts an L2 walked by and told me to confirm with hardware. So I get some guy in India and ask him if I have the right part number for the part. He puts me on hold and comes back with a different number. I asked what it was and he says, "this is a six-foot power cable, sir." So I got kind of mad at him and reiterated what I was actually looking for. He says, "yes, yes, that is the right part" without even checking. I ended up thanking him for blowing me off, hanging up and sending the lady to parts because I knew I had it right. Maybe his centre didn't have enough "Be The Reason" posters.