Someone who forgot to hit the ATM before going shopping.

MSI motherboard with 16 GB of RAM, standard DVD player, blah blah. Two HDDs, one SSD and one platter, with a fat external USB platter for backups. Dual 1080p monitors. And yes, it's quite possible that the 650 watt PSU I had before was simply low quality, but it was an excuse to upgrade to a nice modular 1000 watt one, and future proof it. I'll be dropping in a 2nd 660 and SLIing them for my birthday this year.

Apparently having something to do stops a lot of drug use and other crimes in general.

Quite true - when I was in high school, I had music lessons or rehearsals twice a day every day of the week. I had time for school, music, and sleep. I even stopped watching television at some point, never to resume. Unfortunately I ended up suffering from music burnout by the time I went to college, which is why I'm not an opera singer or a professional trumpet player today.

Someone who experienced the registry getting chewed up during an unexpected burp once before.

Had some instability due to a too weak PSU when I rebuilt my Win8 system last winter. I was getting BSoD or worse - total unannounced shutdown - with annoying frequency. (Turns out the GTX 660 really did need that 1000 watt PSU I was too cheap to get at first.) Thankfully, no lasting damage, because the BSoD and system shutdowns worked as intended and protected the rest of the hardware.

It's very stable now. I think I've had to reboot the system once in the last month.

I am suddenly grateful we've been using a store branded Home Depot credit card for the last few years. Replacing that with a new one won't be painful at all. I think I've paid cash if the amount was under $10, too.

Still going to go through ye old checking account and verify there's no HD charges on there since April.

Have you talked to your eye doctor about the weekly/monthly lenses? I only have to take mine out once a week, and I throw them away for a fresh pair every month.

Again, scale. There are very few party games that can accommodate twenty people and still make everyone feel included.

Uno for long time friends who probably won't end up hating each other. Scrabble for a small group of newer friends. Apples to Apples for larger gatherings, since it can scale up to accommodate teams.

They actually made me think a bit, though. I too thought it was funny as heck that you could beat up the hookers in GTA and get your money back, but that's because I recognize that the GTA franchise is all about doing things that would be illegal or outright immoral in real life. But I'm a mentally healthy, socially well adjusted (mostly) adult, and I recognize that video games are not meant to be an instruction manual for life. Someone who is mentally ill, younger, or un-educated might not recognize that nuance as well.

The problem is that if it wasn't for PCs, I'd have never gotten into IT. My 19-year-old female self realized that if I couldn't repair my own PC I'd be dependent on other people for the rest of my life every time something went wrong. (Like I am with my car *cough*) My video card blowing out is what started me down the rabbit hole to begin with.

Most local schools are funded primarily at the county or state level, not the federal level. The tax that supplies our district's funding is our property taxes. So they got a double whammy with the foreclosure crisis - property values and thus taxes went down, and there were fewer homeowners paying taxes at all.

I wouldn't mind doing this, but I would like to eat too.

It depends on the school and location. Some public schools in the US are great. Most are mediocre. Some are terrible. Same thing applies to our universities - some are great, most are average, and the rest are for-profit.

There's also the fact that a lot of foreign applicants completely fabricate their credentials, with the full buy-in from the institutions that churned out their degrees. So while there will be some applicants who graduated from top tier schools, there will also be a lot who graduated from the equivalent of DeVry who have fantastic resumes that are full of BS. And you won't find that out until long after you've hired him.

I wonder if this practice is also influencing the "requirements bloating" that happens in HR departments. Fake resumes get turned in that have all these fabulous sounding things, so they plop them into the job requirements - if some resumes have them, that means some applicants should have them too! Next thing you know they want someone with 10 years experience with Ruby on Rails.