What you maybe don't realize is that most companies don't handle their own rebates. They sell them to a rebate company, whose best interest it is to not pay them out - and they don't have to worry about the end effect near so much. It's like the 'don't pay a cent' events at furniture stores. They sell the account, and you have to deal with a nasty credit agency - and if you do default, it's not pretty.

Indeed. Back in the day [/old gravely voice] when I was with Bell Northern Research it was primarily mainframes and Sun Sparcs on the network.

PC's were just starting first being commonly connected. People were writing their own network stacks. Inevitably, someone would write a bad one, install it on a couple of machines, and a broadcast storm would result.

Which meant someone from our group would go over with a pair of sidecutters...

iTunes got turfed from my machine for this reason - my son had it installed on another account, and I kept getting requests to update Bonjour and a bunch of other stuff. And no option to say 'don't ask me again'.

Even Windows Update give you that.

Agreed, I could've fallen for this myself. I got a ticket about a year ago in a city I didn't live in, and lo and behold, it had a website on it for paying online. Ticket looked official, but on second thought, I couldn't be sure, having never seen one from that city before. I blindly typed in the URL... I'd like to believe I would have picked off a phishing scam, but still, I took the first step.

Ok, that ad is without a doubt the funniest damn thing I've seen in a while. If you like it, you have to like the ol' Mel Lastman commercials for Bad Boy furniture as well - and this guy became the mayor of Toronto! Here's an example
NOOOOBODY!

to the OP - yes, simcasting sucked this year, and last. Frito Lay seems to buy about half the airtime.

I actually followed a 'tinyurl' link from Slashdot. I had to peek between my fingers as I clicked on it. But anyways, many tx for that