Extended warranties were always bad, until I tried one for a new technology, flat screen monitors. I bought a 17" which failed, and when it failed, Best Retailer had no 17" to replace it with, and replaced it with a 19". When that failed, and I went back, they had to replace it with a 23". Now, if I'd put the money in a piggy bank, the money would have gone farther towards buying a 23" than it did in 2006... so some of this is false economy. But the screens also became more dependable and failed less. I also paid for extended warranty on the "second screen", a flat Sony LCD, in 2007. It still works fine.

A chum in my science seminar class hacked into the principal's office phone, so we could listen to him from the classroom whenever we wanted. When it was close to graduation, he got bored and patched the phone line into the school public address speakers, so all day his calls were broadcast in every classroom (they figured it out and he stopped using his phone after an hour or so).

After lunch, the principal called our buddy up to the office. He asked him "Do you by any chance know something about this?" Our buddy said "Yep." Principal said, "Just go fix it and we won't ask any more questions, ok?" He did, and that was that, no call to his parents or anything.

Now in the early 1950s, when my DAD was in high school, they just led a cow upstairs and locked it in the bathroom (Cows can walk up stairs better than they walk down). It's pretty easy to imagine the same kids pulling the same kind of pranks with the technology of the day.

Seems to me wiping it will do more harm than good. In Africa, where refrigerators were scarce, we would put damp cloth on our beer bottles. The evaporation of the water chilled the beer pretty nicely.

German 3Sat.de television did a great story on how many Germans believe that people who buy used tech, especially Africans, must be burning them. Five studies ( posted here on /.) from organizations like Basel Convention Secretariat, IDC, USITC, etc. show that 85%-90% of used equipment purchased by Africans is reused in internet cafes, hospitals, and schools. But "Westerners" (in this case Germans) are so afraid of being accused of dumping they shred the equipment (forcing African geeks to buy in back alleys). This is just another example of a decade old defamation campaign about reuse.

A good organization serving as an "anti defamation league" for geeks of color http://www.fairtraderecycling.org/ has links to the 2011 German video, showing how German environmentalists would have kept the Green Revolution / Arab spring from ever happening.

45% of all toxics released by all USA industry come from hard rock metal mining. 14 of the 15 largest Superfund Sites are hard rock mines. Mining of tanatalum for electronics (coltan) is responsible for the disappearance of half of the lowland gorillas. It kind of bothers me when "environmentalists" have zero depth perception, no ability at all to prioritize risks.

The first link should be to this registration page or "Event" on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/events/100546936795165/135676049948920/?notif_t=like

(there is an accidental link to a HREF guide)

The cost of the video is so high because they haven't achieved a scale of production. We need them to produce entire series of Star Trek, then IRS Voyager, Next Generation Income Tax... then Star Wars, Mission Impossible, etc If enough auditors spend enough time producing enough of these videos, the cost per video will go down, which means the "rate of increase" of IRS spending on videos could go down.

At least until the auditing period for the 1040 I'm working on today is expired. Then pull the plug.

Nor is it a tax of mass destruction.

In the future, everyone will be a billionaire for 15 minutes, until their ill-gained 15 minute life savings is phished by the next billionaire. The bank account hijack will rotate around and around, shared by everyone in the world, boosting all our credit ratings... momentarily.