My wife sang the same song as a child growing up in Ecuador, and a variation on the English version was even a theme song for the Canadian kids' show The Elephant Show with Sharon, Lois and Bram. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon,_Lois_&_Bram)

Pretty popular song, apparently.

to get a good but affordable Rational Database system,

"Relational." "Rational" isn't a word that's often applied to MySQL.

Damn, they ARE doing well. They made 211% of their income in 2007, WITHOUT counting XP/Vista or Office! I bet if they include those, it'd be a zillion.

Ahmm. You mean the land we paid $15M for after we'd won the war? How often do you see that happen? If it were anyone else, the land would simply have been taken, tough luck, so sorry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Cession

Face it, Hater. The United States have always been gracious winners.

The place I work has taken it a step further in that the machines have unofficial names that aren't in DNS. The machines actually have names like (dept)(purpose)(location)(number)(product), which is admittedly hard to remember, let alone call out. Unfortunately, our two QA boxes were dubbed "Laurel" and "Hardy" in a casual conversation about their "personalities," and the names stuck for people who were privy to the conversation. Of course, this was before I started working there, so I was confused as hell when someone told me to log into Laurel, which isn't an actual server name. WTF?

You have no idea how right you are:

http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/12/02/2008-12-02_it_took_90_minutes_for_daily_news_to_ste.html

No biggie. Just reminded me of that skit is all. :)

People continue to talk about aliens at Area 51 for 2 reasons:

1. They are mentally incapable of stopping. (And need help.)
2. They enjoy it, and think it's entertaining.
3. They just don't know any better.

People continue to talk about aliens at Area 51 for 3! 3 reasons:

1. They are mentally incapable of stopping. (And need help.)
2. They enjoy it, and think it's entertaining.
3. They just don't know any better.
4. They have been abducted by aliens at Area 51

The 4 reasons people continue to talk about aliens at Area 51 are:

No, wait, start over...

Having been on a few sinking ships, I haven't found that to be the case. What I've seen, oddly, is the opposite. People get nicer once the realize there's no future in it for anyone. At that point, it becomes about who remembers you and how, and whether they can get you into wherever they land next.

At a certain point, it just becomes collecting your paycheck until its your turn. No point in being a dick about it.

There's a lot to this. Sometimes people are doing what they do, not because they enjoy it, but because it's a stable source of income and they don't want to jeopardize it. A layoff can be painful, but a smart, positive-thinking person can use it as the kick in the ass they need to do what they've been wanting to do, now that the old gig is gone no matter what.