Am I the only one who agrees here? At least in that I was a kid that could never grok algebra in grade school, and dropped out of college because of it. I was convinced by school teachers and pears that I was just a math moron with no hope. It wasn't until I started getting tasked with some mathematically intensive software engineering projects, that others couldn't pull off, that I realized all I needed to fully understand the HOWS of math was to have a real world WHY scenario. Not understanding algebra as taught in school forced me to adapt and become a better 'learner' that can assimilate new things more quickly than most of the people I encounter with degrees. Turns out I'm a natural with a lot of advanced mathematics, I just couldn't wrap my brain around it without understanding the applications for the problems. I think we focus too much on teaching kids how to solve every potential problem under the sun, and they never get the more fundamental and simpler 'eureka' type stuff that it all branches from. The feeling of grokking it vs the feeling of being rewarded for remembering rules. But we don't teach kids how to learn new things on their own when faced with an ambiguous problem, we just reward their memorization skills. We have access to virtually the entire collective of human knowledge, I think learning to navigate that effectively and being able to learn concepts on demand is a greater skill than memorizing. But obviously there's a lot of bright people that did great learning the traditional way too. So what do I know, ha. Just that I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I solve a complex math problem now, instead of the dread and fear school gave me over it all.

Some people rarely ever see $400 dollars that could be justifiably spent on a new PC. Yet they may have some ancient XP disc lying around. Not to mention it does run far better on old hardware. Determined people get things done with what they have.

This is clearly a misuse of statistics for the purpose of piracy propaganda. As others have pointed out, XP has simply been around much longer. It hasn't been long since it was the standard OS on new machines. It was also the last of the OS's to be included as physical media with a new PC (most new PC's just have a restore partition these days, last I checked). Oh, and in my experience XP runs better on low-resource virtualization setups than Windows 7... ESPECIALLY if you avoid SP3! Come on gang, lets not play in to this loaded debate.

...or, you could forgo the formalities and just do truly impressive work that clearly defines you as a desirable human to be taken advantage of by the highest bidder. Fill your resume with your art, rather than empty cookie-cutter hype. In a world of drones chasing degrees for the sole purpose of getting paid more, I think It's inevitable that sooner or later we'll have a backlash effect from this trend of blind hiring based purely on superficial credentials, and finally people will start paying attention to WHAT people can do, not just how much money they've thrown at their resume.

About five years ago when I got my Dell laptop, I noticed that if I blew in to the phone it seemed that my hold time was greatly shortened. Blowing in the phone seemed to overdrive the audio into anoying distortion. I came to the conclusion that either a) someone is hearing this, or b) they have some sort of system that tries to gage how upset a person is by autio levels on hold (possibly more complex even, as I tried cursing at teh hold music several times with mixed results).
This wasn't a once or twice thing, I probably called tech support 100 times while my laptop was under warranty for 4 years. I was very rough on it and finagled a warranty repair for everything I did to it. I ended up with almost 10K in repairs on a $3500 laptop, and at one point got a whole new laptop for a fried mobo with cracked plastic :-)

All these techniques stopped working when dell switched to Indian support near the end of my warranty. Last thing I called in for was more cracked plastic... the nice, yet clueless Indian man suggested I check my hard drive for errors and possibly have it replaced... That said, no more Dells for me!