My AT&T iPhone4 plan: $40 voice + $15 data + $5 text + $5 tax = $65 monthly.

Me neither, but people get fired for false claims on their resumes. Depending on how close-knit your industry is, you don't want to be that guy.

"Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft" video, shown at CES 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lE21kpE3M0

HP Labs is still around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Labs

Among them are the West-coast DEC labs that were acquired by Compaq in 1998, then subsequently acquired by HP in 2002.

*And* it wasn't exactly the string "Chuck Norris". From TFA:

> I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out 'Chuck Norris,' more or less.

Contributions you cannot deduct: ... The value of your time or services, ...

IRS Pub. 526

Server Firsts are Feats of Strength. From the MMO-Chamption article (linked from TFA):

"The achievement count obviously doesn't take Feats of Strength into account because it's technically impossible to get all of them. (Well I guess you could race change to compete for the first level 80 undead/tauren/troll/orc/blood elf on the same character but I don't think you'll get all of them)"

http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/player-gets-all-achievements-shadowed-unit-frames/

It now requires uber gear to do ANYTHING fun in the game

A guild recently cleared Ulduar in blues, just to disprove that way of thinking: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/08/ungeared.html

Last year my wife was messaged on Facebook by her friend claiming to be stuck at the airport in London, and needing cash wired to get an airplane ticket. (All of us live in the United States.) Initially she believed the story, but eventually asked for proof of verification by asking something that wasn't on the person's Facebook page: the name of her roommate. The friend immediately logged off, and logged on later, claiming "network problems." By then we had figured out the scam and posted on the friend's wall (getting the posts deleted and de-friended in the process) and posted on our walls and contacted our mutual friends. After we were able to contact the real friend, the account was locked down before anyone had actually lost any money. We later found out that the scammer had been messaging a number of people on the friends list to try to get a wire transfer.

Ok, so getting asking for help from being stuck in a storm drain is not quite the same thing as asking for money from being stuck in an overseas airport. But don't believe everything you read on Facebook.

Using the Warcraftrealms census on level 10-80 characters on US and EU realms:

PVE server population = 3.16 million
PVP server population = 2.21 million

PVE-RP server population = 709k
PVP-RP server population = 256k

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

Education is a very broad term. Teaching language is very different from teaching arithmetic or science or music. Rock Band is decent for teaching beginning drum skills. An adventure game or even a specialized MMO could be useful for language immersion.

The hardcore PvE types have raiding and hard modes. The casuals have alts and achievements. And I suppose some kinky types have multibox fun with Recruit-A-Friend leveling.

FWIW, the number of available Free Realms servers has not increased in the past few months. (At 10 when I checked last week.) When Free Realms first launched in April, the number of servers grew quickly, at a rate of about 2 per week. It's been at 10 since around the end of May.

Unless they're upgrading the capacity of each server, this indicates that the number of active players is remaining constant, so new people are entering at the same rate that people are quitting. But in a free-to-play game, the number of registered users = the number of active accounts, and that number increases monotonically.

I've played Free Realms to a number of max-level job classes. Paying a $5/month subscription fee increases the number of classes available, from 10 to 15.

Another $5 buys you the best possible weapon in Free Realms, and it is usable at level 1. Tobold has a good writeup here: http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/limits-of-microtransactions.html

Note that Free Realms has no end-game. There are some questlines that open up at max-level (20), but no raiding or group PvP. So that $5 uber-weapon only helps you quest and level faster.

A third option: find a trusted PC repairman. At the very least, find a tech-savvy friend to recommend one to you. Not everyone has the time or aptitude to learn basic PC servicing.