And they discover they're fucked.

"I know it sounds bizarre, but I was pretty proud of my ability to keep up with Microsoft patches. It's like you are a macho geek if you can keep up with all this stuff," Gerome said. "But now I'm starting to wonder whether catching all the fixes that Microsoft releases is beyond any mere mortal's power."

Actually a really good photo exhibit of "normal" people photographed doing one of 11 drugs. Read the captions, look at the photos ... how are you?

Why Worms Like Code Red Are Good For You

In the vast world of potential Internet viruses and worms, Code Red is a grade Z microbe. It would have to go through a significant amount of mutation before it became any sort of serious threat to the Internet's health. So watching the FBI and Microsoft put on their most serious face at Monday's press conference was like a scene from some diabolical 50's sci-fi movie: Attack of the Killer 0.5 in. Ants.

For Microsoft, this was the kind of publicity you just can't buy. Not only did Redmond get to share a dais with the Justice Department ? which is rather like Stalin vowing eternal friendship with Roosevelt to counter the Nazi menace ? but they also had their name inextricably linked with the well-being of the Internet itself.

It's true. Big Brother *is* different this year. It's fuckin' evil. Above, Justin pulls a knife on somebody, after having threatened many others. In the second episode, one guy named Will, who really admired "American Psycho," convinced his roommates to join him in a fast, as a way of depleting their defenses and gauging who was and wasn't strong-willed enough to recognize the mind control game. Machiavelli would have done well, here.

How might new political systems (think of them as technologies) have developed had the timing of their introduction been different? In particular, imagine that the concept of socialism or something like it was being developed today. How might things have unfolded if it had been introduced to a world where computing and information technologies were cheap and pervasive? How would it have developed if people had unfettered access to information?

So don't rag on your cheaper smokers, donate!

Man, I gotta love Google. They're such geeks.

And then there's IE6 beta 2, Microsoft's latest monopolistic shitbox, which says explicitly in the license agreement that you cannot use software with "viral" licenses like the GPL in conjunction with IE. In other words, they're starting to make it illegal to use MS and GPL Open Source software for a common task. WHAT?! And that's not "viral"?

So why are YOU using IE?