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A report released Monday by the Omaha-based public-interest group Aurora indicates that increasing numbers of Americans are being defrauded by schemes that offer financial reward for a lifetime of hard work. “People don’t realize that long-term savings and loyalty to one company don’t pan out,” said Sylvia Girouard, the study’s author. Girouard added that steady employment which claims to offer long-term financial gain in the form of a pension plan is nothing more than an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

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Financial products, and they are products, just like toasters, are sold today with the most dangerous features embedded in them because that’s what drives profitability. What’s astonishing is that we let this happen. You can’t buy a toaster in America that has a one in five chance of exploding. But you can buy a mortgage that has a one in five chance of exploding, and they don’t even have to tell you about it… We have consumer protection for everything you touch, taste, smell, feel… But there is no equivalent for credit cards, for mortgages; there’s nothing.

The instructions said remove cap and push up bottom. I can barely walk, but whenever I fart the room smells awesome.

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I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She’s had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.

She’s pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.

But standing there in that low-cut top, you’d almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You’d almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she’d just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.

You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.

“I’m up here,” she says when she catches you staring at her chest.

Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she’ll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you’ll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don’t have a choice. You’re just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.

“But I’m different now,” she says, batting her eyes innocently. “I’ve changed.”

Indeed she has. Apparently, she’s really into Cabala now or something like that. It’s helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you’ll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That’s not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she’ll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.

She doesn’t love you, but she doesn’t hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn’t care less one way or the other. She’s here because she doesn’t want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.

But all in all, she’s OK. She’s a seven. She’ll do, I guess.

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The European Parliament appears to have surrendered to pressure from Member States by abandoning amendment 138, a provision adopted on two occasions by an 88% majority of the plenary assembly, and which aimed to protect citizens’ right to Internet access. The move paves the way for an EU wide policy supporting arbitrary restrictions of Internet access, such as customers being cut-off from the Internet by their ISP.

Under the original amendment 138 text any restriction of an individual could only be taken following a prior judicial ruling. The new update has completely removed this, meaning that governments and Rights Holders could now have grounds to force UK ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet (i.e. such as when “suspected” of illegal downloading).

Imagine if you weren’t allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times…

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This is how the Borg does marketing. A seven-burger Whopper promo at Burger King in Japan. Much love to the many readers who have alerted us to this. But is this for real? Even the Borg couldn’t be that bad at marketing, could they?

On the other hand, it’s kinda sorta poetically perfect isn’t it? I mean as a visual image of what Windows is — a big giant pile of grease and fat, served up cheap.