Proof of the Stupidity in American Business: I picked up a couple packages of those cheese and cracker sandwiches that you can get at the convenience store before coming into work today (how convenient). The ones that have eight to a package instead of the regular 6. I just looked at the wrapper of one and made an interesting discovery. At the top in big bold letters it says 'two more crackers.' Now, you would think that, since they normally come in a package of six, below the big letters you would see the word 'free' right? WRONG! Below the 'two more crackers' it said, in smaller letters, 'than six count.' WTF? Are the Research & Development people still in grade school or something?
'You know, if we add two more crackers to the package, there will be two more crackers than the six count we normally sell. 6+2=8. The consumer won't know that so we better put it on the package.'
'Shouldn't we put in the word 'free' in there?'
'You think we should give those two extra crackers for free? Won't that mess up our profits? I think we should jack the price up for those extra 2 crackers they're going to get. They won't notice the difference.'

One of the things that really piss me off about the Internet are those sites that sucker you into trying something for free, but you don't get the full benefit unless you pay. Case in point:
Tuesday night after work i went over to ANT's place to work on his computer. Being a newbie, he was surfing around like a kid in a candy store, devoting a good portion of his time to the 'dark site' of the 'net (i'm partly to blame here, since i pointed him to a couple of sites i'm familiar with, but he delved further than that). Anyway, he told me that he wasn't able to log on to the 'net because his computer was giving him problems. I asked him what the problem was, but he wasn't able to explain it. All he said was he was getting some sort of message after the computer booted up and he clicked on the Internet Explorer icon. I asked what sort of message, but he couldn't tell me. I told him to call me when he got home and tell me what the message was.
He called me later and told me what the message was, but i couldn't figure out why he was getting it. He offered to get me after work so i could take a look at it.
(I should mention here that he told me earlier that he gave one site his email address, which is a bad mistake when it comes to adult related material. He had to go to Calif due to a death in the family, and when he got back and checked his mail, it had 270 messages waiting for him. Yep, you guessed it, all p*rn.)
After work, he picked me up and when we got to his place he booted up his computer (turns out it's an old Pentium computer from a few years ago, with only 64MB of RAM, like my laptop i use here at work). It took FOREVER for it to stop loading whatever he had on his hard drive. I took a look in his task manager and was surprised to see something like 25 tasks running. Good god!
Well, i started by removing all the programs he didn't need, then i jumped onto the net and went to a site i heard about before that checked your computer for adware or spyware. The place was called Spykiller, and the site offered to scan the computer for free. Not a problem. I let it do its thing (took a while, that's for sure) and when it finished, it found about 14 or 15 things, then asked if it wanted to clean them out. I clicked on 'Clean' and it redirected me to where you could buy the program. S.O.B!! If you're gonna offer do to something for free, finish the damn job, don't leave me hanging! It's like sex. Don't take a couple runs around the playground and then call it quits or you'll end up having to be content with dating Rosie Palmer the rest of your life.
(By the way, i eventually downloaded Ad-Aware for free and used it. It found more than 300 things that was considered adware or spyware. It even cleaned it up and got rid of all the junk. Highly recommended. Once we cleared everything of junk it was working much better.)
Another time, i was surfing around and MSN was offereing a chance to take a free IQ test. I thought, what the hell, so i clicked on it and was taken to Emode . There i took the test, just for the hell of it, and it came back with my IQ score. It asked me if i wanted a detailed report on how i did, and i said 'sure.'
'Ok, fork over 15 bucks and you can have it.'
It's really sad when sites have to resort to stuff like this in order to get the attention and the page hits.

Happy birthday goes out to my friend LordShadowhelm. I wish him all the best on this day. As a fellow Scorpio, i'll be joining him in 8 days.