I loved the sign I saw in a bar once that said "Free Beer Tomorrow!" ;)

Reminds me of the Onion article, Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

Hmmm, so you've never built a site for FedEx or the LA Lakers then?

paranoia is a healthy adaptation to reality

This sounds like a man in the middle attack to me.

take a cooking class - you know he's still in the dorms because he's too lazy to cook for himself.

sarchasm - the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

A) this is 2001 you're talking about (8 years ago)

B) I know that lots of IT personnel wear pagers since they need to receive one-way messages sent by a machine to report downtime, and you don't really need to respond with "OK, hang on - I'm on my way!"

You're right - and I think our roads, military, firefighters, police and water systems are run so poorly that we need to find someone else to run them for us... Only through competition will we have the choice of who to hire to spray water on our houses and chase down the arsonists who did it. I just hope they offer frequent buyer's cards.

c) kinetic energy ... or as Neil Stephenson put it recently in Anathem, "getting rodded".

These are tack-on penalties, like not wearing a seatbelt is to traffic offenses. You're not going to get pulled over for not wearing a seat belt, but if you get pulled over for breaking the speed limit and the cop doesn't like your attitude, they'll tack on the "no seatbelt" penalty as well. So if you're in the slammer for some crime, they can tack-on "oh, hey neglected to pay taxes for his ill-begotten gains".

I thought this was uniquely funny

I think there's a reason they call people who send those messages twits.

Not quite - you're thinking of older versions. Modern versions of Peakflow are teamed with TMS (Threat Management System), which allow you to mitigate DDoS attacks.

From their website, "Surgical Mitigation Arbor Peakflow SP TMS enables you to automatically detect and surgically remove only the attack traffic while maintaining legitimate business traffic â" thereby ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction."

http://www.arbornetworks.com/en/threat-management-system.html