And look around you: all those people you dislike, they are miserable too. The days are getting shorter; soon they will be leaving the office in the dark. Not long after that, they will be getting up in it too. And by then it will be cold as well.

Sure, you and your friends must live through the next few months as well. This is why it is important to make sure that you dislike as many people as possible, thereby ensuring that most of the people you know are suffering deservedly. You can start making friends again in the spring.

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Reddit has taken over the front page of Digg. If Kevin Rose and the rest of the Digg team thought that a long weekend would be enough to calm the furor over the latest changes to the popular site, they were clearly mistaken. Not only did Digg's users declare today "quit Digg day," but in order to protest Digg's new auto-submission system, users are now upvoting every Reddit story on the site.

According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010.

Spanair flight number JK 5022 crashed with 172 on board moments after taking off from Madrid's Barajas Airport on a scheduled flight to Las Palmas on 20 August 2008. Just 18 survived the crash and subsequent fire aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 aircraft.

The airline's central computer which registered technical problems on planes was infected by Trojans at the time of the fatal crash and this resulted in a failure to raise an alarm over multiple problems with the plane, according to Spanish daily El Pais (report here). The plane took off with flaps and slats retracted, something that should in any case have been picked up by the pilots during pre-flight checks or triggered an internal warning on the plane. Neither happened, with tragic consequences

Separate
If you need to, say, tell customers about a new $100 fee, it’s better to hit them with the bad news, talk about something else, and then mention their $10 rebate coupon. The bigger the difference between the gain and loss, the more you should separate the news.

Evaluate
If the gain and loss are close to equivalent, consider your audience. Most people would be terrified by a $1 million loss, even if it came with an offsetting $1 million gain. Just say everything is fine. On the other hand, risk-takers (venture capitalists, ninjas) will want to see raw numbers.

Obfuscate
If you want to confuse your audience as to just how bad (or good) your news is, change the currency halfway through. Giving employees extra sick days but taking away free soda and snacks, for instance, makes it harder for them to calculate the value of what they’ve lost.

From a single click on a web site, [x+1] correctly identified Carrie Isaac as a young Colorado Springs parent who lives on about $50,000 a year, shops at Wal-Mart and rents kids' videos. The company deduced that Paul Boulifard, a Nashville architect, is childless, likes to travel and buys used cars. And [x+1] determined that Thomas Burney, a Colorado building contractor, is a skier with a college degree and looks like he has good credit.

The company didn't get every detail correct. But its ability to make snap assessments of individuals is accurate enough that Capital One Financial Corp. uses [x+1]'s calculations to instantly decide which credit cards to show first-time visitors to its website.

In short: Websites are gaining the ability to decide whether or not you'd be a good customer, before you tell them a single thing about yourself.

Last night I had a dream that led to a major creative breakthrough on a work project. Can I bill my client for the sleep time?

At what point in your dream did this idea strike — while you were sitting naked in high school French class or when you realized that all your teeth were loose? Whatever the case, we get where you’re coming from: In the Google Docs era, work has become an around-the-clock grind. We’d wager that checking email now rivals toothbrushing as America’s favorite pre-bedtime ritual.

But that doesn’t mean it’s kosher to bill for REM. “To be billable, the time spent has to be willfully expended,” says William G. Ross, author of The Honest Hour: The Ethics of Time-Based Billing by Attorneys. Once the alarm clock buzzed, however, the meter started running. Did you jot down your brainstorm on a bedside notepad or spin it around in your mind while eating Trix? If so, bill for those minutes. Now you’re living the dream.

Duke Nukem 3D became one of the top-selling videogames ever, making its creators very wealthy and leaving fans absolutely delirious for a sequel. The team quickly began work on that sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and it became one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time.

It was never completed. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather — and each time, the game would recede from view. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build; five years is considered worryingly long. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist.

On May 6, 2009, everything ended. Drained of funds after so many years of work, the game’s developer, 3D Realms, told its employees to collect their stuff and put it in boxes. The next week, the company was sued for millions by its publisher for failing to finish the sequel.