Because I've got an autographed copy of Effective STL.
You see, Scott Meyers (the author) got 50 copies from his publisher and decided to give 'em away. He posted in comp.lang.c++.moderated with the deal that you had to send him a snail-mail requesting a copy. He planned to send out 24 copies, one from each time-zone/meridian/whatever. The remaining 26 would be sent out depending on how much you amused him. Knowing that he'd probably receive a ton of requests from U.S. Central time, I enclosed a bribe of a $10 bill with my letter.
Sure enough, my "free" copy arrived. As an added bonus, my $10 bill was tucked in the book!
That's why I'm cool. As to why you're not, that's an exercise for you.
Also, I've gotta plug Ernest's Diary. He needed an outlet for his need to write (see the movie Quills for an example), and I convinced him that a public diary is a good place to philosophize about things of which you're not qualified to speak and about which people don't care (but you read anyway, gotcha!). Hopefully we'll see some interesting stuff from him.
