Be all that you can be: A commander at a military conscription unit in Finland told reporters in August that some men recently have been discharged shortly after enlisting because they had become ''addicted'' to the Internet and longed for their computers. Said the official, Jyrki Kivela: ''For people who play [Internet] games all night and don't have any friends, don't have any hobbies, to come into the army is a very big shock.'' (All males are scheduled for at least six months in the military, but about 20 percent get specially exempted.)

High-tech burger-flippers: McDonald's franchisees in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Brainerd, Minn., and Norwood, Mass., recently began outsourcing their drive-thru order-taking to a call center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Thus, a Big Mac order shouted into a microphone in Missouri gets typed into a computer in Colorado (and a digital photograph of the customer's car is taken in order to reduce errors) and then clicked back to the originating restaurant's kitchen, which has the order ready in less time (30 seconds less, on average, with fewer errors) than the average McDonald's takes.

- Compiled by Chuck Shepherd