Costco and Sam’s Club are rationing rice. Friday’s reported incident in the Persian Gulf probably has more than a few paranoid individuals stocking up on gasoline. And to top it all off, Microsoft’s cutoff date for Windows XP is coming in two months, a decision that’s left over 165,000 fans of the OS so upset that they were willing to devote a full three seconds of their lives to sign an online petition to save XP.