You know, if there's one day a year on which you probably shouldn't believe everything you read, this would be it. If you were the especially gullible type and you forgot to tear a page off the calendar this morning, you might have found yourself actually believing that Apple has jumped ship to Intel processors, Inside Mac Games is giving away a real rocket launcher, and Apple is gearing up to ship an iTiVo with an enclosure apparently made out of cardboard. Helpful tip: if you found yourself on the receiving end of a "ha ha, made you look" (virtual or otherwise) more than, say, three or four times this lovely April Fool's Day, we hear there's a simple medical procedure by which you can reduce your own credulity level by up to 30%. Best of all, it's so easy and painful, you can avoid those pesky doctor's bills by doing it yourself! All you need is an acetylene torch, a sharp garden spade, and a couple of cans of Bactine.

Nah, just kidding. But see how completely hopeless you are? Yeesh, if you don't wise up soon, you're going to wake up one morning and realize that nefarious con men have taken you for everything you had, and you might even have to sell your precious deed to the Brooklyn Bridge just to make the payments on your valuable swampland in Florida. But fear not, because we're here to help; right now you may be an April Fool, but by the time we're through with you, you'll be wondrously transformed into a street-savvy, no-nonsense April Not-Foolish-Guy. All we need from you is three credit card numbers and a signed blank check, and we'll begin right away.

No, no, no!! See, this is exactly what we're talking about, here. Put your checkbook away or set fire to it or something, or you'll go broke before we even get started. Look, how about we start slowly, with how to identify an April Fool's news story? We'll start with a really easy one: faithful viewer Brian Freeman tipped us off to a CNET article about how Microsoft and Unisys teamed up to launch a web site devoted to convincing people that running UNIX (you know, that wonky stuff that sits at the heart of Mac OS X) in a business environment "makes you feel boxed in," "ties you to an inflexible system," "requires you to pay for expensive experts," and "makes you struggle daily." Microsoft's solution, predictably enough, is that everyone should be running Windows instead (presumably because it boxes you in tighter and makes you struggle hourly, which is far better than UNIX can claim).

The idea that Microsoft would engage in such a strategy is totally believable, of course, and even predictable. But CNET goes on to report that this UNIX-bashing web site is "itself powered by UNIX software," as it's hosted on a FreeBSD box running Apache (the UNIX-based web server software that now serves as Mac OS X's Web Sharing engine) instead of Microsoft's own IIS under Windows. Now, here's where the lesson comes in; think about this for a second or two, and it's clear that even without the April 1st datestamp, anyone with even the most rudimentary capacity for critical thinking would immediately recognize this as a whimsical CNET hoax. Because even Microsoft couldn't possibly be both shameless and brick-stupid enough to launch a high-profile anti-UNIX site and then serve the thing from a UNIX system, when it's a trivial matter for anyone to check and see what kind of software a given web server is running.

Wait, what do you mean, "it's real"? WeHaveTheWayOut.com really exists? And it's provably running FreeBSD and Apache? Oh. Um... Never mind. Evidently the depths of Microsoft's stupidity transcend even the limits of our own skepticism. Maybe we should be a little more open-minded about that rocket launcher giveaway...