It's funny how varied people's experiences can be on certain brands. The most failed component I've ever seen (by a huge margin) is Antec PSUs. My company used Antec cases with their 350W SmartPower PSUs for years and I'd say that about 30 out of 40 went bad over the course of three years. At home, I burned through four Antec supplies in three different computers. The ones replaced on RMA then also burned out. I have never replaced a PSU of another brand once I moved away from Antec. Same story at work, PSUs of different brands used to replace the Antec supplies never failed.

If it hadn't happened to me personally, I would never have believed it. I love my Antec cases but I'll never buy another PSU from them.

It's not as if there's no alternative if this happens. Pop in your live CD/DVD of a Linux distro, most people would be back online. Your data on the FAT32/NTFS filesystems can be read from within the Linux environment. Maybe your proprietary programs aren't there to access some of the data, but that's not blocking your communications. Those still forced to use dialup with their internal Winmodems, yes, their communications would be impacted. I suspect there are more people still forced to use dialup than we'd want in these "modern times".

Given how fast the geeks would get broadband-connected friends and family back online, I think you should be more concerned about the big ISPs being controlled. That's much more universal than just controlling ~85-90% of the PCs running a particular operating system.

I'm much more of a hardware (chip) guy than I'll ever be a software guy. I'd like to ask (honestly), how can Flash remain such a security nightmare? After all this time, all of the preceding versions of flash, how can vulnerabilities continue to be found in light of more scrutiny by the developers (code audits, bounds checkers, etc.)? I realize no complex piece of software is bug-free, but Flash (and of course, Acrobat Reader) have continuous vulnerability discoveries... must it be so forevermore?

I'm pretty sure the hosting company I had a few years ago (aka "kiddie hosting") had that many customers on the server that I was on. Does that count?