The desktop computer that I had immediately prior to this one melted. (Which is why I bought this one.) It looks like the video card overheated and drooped over the motherboard in such a way that it burned a hole in something else and the rest of the motherboard turned into a twisted mess with a hole in the middle.

And yes, it did stink quite a bit, thanks.

The whole thing was contained inside of the case, though. I don't think there was a real fire hazard, though I didn't waste any time pulling the plug when it happened.

My kids have the LG Xenon and the price for ringtones is $2.49! Zoinks! The whole idea of repaying for songs you already have, for a second purpose is utterly ridiculous. I've made my own mp3's rips that I like to use as notifiers ie ringtones or text notification etc, or sounds like my daughter's cry as a baby. No reason I need to be paying for that and no reason I shouldn't be able to use it. In my mind they are taking advantage of children and teen wonderlust ie the record companies. Now if its your company and you're using the rolling stones to make your company seem hip and cool to the 50 somethings out there then I think you should pay the man, but if you're just a kid who wants to use it on his answering machine or phone then I would like the tell the RIAA, MPAA, Apple, ATT, Verizon, and all the others to SUCK IT and let the creativity grow and fund your intellectual property virally. The corporations are always looking at what the kids are doing and trying to be hip and cool, you can get your money from them. I own the iphone and have lots of my own ringtones that I don't use. ;)

The difference is that Apple's website has a "magazine" format that is very easy to duplicate across teams and is conceptually easy to work with and has for a long time, an implicit asumption of uniformality cover-to-cover. Microsoft's webpage is more "web page" like, with less rigourous conceptual designs. Their pages are full dynamic elements, videos, etc... that complement the particular "brand" of software they are selling (notice the website themes within the office suite, the Windows consumer OS, and the Windows Server System and beyond to TechNet and MSDN). Uniformality for navigation's sake is an obvious after-the-fact bolt-on. That being said, MSDN is not conceptually bound to a printed-manual style making it far more usable than Apple's which very much presents like a print-manual converted to HTML.

Civilization Revolution is positively addicting. It also eats battery power like candy, so I don't dare play it if I don't have recharging ability handy.

At least I wouldn't trust software RAID10 to write to both disk sets and then fill in the the other set with the redundant copy when it had time. That really needs a battery-backed cache to implement safely. The overhead of RAID6 parity calculation should decrease for bulk writes, but at some point the CPU is going to be spending too much time calculating parity and not doing other stuff. 16 100MB/s drives in RAID6 would put quite a load on the system, but if it's only a file server it may be acceptable. I agree that degraded drives suffer a much worse slowdown,especially for partial stripe reads. You could easily start getting only 100MB/s for lots of small reads on that same RAID6 with one or two failed drives, and that's assuming the CPU is fast enough to do error correction at 100MB/s (with two drives missing the fast algorithm for accelerating raid6 stops working and it has to emulate gf(2^8) multiplication with lookup tables). Most of my personal needs are cheap bulk data storage (movies, isos, etc.), so RAID5/6 makes sense. At work, I use RAID1, 10, and 5 since we don't have hardware support for RAID6 on the SANs. Production data goes on RAID10 because we can afford it, mirroring for system drives, and RAID5 for test/development systems that just need lots of storage.

Or they use a "real" switch that has port mirroring, or a passive ethernet tap.

Nope. You missed the point. This is about dying for something you KNOW TO BE FALSE.

Because they believe what they've been taught.

Any American soldier goes into service for their country fully understanding that their service may cost them their life. This they do because they believe their service will save the lives of those they love and of their fellow countrymen. Religion, Christianity, oil, and lies have nothing to do with it.

I'm not entirely certain what a delusional state of mind has to do with lies or dying for them.

The times in my life that I've lied have usually been due to fear of some sort... fear of the truth of what I did being found out, and the perceived consequences of those actions harming me in some way. However, I would never die for something I KNEW was a lie. And that's the point here. Jesus' apostles knew him personally. They watched him die horrendously at the hands of the Romans. They also personally saw him after his resurrection. If that wasn't true, why would they willingly submit to being beheaded, crucified, stoned, boiled in oil, flayed with whips, and beaten?