Another story on the lawsuit currently circulating on the wires includes this nugget: "Through a spokesman, Delta denied that it was involved in any hacking. 'Obviously, the idea that Delta would hack into someone’s email is clearly without merit,' spokesman Trebor Banstetter wrote in an email."

Without prejudging the facts in the case, I'm not sure that "clearly" and "obviously" are adverbs that belong in any statement relating to wrongdoing on the part of a huge corporation.

I have a first-generation iPod Nano. Yesterday (the 31st) after I had downloaded an audiobook to it, it crashed totally. Was around 1500 my time, 2000 GMT. iTunes restore wouldn't fix it until I had reformatted the drive. Never happened before.

Probably just coincidence--but kind of spooky. FWIW I have time/date set to display in the menu bar, which is not the default.

First-generation iPod Nano, bought two years or so ago. Never had a problem with it before. After downloading an audiobook to it today, it suddenly displayed the iPod BSOD, namely "Use iTunes to Restore". So I tried that... no joy, iTunes error "Cannot Restore". Finally had to reformat the iPod drive using Disk Utility before the restoration process would work. Seems to be okay now

So what is this? Some arcane spill-over effect from all the dying Zunes in the force field?

Well, now: reading Tolkien certainly does expose people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, and sociological ideas, it's just that they all date back to around the 11th century...

You left out those of us who bought VMWare Fusion and an XP license (well, okay, used my university site license) just to run Quicken for Windows.