Enterprise arrays copy all the good data off the drive to a spare drive, use RAID to recover the failed sector(s), then fail the broken disk.

Having just read the patent claims it seems that this patent is on the ability for a linked list to be cleared of expired items. Truly a ground breaking, patent worthy invention!

Summary:
> Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke
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Article:
>When the documents finally arrived more than seven months later, they included more than 800 pages of information, including 15 burn and fire-related incidents blamed by iPod owners on their iPods.
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> After conducting its own preliminary investigation, the federal agency determined that, with more than 175 million iPods sold, âoethe number of incidents is extremely small in relation to the number of products produced, making the risk of injury very low.â
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I'm ALARMED!

To reword: our fair use law is very restrictive and doesn't allow for commonly considered fair use cases, such as the right to transfer songs to your ipod from CD. The "fair use" laws we have in the UK are designed for the press and for educational use, not the common people.

Welcome to globalisation. Laws in the US aren't the same as the ones in the UK. In the UK we don't have fair use laws.
I'm wondering why this is different to the music mess caused by allofmp3; everyone was so upset that the Russians system was different and against "our" laws.

One of a couple of things is going to happen as we continue the Digital Revolution. Either we're going to need a global legal system since all this internet stuff is global, or we're going to have to shut down the internet and make it the "countrynet" so that everything you do is contained in the same legal framework.

Or, head, sand, bury.

That used to annoy the crap out of me too. It's trivially easy to ask the user where they are and pick sensible defaults for all the rest of the questions, including keyboards etc.

However, as I've switched to a mac I find that in Windows I *should* use the US keyboard layout. Go figure... maybe Microsoft likes UK based Mac users?

I bought mine PAYG for this exact reason. My all-you-can eat data plan is going to be £10 a month when I have to start paying for it in a couple of months. I never call anyone (on this phone) or SMS.

Going to save me a fortune compared to buying one on contract...

Since the world is slowly (rapidly?) moving towards the lap/notebook this market surely can't be a growth one.

i.e. in my house I've moved all my kids computers (4), mine, and the wife's to laptops. Oh, and my low power home server broke so I switched it to EEE701 since the 20MB/sec it cranks out is more than sufficient for the G/N network.

That, and none of the new chips they're bring out seem to be much better than renamed versions of the old ones. My "old" 7900GTX has about the same performance as the 9600 I've got in my MBP...

Except you don't. Instead you buy a box and media and license a game. In most countries you can re-sell the box and media but licenses tend to be transferable only when the licensee allows it. In most cases they do, but outside of the games industry (i.e. rest of the computer industry) license resales can be problematic.

> no regard to what they're committing themselves and their company

Most employees aren't legally empowered to commit their company / organisation to anything. They don't have the authority to sign contracts on behalf of the company / organisation.

Insensitive clot. I use 32 bit unicode!

Given how quickly laptops get destroyed by viri, spyware, user mis-action etc, why bother with key management. Just have automated backups and in the event of a key loss just perform a restore.