As someone that's seen this first hand, I've got to say it's definitely not caused by abnormal usage. Any slight jostle has the possibility of causing the disk to become gouged, and sometimes it doesn't even need to be moved in order for it to happen. My 360 regularly puts slight scratches on any disk inserted into it under normal circumstances, but so far non of them have been bad enough to prevent play. The only time I've seen gouges bad enough to ruin a disk (on my console) was when someone tripped over a cord and knocked the console onto its side. Even so, the occasional jostle should not be an automatic death sentence to any disk in the drive, and certainly carefully turning the console on its side should be within the normal usage.

The real kicker here of course is that MS essentially screwed all their customers just to save a measly 50 cents a console. To me that's ridiculous, as I, and I'm sure the vast majority of owners would gladly have paid an extra 50 cents to prevent this problem.

I'm not sure about Canadian law, but in US law there's the concept of fair use exemptions to copyright (which I think we got from UK law, but I can't say for sure without researching it). I would be somewhat surprised if Canadian law didn't already have a set of exemptions to its copyright laws prior to 1997 (such as for instance for educational purposes, reference, backup, etc.).

Apparently that's only if you inhale them.

The language itself, the syntax and such is fairly good, but as the wikipedia article points out the standard libraries are a little fubar right now. Tango was built as a replacement for Phobos, but because they use different APIs, an application (and worse, a library) written for Tango won't run on Phobos and vice versa. The goal of D was to create a language with all the benefits of Java/C#/Python and other high level OO languages, but with the ability to compile to a native binary so the language could be used to write drivers and to do embedded development. The language is compatible with C and you can link against and use C libraries, although as you might expect a little bit of foresight needs to be used when passing variables to and from C libraries due to the garbage collection mechanism that D provides (you can opt to manually do garbage collection which is necessary in some cases).

From a syntax perspective D looks most like C# I think, although there are differences and some parts look more like Java. There's work being done right now with D 2.0 to unify Tango and Phobos and clean up the standard library in general, but as far as the syntax of the actual language goes it's one of the best I've seen.

Yes, BASIC is more or less obsolete at this point, so might as well point them in the direction of something at least slightly useful, which is where Perl comes in. Assuming you're not talking a beginner level class, assembly would be the better choice to start with. I was assuming recommendations from the level of complete beginner to programming on through at least a medium level of experience. Once you've gone beyond medium level of course the language you pick is going to depend on what you're trying to do, and learning a new language should not be a problem as you should already have a grasp of all the basic concepts and most of the advanced ones as well.

Javascript might not be a bad choice as well, although I'm a bit hesitant to recommend that over Perl for a complete beginner as some of the concepts (like prototypes) might put off a beginner, and the distinction between the various structures is a little less defined than it is in Perl, which once again might prove confusion to a beginner. Also, do you really want to try to explain the difference between =, ==, and ===, to a complete beginner?

I'm familiar with L4 (and it's various relatives) and I rather like the kernel, although I think it needs a lot of work to achieve anything close to good security. That's not really the kernels fault of course, it's only part of the problem, and there's really very little wrong security wise with the actual kernel, but a kernel by itself is only a very tiny piece of the overall security of the system, it's the other system utilities and even the filesystem itself that's the biggest security problem. Pointing at a kernel and calling it secure as opposed to an OS (and all the baggage that entails) is a little like pointing to a safe and calling it secure as opposed to a bank. It doesn't matter how badass your safe is if anyone can walk in, pick it up, and walk off with it, it's a layered approach to security that makes it secure, and somewhere along the way people need to be involved. Security always comes down to people at some point, and as such anything that does not quantify the person and take them into account is not truly secure. To go back to our previous metaphor of the safe, you can mathematically prove the number of combination's the lock might have, and you can mathematically prove the physical strength of the various components, but what you cannot do is mathematically prove that the guy in charge of guarding that safe is doing his job, or that someone won't somehow manage to steal the safe itself.

Now, formal verification is a nice tool, it lets you efficiently spot certain kinds of problems, but formal verification by itself is far from a good measure of how "secure" something is. A good secure OS must be both free from code defects and exploits (buffer overflows, various injection attacks, escalation bugs), and must be designed with an overall goal of ensuring that the user is given all the tools and information they need in order to make informed judgments about the state of the system.

The rules set forth by the scientific process. Pay particular attention to rule 4, and the clause that specifies observing a expected result does not qualify as a affirmative test of a hypothesis.

There are a great number of people that are highly superstitious (which is the same thing as being religious), although I rather hope this isn't permanent state of affairs.

No, there are people in this world who will fly airplanes into buildings and blow themselves into tiny pieces because they've been raised to be unable to realize the difference between religious dogma and reality, and work themselves into a psychotic state over unimportant triviality.

Much of the western world, and some of the eastern world makes irrational decisions based on their damaged ability to deal with reality caused by early indoctrination in religious dogma. Getting into a car or airplane does not require faith, and you do not need to believe you are guaranteed to arrive at your destination. Any sane well adjusted individual should know and understand the risk involved in any activity including riding in a car of airplane. When you choose to get into a vehicle you're gambling based on the knowledge that the odds are in your favor that nothing life threatening will happen versus the inconvenience that not getting into the vehicle would cause. You may hope that nothing bad happens, much as you might hope that if you purchase a lottery ticket that you'll win, but neither getting in the car, nor purchasing a lottery ticket requires an ounce of faith in anything.

To paraphrase a famous quote, there are no guarantees in life but death and taxes.

Actually this is both the OEM, and Microsofts fault. Microsoft came out with a program to certify OEM hardware as able to run Vista with acceptable performance. Had Microsoft actually done what they said they were doing things would have been fine. Instead when the OEMs started complaining to Microsoft that only the most powerful most expensive systems they were selling that year meet the certification requirements, Microsoft lowered the requirements knowing that by doing so they were representing underpowered systems as being able to run Vista with an acceptable level of performance. Apparently being able to boot in under 10 minutes and run solitaire without completely pegging all the system resources is considered "acceptable performance" by MS, but unfortunately for them not by anyone else.

"We predicted that 9 cars would be stolen this month, but only 4 were! Of the remaining 6, 3 stopped working, 2 will probably be stolen next month, and the last one exploded."

They're off either side, they're the ones labeled "OS X", "Linux", and "Unix".

Have you looked at Spring lately? With the annotation support that's been added recently you can eliminate just about all the XML out of Spring. You still need a single XML file that specifies the package or packages to search for annotated classes (an inherent problem with the way class loading is handled), but aside from that everything else can be configured via annotations. Injecting a service into a controller is as simple as annotating the service class with

and then on the controller having

Spring takes care of everything else, including dealing with circular dependencies. Likewise Hibernate can handle any association you care to toss at it, and can be entirely configured with annotations (once again baring a single XML entry to list packages/classes to scan for annotations).

They weren't so much invented as evolved. It started with some people essentially getting together and going "Hey, wouldn't it be great if everyone got along. We should make some rules on how people can treat each other better.", and pretty soon it snowballed to the point where bureaucracy started to take hold. Once they achieved a certain level of size they started snapping up other smaller religions, superstitions, and the occasional nutball and incorporating them into themselves. Things were added, removed, and modified over time, sometimes by individuals, other times by committees. Eventually you arrive at the various amalgams of stories, beliefs, superstitions, and rules that are recognized as the mainstream religions.

Most of this is in reference to the western religions not the eastern and alternative religions. Most of the eastern religions tend more towards world outlooks or philosophy than they do rules and stories and evolved primarily out of the ideas of various philosophers over time in combination with early superstitions. The alternative religions tend towards an attempt at reviving earlier superstitions combined with modern mysticism and pop-culture, often drawing inspiration from poorly researched Egyptian beliefs, or cherry picked portions of eastern philosophy.

You know what they say, "Ignorance is Bliss". They're just sad that you're not as blissful as them.

Ok, add a second bone cloning vat next to the meat cloning vat and package them together. Problem solved.