Actually a lot of countries did put out Einstein stamps, even the US did at least twice according to my quick Cyber Googling, 8 and 15 cents. Mickey Mouse probably has more lobbying clout in Washington nowadays, it's either this or somebody has a cyber string theory agenda.

Bookmarks ? Seriously, is anyone still using bookmarks ? Pardon my tone but after a quick survey of my fellow workers the only bookmarks we have are the one that come by default. Search history is a far more reliable source when paired with auto complete.

Attack toolkits are about as old as viruses, the MtE (Mutation Engine) was released in 1991. Before that all you needed was debug, edlin and a copy of Ralph Brown's book, oh and Elk Cloner was on Apple II in 1981. Make that 30 years for other 'personal computers'.

Man this is going Viriial, its like viriises have taken over /.

Well I can tell you from experience no amount of change documentation and preparation can help a Sysadmin doing work after hours (meaning after a full day of work and then some) not to make some stupid mistake like popping the wrong drive out, overworked anyone ?

I've had some worse experience where on IBM ServeRAID controlers when you put in a replacement drive while the array is in 'degraded' mode some awful engineer at IBM decided that if the new drive were to fail while rebuilding the array to a consistent state that they should fail the whole array instead of just warning that the rebuild failed and asking for another replacement (a good one, yeah it seems they sometime ship failed drives as replacement, another IBM genius I would guess). Now everytime I replace drives on IBM servers i'm allways anticipating server rebuilds, but that never gets to the managers or else like it was said earlier in the thread they would have me do this 'maintenance' on christmas eve or some other crazy maintenance window.

BTW: For consistency's sake you can actually boot a floppy to reenable a 'failed' IBM harddrive and set its status to ONL(ine) although this is hardly documented anywhere and thus save yourself from a complete bare metal disaster recovery on IBM servers.

Have you tried not looking directly at the sun ? Also I sincerely hope you are not using a microwave for popcorn if you are electro sensitive...

Fan death, that is really cool ! I'm a big fan of fan death !

Actually I am surprised they are not banning use of microwave ovens before they ban Wifi. The signal strength of the average microwave oven is usually stronger than most access point even with the 'shielding' they have.

40$ per Gigabyte is not that bad if you don't have to pay to acquire 15K RPM SAN drives which can easily run into 2500$ for a 600 GB drive with dual path fibre channel. Fibre channel HBA will run into the 1000$ a piece (twice for redundancy) plus all the SAN switches needed to connect your SAN to your server, again very expensive costs to front for an IT dept. Oh and you get to pay also for nice 24/7 maintenance contracts plus all that support staff with their big salaries because no janitor can build a SAN infrastructure after all, and if he can he will charge you big bucks anyway.

You can't expect 24/7 99.99% reliability out of consumer hardware, and as for the commenter that said that for 300 000$ he'd buy 100 servers that he would host at 100 different sites and replicate all that data, hum well good luck with that and that thing won't get implemented before a year of running around the country and bandwidth costs will probably double the operating budget.

Good and efficient IT operations are like race car teams, they cost a lot, can do trivial operations in seconds and can plan for the worst and still come out ahead. Other cheap solutions ? Go the Google way and let the advertisement pay for it all, other than that put everything on your cheap 1TB pc hard drive and hope it never fails or gets flooded, or stolen, after all how long does it take a human to fill 1TB of actual work data on average ? Multiply that by the hourly costs of such employees and soon you'll discover that HR costs are much higher than typical IT costs.

Wow you are the lucky one, I got a 3G with a 3 year contract (the only option in Canada besides importing a 1000$ unlocked phone) and so I had to skip the 3GS.

As far as the iPad go it's fast but then again it's not running iOS4, the day of that upgrade i'll be reading the Apple forums BEFORE i push that ''upgrade'' button.

If Hell had such ''upgrade'' buttons I suspect they would be far more enjoyable than the iOS4 3G experience. My iPhone 3G has been Vistaized and there is no way of going back.

Oh and yeah i'm typing this on a Macbook, but i picked because it was the less overpriced mac availlable out there, pop in a decent HDD and upgrade the ram and you now have a computer that is decent and you have spare parts too in the process.

I think I mean Apple was downright flawless in the execution of all of its fanbase that were upgrading their iPhone 3G to iOS4, their forums are full of nice fanboyism like: 'It took me 4 1/2 hours to backup 14 GIGs of data on my iPhone... I say stop using floppies!'

or also

'I'm stuck in an infinite restore loop in order to recover all my data... I say who cares about history anyway? Start anew, wipe everything clean, it's going to be marginally faster, not really ? Ah well, too bad so sad, you should have sticked with the previous OS version.'

'I want to downgrade to OS 3.x... I say look to the future, we just released a brand new iPhone 4 that will make your 3G phone look like it's crawling out of the pleistocene.

'I'm stuck in a 3 years contract with 24 months to go, no upgrade option other than paying Apple 500$ over product cost and a 3G phone that is useless... I say it's a free market out there but thanks to the walled garden you have imprisoned yourself into by buying apps and music there is no way in hell you can get out of it without loosing it all.

Think different, that's an order !

Actually they forgot to mention in the EULA:

For current users of iPhone 3G Apple may:

Force you to wait for several hours while iTunes displays that it is backing up your data even though it won't be able to restore anything later (also named the /dev/null clause).

Wipe all your precious photos (the memory clause)

Not give a d*mn about 3G iPhones users because they were too cheap to buy a 3GS the day it came out (the Scrooge clause)

Not allow you to restore settings per application because that would be way too useful (the early upgrader clause)