I voted "hamster", as I suppose that's the thing they put in DVD drives that die so easily. On my last 3 laptops, the first thing that stopped working well was DVD drives. Then, in quick order:
- the connector for AC adapter and/or the adapter itself;
- a random key on the keyboard;
- the battery.

I keep replacing parts, but eventually I buy a new laptop because the current one seems to have seen too many wars.
Only once (HP laptop, AMD processor) did it really go beyond: the hard drive, then a couple of months later, the motherboard, so ill-designed it died from overheating.

I guess all that says a lot about how I use my laptops: I travel a lot, to dusty places with bad electricity supply, and use them 14 hours a day (eating, drinking, smoking). Will soon have to replace the wetware as well, I guess.

The idea is not to force everybody to install it, but only propose it to users who have been spotted "illegally sharing protected content".

Users are supposed to install this software suite after the first or second "strike", so that they can't claim their internet access has been used by someone else for illegal purposes without their knowledge. If they don't, they're liable to be prosecuted for negligence in securing their internet access and computer.

On top of the classic spam control, anti-virus, parental control and firewall, the system is meant to warn users if they perform "suspicious actions", and generate an encrypted log of warnings and whereas they stopped after the warning or ignored them.

I for one would welcome such a (very stupid) scheme, as it shouldn't be too difficult to bypass, providing a "good faith certificate" for cheap. But for many users, it is very probably going to prove extremely annoying (remember Windows User Account Control), if not dangerous.

TFA seems to imply the chip is actually working:

Amazing indeed. I just wish NASA TV showed a bit more of this kind of footage -- advocate for NASA to hire a couple of good video editors?

For those who don't know it, a good source of NASA video archives (besides Youtube) is http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/.

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Don't you think it already pretty much looks like -- or at least sound like -- Klingon?

Most of these probes and their instruments far outlive their original mission duration -- Voyager 1 being the best known example. I've always wondered what part of that extended lifetime could be reasonably expected, and what part really comes as a surprise.

I guess engineers compute probability of failure for various instruments: any idea if they are usually right?