I personally use evorack hosts - absolutely superb support, very decent specs/price ratio and they use Xen which is a must-have for some.

First off, you would need to check how often GDM/KDM crashes without GFX...

Facebook is not schoolyard where you can angrily call your teacher names.

As my professor said, we live in a dangerous times - being called a pedophile by a 13 yo student of yours, especially via a as permanent medium as the internet is can make your life hell.

Of course lets not get hysteric here - kids are kids and they do stupid things and most of them will get screened in time and forgotten. But once in a while you hear of a guy who was accused of rape and promptly lynched by angry mob. And all because some kid got an F and told his parents that he was raped and then blackmailed with bad grades not to tell anyone.

I guess that Homeworld saga was too stupid for 99.9% people (as in - 'This is stupid, they keep beating me!'). I also guess that todays strategies based on super fast mouse clicking to micromanage or quick reflexes to counter basic rock-paper-shotgun situations are much better now.

Yes, I enjoyed games that wouldn't tell me where to go next after I'm stuck for 30 seconds (if only, now they usually wont let you get stuck). I enjoyed trying 10 different fleet setups and tactics in unpatched Homeworld 2 11th mission looking for a setup that wouldnt end in total disaster. Call me elitist lunatic self-proclaimed PC gamer if you want - I've played the hell out of both Homeworld games and would trade 10 todays so called "AAA" titles for an DLC for HW.

But TBH (as an effort to admit my bias), I enjoyed quite a lot the streamlined gameplay of COD4 online or the new Medal of Honor. As an after-work entertainment they are great. But nothing more.

PS. I wonder whether Valve will cave in and put some kind of a autopilot into Portal 2 (Or 'Place portal here and here to advance to the next level' signs all over the game ;>). That would fit the todays trend I guess.

Yeah, and they prolly killed the multiplayer part - Power Struggle was one of the greatest game modes I've seen. But most people can't understand beyond team deathmatch so they dropped PS from Crysis 2 :/. Well, at least they tried. With all those "This is your objective!" signs all over your screen in Warhead.

And now we gonna get yet another mindless shooter with replay value based on pointless ranking system. And when you reach level 55, you can go once again from start! Great feature, right?

(Sorry for this little rant here, had to get it off my chest ;>)

MS made IE9 so fast as a prank on all slashdotters - right now its pretty much the only browser can render slashdot threads smoothly. So cruel.

Dave! I'm home!...

You pretty much defined Stockholm syndrome.

Putting aside $ per GB (matter of time):

There already are 500 GB SSD drives - OCZ colossus.
160 GB, IMHO is more then enough for apps/OS (and thats what SSDs are great for considering their pros/cons)
Nobody forbids you to use HDDs for mass storage (with large files and decent sequential speeds of HDDs it all works nicely)

In the end, the only problem is the price. With improvement to technological process, popularization and popular demand rising we may hope for them to drop soon.
I would compare it to flash drives beating DVDs - DVDs are great way to store something cheaply and pretty reliably. But for day to day use - moving presentation files, large data files and one-time-OS-install-use, flash sticks win for me. I've even disconnected my failing DVD burner and bought 8GB stick to replace it.