How is handing control of your gaming experience entirely over to Valve any better than handing it over to Microsoft or Sony?

I don't use Steam. I like PC gaming, but I want to disassociate my gaming experience entirely from online services. That leaves me with very few options. I've returned every boxed PC game I've purchased in the last three years has required some kind of online login, even for single-person, offline play. I really don't like having to play "mother may I" with Electronic Arts or Valve or anyone else. That doesn't leave me many gaming options, but I will say that every single thing I've ever gotten from GoG.com has worked, is divorced from any sort of download, copy protection or online community bullshit.

Also in a lot of case I have just as much fun watching somebody else's game playthrough videos on Youtube as playing myself. There are surprisingly complete video sets for many RPGs and other single player titles and that's just fine as far as I'm concerned.

RDP clients are typically used to administer Windows machines, but as far as I know, Linux does not have an RDP server. It has VNC and X11, but both of those guys are enormous bandwidth hogs with a limited feature set compared to what RDP is capable of.

I had a 10 week wait getting a replacement for a 32GB SLC drive from OCZ. They did not respond to support emails made on their web site, but they're very attentive if you go complain on Anandtech or HardOCP or something. In my experience, the shortest amount of time that an RMA from them has taken is a little under five weeks.

One of my customers has some systems with Revodrives. They die and I just toss them rather than bother with replacement. Some of the machines I'm dealing with are on their third one in 18 months.

I stole a bunch of large-ish binder clips from work. I binder clip stuff together. Binder clips have loops, so I stuck some screws in the underside of my desk and hung the binder clips with excess cable on them.

It's not super-pretty but it works just fine.

Please mod up for truth, justice and the HP way.

I seem to recall mention of something about using water as part of anti-radiological shielding.

You pretty much have to figure that anything that was meant for interstellar travel is going to have some pretty serious phlebotinum shielding to make high-energy particles a non-issue in the first place, so it's really just a matter of having armor sufficient to deal with the forces of some presumably multi-kiloton explosion.

The Vipers carried by the Galactica lacked fly-by-wire tech, presumably so that they would not be impacted by Cylon EW. It may have been that the Cylon Fighters had some EW-related function (sensor or telemetry platform, maybe?) and carried anti-fighter weapons primarily to deal with Vipers, which were fielded primarily to deal with Cylon birds and reduce the effectiveness of Cylon EW.

What I'm saying is, they could've probably justified it.

You're barely using the capabilities of the machine you have now and you don't have any reason to keep the server. Get a decent VPN-capable router or pay $20/year for LogMeIn Hamachi if that's a need and combine it with a Synology or QNAP NAS. Those have firmware that's relatively straightforward to support and if there's ever a need for more advanced file services, they're already baked into the device.

Do make sure you buy decent disk drives for it. "Green" or "Eco" drives from WD or Seagate work for shit in disk arrays.

This really won't be a downgrade for you. It will actually probably make your life easier.

Installing most well known consumer Antivirus products or especially security suites.

That is in fact exactly how the *AA harvests IPs from torrents, but torrents in and of themselves are not illegal, only the infringing behavior of sending copyrighted material to another person is illegal.

In theory, you can tell your client to download the .torrent file and join the swarm without allowing it to download any of the associated files. You might do this to harvest addresses from other clients or to otherwise monitor the torrent.

It's pretty suspicious behavior, but merely being in a big blob of chattering IPs doesn't necessarily indicate that yours has specifically done anything criminal.

The RIM tablet doesn't really add anything over and above other 7" tablets that might run Android. Kindle Fire and Nook Color devices can be had for less. All of those really need work with third party firmware to be made legitimately worthwhile.

I own a whole bunch of tablets, including a (work-provided) ipad2 and several options from first-tier Android OEMs. In general, the best use I've found for them is consumption of ebooks, webcomics and product manuals. My favorite device is an 8.9" Samsung Galaxy, which has the 1280x800 screen resolution of a larger Android tablet but weighs about 2/3rds what the 1" larger ipad2 does. That's a lovely combination of form factor and usability.

I guess I could get away with doing the same things on my phone as I do with my tablets, but a 4.3" screen really doesn't have the same level of utility as a 7" or larger one.

And regarding your question, I'm sufficiently annoyed by all the drawbacks to iOS that I would never consider purchasing an Apple device for myself. Data sandboxing and format limitations drive me insane.

I do that for small business machines. I know all about Sysprep and .wim files. Believe me. I also leverage the fact that there are free versions of TrueImage available for anyone whose machine includes a WD, Maxtor or Seagate hard disk. That doesn't help much to address home machines or personal laptops.

One thing in particular that I've found to be problematic in relation to getting Windows reinstalled is fear of losing purchased itunes content. If I had to guess, that's a bigger issue than absolutely anything else I've run in to.

I've actually lost clients from advocating reinstall as a standard procedure after infection. The usual claim is that it's an excuse for me to pad a bill. I know a repaired system is substantially more vulnerable than a known-clean new install is, and I can make a good case for that with my customers, but that doesn't mean they all go along with it and at some point I decided that it's not really a battle that's worth fighting.