Probably some mineral, that can only form on the bottom of an ocean.

Dang. I was going to start a bet about how long till Cheney bites it from a "malfunctioning" pacemaker.

On a side note; I've heard about organ recipients developing traits of their donors, so this might be a good thing.

Then again, bad news for whoever has their soul linked to Cheney until the ticker stops.

OCZ is the lowest-cost brand in SSDs. Look at any shop listing SSDs, you'll find OCZ at the cheap end of the list.
It is virtually certain that OCZ uses bottom-of-the-barrel Flash chips and controllers to be able to sell SSDs that cheap.
I don't know what the failure/RMA rate is, but probably closer to (if not actually at) a double-digit percentage, than both you and OCZ would like.

OCZ also pulled a fast one not so long ago: The Vertex 2 series was changed to use 25 nm Flash chips without changing the product code .

Benchmarks were not quite the same with 25 nm chips (most benchmarks slower, a few slightly faster), and endurance is likely to be a low single-digit number of years, depending on how much data is written to it.
I wouldn't trust a SSD from OCZ with 25 nm chips, to last over a year.
25 nm Flash chips use a larger percentage of spare area to compensate (though I suspect far from entirely) for the reduced endurance from the smaller die-size.
With the new 64 Gbit chips with an even larger spare area, that meant a somewhat smaller Vertex 2 than advertised; not quite the, for example 120 GB ( 120 billion bytes), but only 115 GB (in BIOS).
After the news about it spread, OCZ now offers to swap drives, but still to ones with 25 nm, just not 64 Gbit chips, instead double the 32 Gbit chips so the capacity is actually 120 GB, primarily to help customers with RAID setups, but that's basically too little, too late.

I am NEVER buying a OCZ SSD - that company is only interested in making money and now that they've started to screw over their customers to do so, I'll bet that company goes the way of the Dodo in a few years.

Fiat currency will always decrease in value. It's a function of the interest rate. Fiat money has no way of multiplying (like plants or animals), other than printing more, which will also decrease the value of each note or coin equally, percentagewise.

Bitcoins will increase in value over a sufficiently long period, especially after the maximum amount is reached. Every bitcoin lost by harddisk crash or in some other way, will increase the scarcity of the rest and thereby make them more valuable.

Bitcoin has yet to stand the test of time, but right now, it's looking pretty good.

What's 'crazy money' in numbers (and currency)?

Unless you think SSDs are too expensive for their size, an OCZ Agility 3 240GB will speed up boot and especially your games quite a lot.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227727
If it's still too small, perhaps use this one solely for games and get a small SSD just for Win 7 (if you want the faster boot). It's not like one more SSD makes more noise or wastes a lot more power.

I've talked to a few who tried it, and it worked. Fortunately I never needed it myself, usually replaced my HDDs after 2-3 years and sold off the old ones, many months or years before they (I assume) would start to fail.

I've had it work myself two times - with cell phone batteries (my sister's and her son's). But that was probably NiMH type, that had developed some memory effect, which the freezing undid.

Nowadays, it's either Li-ion or some other type of Lithium-based batteries, which die because people discharge them way too deeply and probably also do that too often.
Li-based batteries, especially Li-ion should never be discharged below 50 %. I've consistently made sure my cell phone batteries never went below that, and I'm quite sure that's what made them last 4-5 years each.
By the way, the freezer trick will NOT help recover Li-based batteries.

Sure, but that could mean a lot less 'dead' drives, and a matching drop in sales, so..
Now, if they'd used a socketed chip with bad block mappings since the first harddrives came along, there'd be no problem, no drop in sales.
But in that case, somebody probably would have suggested dropping the socket somewhere along the way, to get a nice increase in sales..

He's extremely unlikely to succeed, period.
Even assuming the 120 GB is a one-platter drive, any dust and moisture that gets on the platter during the move will damage the surface initially, and then extensively when the drive spins up and the dust specks get whirled around, hitting the surface again and again, and sometimes coming between the head and the surface rushing by.
Imagine a vertical-axis cement-mixer with some tiny pebbles in it,
(like this one: http://image.ec21.com/image/sunday6323/OF0009411949_1/Sell_JZW350_Vertical_Concrete_Mixer.jpg )
only shrunk down to harddisk-size and running at 7200 rpm.

The filesystem might look okay in Windows Explorer (or in some file manager in a different OS) at first, but when you try to read/copy the files, there will either be a plethora of errors, or the system will just hang.

That should be a no-brainer, for pretty much anyone with some knowledge of electromagnetism.
If the temperature is above the Curie temp. for any material, and there's still a magnetic field, then that magnetic field is caused by an electric current.

In the Athlon era (2003 or so) I read about a local guy (in Denmark) with a dead motherboard, and an Athlon processor, which somehow fried another motherboard he put it in, which then fried another Athlon. Supposedly, it could have gone on until he ran out of money.
Fortunately, he wasn't that stupid and dumped the whole lot in the trash and ordered a new motherboard and processor. Can't remember if it was Athlon again, or Pentium IV.
AFAIR, the Athlons were visibly burned (when looking closely), the motherboards weren't. No idea what brand they were.

you DO know, that Maxtor was bought up by Seagate in 2006, right?
They kept the Maxtor brand alive, but for some years now, I've only seen external harddrives with the name on the box.
Internally, they do have Maxtor-branded drives, and bad (power-sucking) ones at that.

I had a Maxtor III OneTouch 300 GB: the drive consumed 21.7 Watts at max. (I'm not kidding).
I kept a picture of it: http://bayimg.com/baainAaen
I took the Maxtor hdd out and put a 1 TB WDC hdd in the box (consumes ~8 Watts at most).

In 2010, I sold the Maxtor to a guy who, just as he left, said he intended to use it as a system drive in his PC, instead of the old hdd that died.
I felt sorry for the guy, but said nothing.
I am pretty sure he learned the hard way not to use extremely power-intensive drives as a system drive.
Well, either that, or he learned to cool it really well.

Considering the hordes of people who happily buy locked-down/restrictive Apple devices, I am quite concerned that software freedom could be eradicated by consumers, who don't consider the ramifications of their purchases - in other words, how they vote with their wallet.

An ounce of gold will buy you approximately the same goods it did 100 years ago, or even 2000 years ago in the roman empire.
If not exactly set-in-stone static, it certainly looks that way.

Good point.
Ideally, we should probably have one in each hemisphere, and one on the equator, to be able to observe all objects and/or events fairly well.

Though by splitting it up, they're going to have to know the distance between the sites very precisely, to synchronize the images.
(as in; way better than GPS accuracy).

Problem is, if earthquakes in the (Richter) 8+ range modify the planet even slightly, the distance(s) will have to be measured again.
I'm thinking of something similar to the 2010 earthquake in Chile:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100302-chile-earthquake-earth-axis-shortened-day/

If the axis shifts a little, hopefully it will just be a (software) reconfiguration matter.
if one of the arrays is close enough to an earthquake, the base of every dish in that array might have to be realigned - the axii of the dish support bases need to be parallel.

Did anyone else read this as
"Pharmaceuticals would still be in clinical trials when their patients would expire"?