Desktop processors sometimes do die abruptly.....replacing a cpu and remounting the fan is much easier than yanking out the motherboard as things currently stand. We had this happen on an older workstation with high quality motherboard...after a few years, the cpu starting giving errors..replaced the cpu, all was fine. Replacement CPU was easy to find and cheap....if we had to replace the motherboard, it would have been much more work and also required replacing ram.

It's nice and all that Lego might be releasing an official design of rover, but models of the curiousity rover for 3d printing have been available for roughly a week now already and are begining to enter 2nd/3rd gen revisions...we just gave one away this morning that we printed last night for a childs birthday party.
Lego these days is about robotics and First Lego League Competitions....for models, we can print or create our own....same for legos pieces themselves.
If you can afford to buy your child the occasional lego model and various sets which are very expensive, then you can probably afford a 3d printer which opens up many more possibilities.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27908

Type 2 generally means that the body has developed higher levels of resistance of insulin and that the resistance has over time caused the pancreas to work so hard that not enough insulin is being produced at the time of diagnoses that body blood glucose levels are no longer kept within healthy parameters which causes the body to begin to experience accelerated aging. Type 2 patients usually also have a pancreas that is no longer capable of producing close to the normal amount insulin (the system has essentially given up and can't rebuild). So, two problems that feed on each other in a negative feedback loop...and only one is fixed by lowering weight.

In lucky cases, where diabetes is caught early and the pancreas has not yet been irreversibly damaged...reducing weight on its own cause a resulting reduction in insulin resistance and effectively 'cure' type 2 diabetes. Unfortunately in most cases, and especially because diabetes is diagnosed in the USA via blood fasting glucose levels, those that are diagnoesed with t2 diabetes already have incurable damage to the pancreas. There is currently no known way to cure this...unless science/medicine can find a way to fix insulin production levels of the pancreas without constant stimulation from oral meds/etc (metformin is the most commonly prescribed). A better form of diagnoses is regular hba1c tests which may detect diabetes before the irreversible damage to the pancreas has happened. Also, not all increases to insulin resistance are a result of weight,....drinking excessive soda which has carmel flavoring which increases insulin resistance, not getting enough exercise on its own mean the body doesn't get lowered insulin resistance, and other things that might be associated with those that are overweight have a huge role that are completely seperate from the weight itself.

Yep, this is all about rising chinese/pakistan tensions with india.

Pakistan has signaled that it is breaking off attempts to work with the USA because a good portion of the pakistan population wants the western world to go away and the rest of the population is hoping that if pakistan doesn't cooperate americans will give up on afghanistan sooner w/o any negative impact which means that pakistani's can have a larger influence on afghan politics.

Meanwhile, the chinese have come in and offered to be pakistan's new best friend. Mostly because China wants to increase its influence in the region and the greatest local competitor to chinese influence is india, of which there have been several border wars/skirmishes in the not so distant past. Pakistan and china are logical allies now -- it's a double win, lessen american influence -- encircle and limit indian power.

China is rapidly bumping up its military and adding to its forces on the india border -- pakistan will be able to free up troops if afghanistan falls under its sway and therefore have more troops to put towards india. Naturally, india is alarmed and wants new weapons NOW...france can deliver quicker. That's all there is to it.

Both parties attract those who are power hungry to their elected ranks:
- Republicans unfortunately have a tendency to allow politicians who are being paid by big business who want to gut all regulatory oversight and put in place laws that protect them. These guys certainly are as you describe.
- Democrats have the equal and opposite problem - politicians who are eager to give away other peoples money for projects and programs that don't work, as long as it gets them elected and in the elite so they can become the new "ruling class". When challenged about the fact that they are bankrupting the country, they respond with fake data/arguments or simply imply that some magic fairy will pay for it all ("the rich"), etc.

I find both very bad, but I don't blame the parties per say for the problem as much as the american voter for letting them get away with it. I also still think most voters intend to put someone who follows the party ideals I stated above into office, they just don't research enough or vote party line rather than review each candidate individually.

That's one way to look at it....I see things a slightly different:
*Republicans believe that nothing should hold back an individual or group from achieving success and happiness provided that it is done in a way that is not that harmful to society or others - also, that ideally all individuals and families should be positive role models. Furthermore, republicans generally believe that each section of society has a proper role and size where the family is responsible for giving kids a good start in life and being the primary resource for handling emergencies and major events, that the individual is responsible for what he achieves and his health, that religion and churches should look after the moral health of society and also be the venue through which most general welfare and charitable activities be handled, that government be limited to providing basic infrastructure and a neutral safe ground for everyone to interact, and lastly that when decisions in government be made that it be at the level closest to those impacted (e.g. local control of schools rather than state/federal).
*Democrats believe the republican "traditional approach" has failed or otherwise lets too many people out in the cold. Their arguments are more from the emotional side (e.g. everyone has a right to good health, it is better that we all have the same standard of living than that some do too much better than others, that too many people are not capable of governing their own life and we should use government to ensure they are both cared for and that their actions be for the general good).

Both approaches have their pluses and minuses.....I see the sensible middle ground being that for society to succeed long term it must blend both, enough of the republican approach to have wealth, and enough of the democrat approach for everyone to feel they've had a fair chance at life and not rebel.

Politics is more intense now simply because the USA is at the start or middle of an economic decline and there are two approaches being discussed. Republicans want to do everything possible to recover growth and wealth (no matter how painful it will be). Democrats are more fatalistic and believe that we should be directing our attention towards managing the decline in such a way that no one group gets hurt too bad, and that if any group must be hurt -- it should be at the higher end. Unfortunately, these two approaches are somewhat the opposite of each other...

If it was on PBS, I'd be worried that it would be biased.....

I give up even trying to watch charlie rose on pbs these days....... whenever reporters are brought in to discuss current events, there are always 2 from the editorial wing of the new york times, and 3 from other left leaning news outlets and the conversation always goes around to complaining about tea partiers.

I used to watch frontline, newshour, and other shows on pbs and the BBC....haven't been able to for the last 10 years, especially as even the science shows are no longer willing to consider all sides of an argument, and the bias is as much in what issues are covered as in the content and who they consult as experts. Pretty much ever since gore lost the election, and the AP decided that that fair fact based reporting wasn't informing voters properly, the closest I've found to fair reporting is the wall street journal (assuming you skip the editorial pages) and focus just on the news.

Fox also isn't that bad in the sense that they actually are open about their biases.....CNN/etc not so much.

The black line has been nothing but problematic for me(2TB, SATA 3Gbps).

Purchased 2 of them, both failed, RMA on the first has been working reliably, had to RMA the 2nd 3 times and it kept failing...no point in RMA'ing any further. Yes, I switched cables, power, and controllers to ensure it was the drives fault. From what I've read, western digital is doing only a minimal job on repairing RMA'd drives and then just sending them back out as re-certified and truncating warranties on rma'd drives down from the 5yr original guarantee to just 90 days.

Strangely enough, not a single problem with the either the seagate enterprise constellation drives (2TB) or the western digital RE4 enterprise drives (also 2TB). Dozens of these in production, some for a year now, and smartmon shows no issues except that while the western digital firmware is not 100% compatible w/ some controllers, seagate is compatible but trades that off for slightly less performance.

Unfortunately, amazon caved into the demands of the large publishers and is now allowing publishers to set prices. Naturally, the publishers have started to test having ebook prices of popular new releases actually be $1-2 higher than the equivalent hardcover and after the release has been out awhile reduce the ebook price to be just the same as paperback. So, in effect we move from the situation a year ago where kindle readers were receiving a discount on books and publishers could complain that the future of publishing was in peril - we now have a situation where kindle readers are being pushed as an extra money maker - kindle readers are paying a premium for fast access to books above and beyond the cost of the kindle itself. Somewhat of an interesting situation where if a kindle owner has an amazon prime account, he is actually paying amazon extra not to kill a tree and burn additional energy to send him the physical copy.