A good question. I ran the numbers, and the answer is FUCKING quickly.

As someone else has already pointed out, it is not a competitor to USB.

As to the RAID box, well, something has to be first. But there are already three others I'm aware of:

There is already also a Sony laptop with a Thunderbolt connector to docking station which has an optical drive, a graphics chip, *and* USB 2.0 and 3.0 sockets. The newer Apple monitors, as well as the new iMacs, use it for USB and DisplayPort. The laptops with it can use a powered-down iMac as a monitor. You can't do a lot of that with USB.

As usual with technologies like this, as soon as it's integrated into chipsets and/or standard motherboards, the products will follow. Just the fact that Apple are selling hundreds of thousands of units with this integrated will help stimulate companies to produce more products that use it...

I wish that was true - but unless I'm being misled, these drivers already don't support my 2-year-old card or the generation after it. Is there anything concrete to give me hope this will change, and the 6000 series they're now making great steps forward with will be supported for more than 10 minutes after the 7000 series is released?

Wise words. Al-Jazeera is broadcast here along with 4 or 5 other 24-hour news channels, and it is very good. Their live web stream works well too without any silly restrictions, unlike most of the others.

Take a breath, man, Jesus.

I am not an american, I don't support either of your two parties. I made no comment on Obama, or any of the other news outlets. None are perfect, and I didn't say any were. However, in my eyes, what thankfully little I see of Fox News is the worst example of biased shrill fearmongering bullshit which twists facts, ignores common sense, and generates maximum anger, fear and hate - and leads to rants like yours, which so beautifully illustrates the problems that are making the US political system so badly uncompromising, reactive and broken.

Whether you agree with Fox's agenda (and you cannot realistically deny they have one) or not, the fact is they fucked up on a matter of IT security here, and it takes down a peg or two, and I think that's a good thing, are enjoying it. I could hope that they might start to take themselves a little less seriously, but it's a little to much to ask.

It's sad, but what you said rings more true than anything that so-called news organisation comes out with....

Funny comment, but seriously, has any constitutional discussion ever involved (potentially) 2/3rds of the population before? OK, there are referendums to approve a new constitution or not, but to involve 2/3rds of the people in that discussion is *way* more than any other I'm aware of. Or to put it another way, why would you exclude a communication forum that 2/3rds of your population have access to?

Oh, and as the comment you replied to said, it's "most" of the discussion - not all of it.

All solid advice - but make sure when you get a fixed IP address it's not part of a residential block of IP addresses, or you will still be on the blocked lists.
I fell foul of this last year, we had to switch our broadband to a 'business' account to get a clean IP address.

Also, the Messagelabs service is excellent, and surprisingly cheap, and removes the problem you have - recipients see emails arriving from trusted Messagelabs whatever your connection looks like. They also periodically check your email server and make recommendations.

One device and one OS? Apple insists you need at least two of each, one for your pocket and another to activate and manage the first...

At which point you'd be put in a cell.
Until you were discharged.

Reminds me of a story too...

My Dad had a new-ish 386 PC which he loved, he especially loved how fast it was. One weekend I played some games on it, one of which (maybe Level 42?) needed the turbo off, as it was way too fast to play at the full nosebleed-speed of 33 MHz. I then went away for the week.

When I came back that Saturday lunchtime, he was literally waiting on the driveway for em, purple with fury. He'd been struggling for the whole week with an unuseably slow PC, and he'd tried rebooting, and he'd tried lots of things, and it had ruined his week... basically he was ready to murder me, and woe betide me if I didn't fix it pronto.

I was in a panic - what the hell had broken to make it so slow? Was it something I'd got from a BBS with a virus? Was it some TSR causing an issue?

The panic ended when I walked into his study, and from across the room saw the Turbo light off. I walked over to it, pressed Turbo, and let him try again. Problem solved. It was years before he could laugh about it...

That reminds me, I shoudl dig out Level 42 and try it on my 3.4 GHz machine... maybe running it in DOS in Bochs would slow it down enough?

Thanks for pointing that out, it's not like the catholic church has any positions or beliefs that are in conflict with sanity, reason and common sense, is it?

Infallibility of the pope (until there's a new one)
Randomly picking which bits of the bible are absolutely unquestionably the literal command of god, and which bits are just allegories
Condoms and contraception in general (helping spread AIDS and other effects such as overpopulation)
Celibacy of priests (and look where that has lead in terms of rampant child abuse and a complete lack of appropriate response)
Decades or even centuries of fighting against scientific discoveries that eventually become part of 'accepted teaching'

and that's before we get to the whole imaginary-god-invented-to-control-people thing.