I gotta say this - I'm tired of you and people like you putting logout links in your signature. It's not funny. It's not a moron test. It's rude, and you're an ass hole for thinking it's a good idea.

For the record, this isn't personal revenge: I've never been caught by something like this. But you're a dick, and you need to be reprimanded by the community - modded down on every post until you shape up.

Sorry to hear about your problems. Given your comments below, it looks like your MBP is completely effed. I would look into getting a new mobo (I don't think you can replace the GPU on those boxes) and finding a good guide (look around here). Otherwise, sell it to an enthusiast when it dies.

I had something similar happen with an iBook G4 many moons ago, and it taught me a very important lesson: buy the damn warranty, especially with a laptop. I've done it with every laptop I've bought since then, Apple or not, and it's absolutely worth it.

If it seems like it costs too much, there are two things to do:

1. Consider whether you need the laptop you're buying - would that last $200 be better spent on the warranty?
2. Remember that much of the time you're able to purchase the warranty up to a year after the purchase of the machine. This means you can distribute the cost of the warranty. Often it makes sense to go ahead and make the purchase and then buy the warranty 6 months later.

The one thing that's really not an option is to just bank on your laptop living through your use of it. You'll stress it, abuse it, maybe drop it one day - and you need some kind of support when that happens.

I actually contracted nVIR on a Centris 610 once, well over a decade ago. I also wanted to point out that the fact that nVIR was viable against System 4.1 machines should have been a big freaking sign that something was amiss when it was cited as an example of the Mac's vulnerability. If the virus is contemporaneous with System 4.1, it's over 20 years old.

nVIR is in the wild like smallpox is in the wild.

People need to understand that no one in the know is saying that OS X is vulnerability-free or that it will stay virus-free. But every time that's brought up we're practically told to start handcoding fixes for non-existent threats. It's absurd.

They are competitive, at the beginning of their life cycle. Because of the way Apple updates its products, though, price competitiveness goes down throughout the cycle until the next refresh.

All this means is that yes, you should wait until the next refresh to buy a shiny new MB/MBP/MP.

Like many others here, it was logic that led me to CS. My degree is in philosophy, but my career is in software development. So maybe I'm a bit biased.

I can't really point to applications in the last 2.5 years, but I think you're overstating the case. I'm quite familiar with work done by people here (Nick Asher, mentioned on that page, was chair of UT's philosophy dept. for some time). Paul and Patricia Churchland have done a great deal to bring the philosophy of mind in line with contemporary scientific thought - which includes CS. Neural networks are now regularly discussed in undergraduate philosophy courses. In no other liberal arts major will you find students so familiar with the work of Kripke, Goedel, Turing, or Frege. Hell, I know CS majors who can't go toe-to-toe with a good philosophy major when it comes to theory.

And when you ask us to set aside "logic, predicate calculus and the philosophy of mathematics," you're asking us to ignore the foundation of the philosophy of language, a field of study that's enormously popular today and overlaps into linguistics, semantic modeling, etc.

That's not to mention whole subfields of metaphysics, such as ontology.

I'm not saying there's some "killer app" for philosophy here. But the fields are more closely bound than you make them seem.