With pandemia it's safe to assume that most of medical facilities would be too full to administer care to even the critical part of the population. The chances are you won't have any treatment at all in the hospital, just quarantine facilities to make sure people don't escape while they are still sick.

I have seen the same, my long running hard drives wouldn't boot up again. When I opened one of these stopped hard drives the head was glued to the boot sector. I assumed that since boot sector is never used during the 3-5 years of operation it collects some trash that will attach to the reading head when HD is stopped and cools down.

Sometimes moving the case is enough to get bad connections appear (or opposite, when computer is brought for maintenance it starts to work) but pressing down all the cards and chips that are using sockets solves those problems. Vacuum cleaner is also a good tool when talking about an old computer with mouse nest or something similar in it. Anyway computers can run well when stopped frequently, as long as you maintain similar schedule during the lifecycle of the computer.

Hmm... isn't being a IT/Geek/Nerd pretty much Darwin Award material as itself?

That's only true if you look US as a whole. West coast has dense population centers and east coast is ideal for a rail. Both east coast and west coast have most of the population living only tens of miles from the coast, making it easy to cover all the cities by rail. In Europe it's more difficult as the cities are not on coast and to get from one city to another there are often no straight routes.

European high speed rail connections are not limited by borders, of course going from one city to the next is cheaper than building one huge rail with only two stops, 520 mile rail is not extremely long. The high speed rail makes sense where the travel time is competitive with airplane travel time and population centers have demand to travel between them. California is great place for high speed rail, very sparsely populated land with huge cities along the coast. San Diego - Los Angeles - San Francisco - Sacramento train would cover big parts of California, extend that to Las Vegas, Portland and Vancouver with more stops on the way and you have all west coast covered.

Sure, but you also managed to overlook the Macbook Air benefits compared to your excellent Asus model. First of all Macbook Air is just under 3lbs, while Asus is 3.7lbs. That weight difference alone explains some of the hardware differences and design decisions. Additionally Macbook Air has better resolution on the display, which is a huge plus in my eyes, 1440x900 compared to 1366x768. Add the ultra light power adapter of Macbook Air to the mix and you get portable system with you well under 4lbs.

Second area where I believe Macbook Air will prevail is heat management. Try using all those goodies loaded in Asus for an extended period of time and the laptop becomes unbearably hot and reduces battery life significantly. Macbook Air also heats but I believe less so because of lower powered CPU and no dedicated GPU. Adding dedicated GPU or more CPU power is less appealing on ultra portable than on a desktop computer and should be always weighted on the down side they create.

Nice things Macbook Air has that are more rarely found in competing products: Magsafe power port, OSX Lion, Thunderbolt port, excellent microphone, and great webcam.

I think the problem with these charges is that they are not even close to what it costs for a carrier to deliver 1GB. You don't pay $30-40 a month because of people who use 10GB per month or even 100GB per month. You pay that amount because of the carrier is greedy to subsidize other failed investments and/or extra dividends with the data fees. Or maybe they are just incompetent and the operations truly costs that much.

Amazon can sell 1 GB of data transfer for less than $0.15, even if we double that cost it's nowhere near the fees charged. With double of Amazon prices the carrier could transfer 100GB for $30. The cell towers needs to be built anyway for the coverage and the base cost of cell tower coverage is charged already on your regular phone bill.

I'm living in Finland and here the data transfer over cellular network is truly unlimited, tethering doesn't cost extra and speeds are up to 14mbit/sec. The cost for this connection is right now 13 EUR/month. On the other hand 10/10 fiber ethernet purchased by HOA for every unit in the building costs 6.80 EUR per apartment with 100/10 upgrade after 2 year contract period. Individually 10/10 fiber with IPTV costs 19 EUR/month.

I'm telling these costs as an example of true cost of delivering 1 GB over cellular or fiber network. If it would cost more than fraction of cent these companies would be out of business and right now they are in fact profitable. Even if you count in higher US wages, more difficult environment to build networks, and regulatory hurdles the true cost of gigabyte cannot be nowhere near what Verizon is charging.

You mean AT&T Wireless will compete with AT&T uVerse and Verizon Wireless will put Verizon FIOS out of business?

Now if attacker has your hashed password from the server it's still possible to get authenticated. Am I thinking too simple way when I would just send the password over secure channel to the server, hash the password at the server and compare the hash to the one on the database?

Yes. If they didn't they wouldn't be shutting down Google Video.

Isn't this how leases work? Leases always have some limited number of miles and any miles above that will be charged at very expensive rate.

American worldwide military base network, ability to project power anywhere in the world in matter of days, need to defend US interests across the globe, and requirement to be able to simultaneously encage in several fronts has its costs. Old European imperialistic nations didn't give up the foreign lands just because they suddenly felt generous and wanted to give freedom to these countries. It was in big part also a fiscal decision and sooner US realizes that the sooner the budget will be balanced.

Problem is that you cannot cut military spending without giving up the imperialistic approach towards the rest of the world. Having a weak military with same worldwide objectives in place will cost more as more conflicts would arise.

That's why they call the middle as "The Real America".

I bet your conversion to AC also changes the voltage to allow higher throughput. You could use DC same way as you use AC. DC to DC converters might just be more expensive or not so widely available compared to AC to DC converters.

Some countries in Europe have it better than others. Lumping Europe as one entity is a little silly.