Not surprised. After all, who better than the manufacturers to predict how long their crap will last. One year is generous.

Of course, if we don't really know where all the targets are, we can now just have our satellites follow the long line of cement trucks sure to be soon rolling around in the deserts of Iran.

Lately, Comcast has been depositing nearly 100% of the checks that I have sent to them. If they continue to cash my checks at this rate, I will be force to throttle back the check writing to 50% of the invoice amount. During times of peak demand of my money, it is only fair to other utility providers who also require a portion of this limited resource. With throttling in place, which should only affect the top 1% of my creditors, everyone can continue to enjoy "unlimited" payments.

Big difference. Electricity is a metered service. "Unlimited" Internet is not, at least in theory.

Bought a hard drive lately?

Seriously? The first comment is marked as "redundant"?

How loyal is your current company to you?

If the role's were reversed and they had an opportunity to hire a more qualified person for less money than they pay you, would they? What if that employee lived next door to the office? And [hypothetically] knew more about the product than you? Would they feel such tremendous loyalty?

If so, then stick with them. Companies like that are hard to find.

They used "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"

Take a look at Amazon's Mechanical Turk offering. (www.mturk.com) You create "hits" either through their website or API and real humans complete the tasks. This one would be simple, some two (or more) images to the worker and have them select the one with the best quality. You can even pre-screen workers by having them complete a qualification test. You could get all your images sorted out for a penny or two a piece.