"I worked for the Postal Service for 13 years." - OK, I'll be honest, this statement alone biased me against you, but I'll bite. "I can't believe that 1 in 1000 disks would be broken as a result of normal mail processing, even OCR machined mail, much less 1 in 100 or 1 in 50." -That is because the rates are likely higher. My wife's company ships DVD's as a competitor to Netflix and Gamefly, and Gamefly is 100% accurate in their complaint. The USPS machines eat the mailers, destroy the disks, and even if you attempt to 'package it right' the USPS sends your company's disks back to Netflix! "The Postal Service is an easy fall guy." - That is because, like most government entities, they are typically inefficient and ineffective in their duties. They are an easy fall guy because of their track record, not because someone just felt like blaming them. "Theft of such a magnitude is just not possible, not within the confines of the mail service." - Wrong. Gamefly got 19 people busted, and my wife has personally gotten 9 people busted in just the last year, 4 in one specific post office location. This isn't speculation, it's fact. "These people are honest and proud of it, except for the few inevitable bad apples." - Some, yes. My grandfather was the head of the Cleveland Post Office Union for 12 years, so I know both sides of this story, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that Gamefly is dead on in their suit. That said, that doesn't mean they will win, sadly.

This likely means something in my opinion. To me, it means Apple is charging resellers a very specific price, and Dell, HP and others are likely changing rates based on reseller/vendor. Can any vendors out there comment with some experience rather than my speculation?

Local: 2008 General Election - Allegheny County, PA - Straight Party Column, 163,376 Dem (65.09%), Libertarian 536 (.21%). State: Per the AFL/CIO page, 620,000 union members in PA, at least. By comparions, 200,000 people across the country are registered Libertarians? National: See above.

How do we blame George W. Bush for this when Barack Obama is the president now?

I still remember when my dad bought the Mac 128k. At the time I was blown away by the technology that was in that machine, which had an HD the size of my last paper for school...

We all know if he fails at anything he can just blame George Bush, and the media will eat it up. He got elected on hope, not policy. That means he doesn't have to deliver on anything, because losing hope isn't something most people blame on any one person. Despite all that, I truly hope he proves me wrong and actually becomes the first President (in my lifetime) to really do something.

Do you see extended support times in the instances where you need legitimate outside access to the PC in question? Also, what do you do when the "work-related" site gets infected and the user then uploads (unknowingly) the worm into your (poorly patched) network? Have any other users been burnt with this method?

What if the point of all these attacks isn't to steal passwords or credit card information or anything? What if the intent of this massive 'takeover' is to create a database of information, that stores oh let's say...Microsoft's encryption in relation to a specific terminal, in comparison to how the attackers know the system is truly identified? Would this allow them to brute force determine how Microsoft encrypts computer information on a broad, rather than granular spectrum? I mean, if you give me a database of information, and in one recordset I have the unencrypted records, and in recordset two I have encrypted records, couldn't I then start to break down the encryption process more easily based on the huge amount of data I have?