Since your major partition is HFS+, I recommend DiskWarrior (http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/). I've used it professionally for over ten years, and it still does the best job at finding, fixing, and reporting corrupted files on HFS disks.

I read these books, too, when I was a boy. Readers should be prepared for the racial, sexual, and social attitudes of 1930's America, though.

I grew up in Silicon Valley. I will be 59 at the end of this month. I'm an African-American male who has worked his way up in the tech industry from a computer operator to the owner/operator of his own tech consulting firm and "beyond"...

The industry here is the closest thing to a meritocracy I've ever experienced. If you're an entrepreneur worth exploiting here, you will be exploited. Anyone with a good idea can get a hearing as long as they know how to present it to the right people in the right way. I can honestly say that the stakes here are too high for racism to interfere.

My experience was that I was competing against kids whose parents were among the pioneers in the industry. Most black kids were excluded from college by economic circumstance as well as bias when I was growing up. Kids whose parents worked for nascent enterprises like Intel and HP and Fairchild and Apple had--and still have--a leg up on everyone else. The children of BSEE's have more of a chance to become BSEE's than the children of carpenters or dock workers. That's just the way of the world. But I had a knack for the industry, and I got in on merit... and luck.

My son is one of the few kids in our area--black or white--who had an internet connection in his home by the late-eighties. He was one of the few kids in our neighborhood who had a personal computer at his disposal. He didn't nerd out, but he had the opportunity if he'd wanted to pursue it. That's the biggest factor in this; if your parents are nerdy, it's likely you'll be nerdy, too. The lack of access to college among Black Americans before the Civil Rights Movement was probably the single most formidable impediment to the fostering of significant numbers of Black Tech Entrepreneurs. If your parents don't know Avogadro from an avocado, it's unlikely you will either--no matter what color you are.

The current political attitude toward funding education makes it likely that things will stay that way unless people demand change.

Your experience with the AirPort base station is unique, AFAIK. However, your charge that the "only times Apple admit(ted) something outright" is flat-out false. The iBook G3 logic board, certain iMac power supplies, and iMac/eMac problems directly analogous to the Dell situation were all acknowledged and addressed aggressively by Apple.

I've been an Apple Authorized Service provider since 2005. Apple had the "capacitor plague" problem with certain iMac and eMac models. Apple acknowledged the problem, and customers were authorized to come to me for a free repair for as long as three years after date-of-purchase if the warranty had run out. Those repairs constituted a good part of my work from 2005 through the middle of 2008. Every customer--especially the ones out-of-warranty, were grateful. I made a point of telling them that the problem wasn't restricted to Apple machines, and I directed them to the Wikipedia entry on "capacitor plague."

I was on the AirPort team from 1999-2001. I heard not one word about thermal problems with graphite base stations. I did the build acceptance and functional testing on AirPort in the first version of Mac OS X. I also performed automated and manual usability testing with dial-up, my own Earthlink account, and a Graphite base station. That base station worked constantly--day and night--for over a year. It was still working when I left.

Fujitsu is doing Apple a great big favor. Losing this suit would be the best thing to happen to the company in this historic product stumble:

There's a five year-old MadTV skit touting a mythical cross between an iPod and a feminine sanitary product--and it's called iPad. The Colbert Report just joked about calling it the "TamPod." The obligatory Downfall/Hitler mash-up is as devastating a critique of the product's capabilities as you could find in an industry magazine.

Word of warning, though. Apple is at its best when it's fallen flat on its face. The Apple ///c was followed by the Mac. iTools was followed by .Mac. The Mac Portable was followed by the PowerBook 100. The Cube was followed by the Power Macintosh G4 (Quicksilver).

Wait a year...

Apple used to leak like a sieve. We employees used to read MacWeek to find out what the agenda for new projects were. There's a reason you can date PC laptops within six months of the release of Apple ones and I think we can guess why that is.

The engine of Apple's economic success is innovation. Unfortunately, there are companies sitting on pins-and-needles waiting for that next idea so it can be copied and capitalized upon. Secrecy maximizes Apple's advantage when their products come to market. That's not an opinion; it's an observable phenomenon--Stock Price Pre-Jobs vs. Stock-Price Post-Jobs.

And part of that success is keeping their mouth's shut until it's time.

Nicotine is a bio-hazard. According to the Wikipedia entry for nicotine, "spilling an extremely high concentration of nicotine onto the skin can result in intoxication or even death since nicotine readily passes into the bloodstream from dermal contact."

That's why cleaning a contaminated machine involves a lot of time, effort, material, and preparation. Isopropyl alcohol is the most effective agent for removing it, and it takes a lot of alcohol. You end up with a poisonous mess, not to mention the filth that's attracted to it.

It is a nasty job, and it has the potential to make the technician performing it ill.

The decision to void a covered machine is on a literal case-by-case basis. If I can attribute a machine's failure to something other than the smoke, I'll do it. And I'd definitely charge the customer for the cleaning. And if I refuse to repair a covered machine because it's filthy, maybe another technician would agree to do it. But Apple doesn't require anyone to jeopardize their health and well-being to clean a filthy machine.

Inferior RAM is the leading cause of kernel panics. And drives are rated by Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF). Buy a cheaply-made drive and it's going to fail more quickly than a better-quality drive. Bad RAM can cause enough data corruption to scramble a hard drive. Parts installed incorrectly can lead to shorts or physical damage.

For instance, if you install a 7200-RPM SATA drive in a machine that came with a 5400-RPM drive, you've exceeded the specs of the machine as sold. If the faster drive isn't supported and something goes wrong, you're out of luck.

As I said, if you don't have the original parts, you're out of luck.

I'd be stupid not to check. I always ask if any modifications have been made to the machine. If the original parts are available, I swap them in and test. If you don't have the original parts, you're out of luck. If you do have them and the original parts work, you're out of luck. If the machine doesn't work with the original parts replaced, then the problem is attributable to something else and is covered.

As Apple's representative to the customer, I owe the company and the customer my best effort