Hard to say. The Apple Store guy only had one in stock, and I took it. It was a bit frustrating at the time, but the quality of service I received at the store really mitigated my ire. But twice in as many years is too much. We're an all-Apple household and have been for years, but this sort of thing makes me wonder about the viability of their infrastructure components.

My first time machine failed almost 18 months to the day after I bought it. I took it to the Apple store, and they replaced it for me, no hassle. I took the new one home, plugged it in, and used it for sixteen months before it crapped out again, stone cold dead. This was two weeks ago. My MacBook Pro is in dire need of replacement, and I don't want to do that before I have a reliable backup of the system I have. I'm starting to think that Apple sacrificed quality in favor of ease of use and (relatively) low price. The triangle is classic, but I'm somewhat surprised that Apple, historically leaning toward quality and ease of use, damn the price, went this way.

We used to call the Taliban "freedom fighters" when they were trying to kick the Soviets out of their country.

Or they've decided that adapter licensing is much more profitable than cable licensing, and are revoking these licenses so they can issue more-profitable adapter licenses.

You, though, aren't a good fit for a social network. Freedom's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

If someone put you in their "BFF" circle, and you put them in your "Acquaintances" circle, do you really want them to see that and potentially move you into their "People to Stalk" circle?

It's probably a sign that Facebook is becoming mature, hitting their initial peak and losing a few users who didn't really understand it or need it in the first place. They'll probably lose quite a few users in the near future, settling back to a core set of users, though still over 100 million. If they provide useful functionality for people, they'll grow at a more reasonable rate and continue to mature. If they panic in the face of losing users and pull some BS maneuver and start blasting out spam, they'll die on the vine.

Are there any studies around the rise and fall of AOL and MySpace? Some enterprising college student should put that together.

They should get sponsorship money from Doritos and R.C. Cola.

In Korea, only old people use Dropbox.

[Sorry, I haven't been around in a while...]

More likely they said, "Hey, we're done with this moon survey mission and have a bunch of gas left. What do we do with this big collection of observation instruments? Oh, I know, let's send it out to a spot where it's good to put observatories."

Only they probably said it in Chinese.