You're totally right. Better to paralyze a few weaklings if it means I won't get the flu.

Sounds awful, but vaccines weeding out the unfit is clearly the right thing to do.

This settlement should be paid with pictures of real and/or virtual currency, and pictures of clothes for real or imagined pets.

would it really? If it's impossible to produce enough to meet demand, and America certainly doesn't have the infrastructure to support iPod+iPad+iPhone production, then Apple would be losing even more to cheaper competitors running Android.

So there's the initial loss, from increased labor costs. Tack on the increased materials cost, because everything comes from China. Add in the time to get the parts by boat, because they're not going to air-freight the parts to produce millions of iDevices. Add in the opportunity cost, from competition (made in China, and much cheaper) eating Apple's lunch. Add in the cost if China decides it's time to scale back on providing eare earth minerals to foreigners in some sort of protectionist bid. It's a lot more than the $70 that some yahoo thinks it could cost.

Sure, you can bury your head in the sand and pretend that it's just the labor that's more expensive, but Apple knows better and so do thousands of other CEOs and American companies that make none of their products in America.

Or maybe you and some other /. pundits are right, and America really does have a chance to win back Apple's manufacturing business ;)

Ahh, that explains why America is such an electronics manufacturing powerhouse. And with all those wonderful American subsidies designed to prevent outsourcing to hostiles like BRIC, I expect (based on your info) we'll be seeing a massive influx of manufacturing from Apple, Dell, HP, et al.

you realize that Apple relies on cheap Chinese slave labor to make iPads at $499/ea, right? And if Apple pulled out of China they'd have nowhere else to go. America isn't an option because of labor regulations and an expensive workforce. iPads would be up at $1499 and still losing money, iPhones would be $1000 subsidized and America's economy would take a larger nosedive than China's. Brazil? They've already tried that and it's as bad as America.

Then there's the 99% likelihood that China would continue producing iPhones/iPads/etc and selling them everywhere but America. If Apple pulled out of China they'd be out of manufacturing AND out of a market.

I'm making a note here, "HUGE SUCCESS!"

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction with Russian nuclear engineering these days. Doing what they must because they can.

As others have mentioned, Gargoyle is a superb alternative to Tomato (which is fairly limited in comparison) or OpenWRT (which is a bit frustrating for newbs). Gargoyle gives you the best of OpenWRT while also providing a useful, easy and intuitive user interface. LUCI is a bit rough :)

For the record, DD-WRT sucks monkey balls in comparison. I've been using my G300NH for months of uptime, heavy (multi-TB downloads, plenty of bittorrent uploads) usage, while SSH-ing into my work and home computers at need. No problems, no hassles. DD-WRT, which I ran for years on my other routers, and followed devel on too, required monthly reboots and tinkering to get anywhere. On the G300NH DDWRT is a piece of poo.

TSA FTW.

Absolutely top notch. I've been running mine for months with Gargoyle Router, a pretty nice upgrade from the standard OpenWRT unless you need to micro every last setting, but then you'd probably ssh and use the shell anyways, right?

Another superb router is the TP-Link WR1043ND, it's got 8MB flash and is stable after many months of uptime on Gargoyle, even without quite as much raw power as the Buffalo. Both have 32MB of RAM.

No matter what router you get, try Gargoyle or OpenWRT before settling. DD-WRT isn't what is used to be.

add in the classic cracking/yellow plastic on prior models, the crappy 15-bit TN screens they've used in the past (fixed under performance guarantees, IIRC, after legal action), too much thermal paste causing massive overheating, nVidia gfx chips cracking and falling off, exploding batteries, cooling ports blocked by plastic film and numerous HW failures-by-design - well, it's no wonder he's looking for a heavy duty warranty.

I'd recommend a Dell, if you can stand the hardware - their NBD warranties kick ass. You can practically (ab)use the hardware for anything except hammering fenceposts & they'll replace it for you. Plus there's the data recovery option, might be worth it if you're special enough to keep important data on a laptop.