A few rebuttles to your comment and others on this thread. Downloaded plugins and such are not necessary on a website for malware to transfer. All that is necessary is for an advertisement to load which contains the means for a cross site scripting attack. You don't even have to click on anything once you visit the site.

And yes, these attacks happen on totally legitimate sites that are not very discriminating on the ads they run, or whose admins do not properly defend their server against worms/ teh h4x.

XSS attacks are the #1 growing attack technique by far. As long as there is money to be made in infecting computers, techniques will get more advanced as offense is always ahead of defense in terms of Malware/AV software. Simple image and video content is all you need to transfer malware.

I wish it was as easy as saying "Obey these 3 rules and you will not be infected", but that is simply not the case anymore. The people that write this software are honest to God,legitimate, Software Developers. You don't have to like em, but you do have to respect em.

The only way to be 100% certain that you do not end up with malware at the end of the day is not AV software, it's not being cautious, it's not using a mac or linux, it's virtualized environments. And one of these days, even that might not be a panacea.

You just nailed it.
There could be a thousand different reasons why Rom chips would be superior to an optical disk, and in the end it would not matter. Disks are cheap to burn, and you don't have to worry about commodity price fluctuations. Price to manufacture is the only concern that trumps all others. 60 dollars per new game is high enough, and game companies are not going to decrease their margins on games, nor will distributors or retailers. Any increase in price will be passed to the consumer. Let's face it: We all hate load times. But we've gotten used to them.

No doubt, developers of software don't want to have to spend all day trying to re-create and fix bugs; think of it from their standpoint. They are being simultaneously tasked with making the program do all the awesome things the marketing department dreams up, but be completely and totally idiot proof. These two tasks are mutually exclusive. That having been said, internally, they are financial motivated to do so. I am in a Q-A type environment, and I get a chance to document failures in our software on a fairly regular basis. The key to the entire process is working through the channels. I have been with this organization for about a year, they are comfortable with my skills, but at the same time, the guy that wrote the app doesn't know me from Adam. So you document, reproduce, escalate through the proper channels. I gaurantee you, when you start documenting that the error is costing the company money, and management is aware, it gets worked on. And support ticket systems are ALL about determining what is costing what amount of money to the company.

Word up. I've been filling up and then trimming down my Sansa mp3 player, still haven't maxed out the 8gb with rockin tunes, but sooner or later I will have to pick up a Micro SD chip for it. That said, my first experience with Micro SD was for my DS loader, and I swear, I sat there looking at it for about 20 minutes, in awe. 2 gigs on something a quarter the size of a penny, half as thick? The fact that so many people in this thread are nitpicking is just further proof that the future is now. As far as I am concerned, the USB Flash drive is what the Floppy disk always aspired to be. The unfortunate downside to Micro SD is that it is simply TOO small. Too easy to lose/Break. First HD? 20 mb, and I don't even want to talk about how much it cost. At the time however, it was glorious.

Yes, because right now, after bailing out the financial system, and the auto industry, some industries, like the multi billion dollar security sector, are feeling left out. Where's our share of the grift?

I like to name my machines after Batman Characters The file server is Alfred, the most production server is Batman, the backup is Nightwing, and the clients are Robin, Batgirl, Huntress, and various other past Batman sidekicks. As someone said, I think it has more to do with A: whimsy, and B: a passive aggressive means of defying our corporate overlords. Naming conventions are fun.

These cats were getting paid to say whatever their bosses told them to. I understand that you are primarily condemning Comcast here, but really? Sticking it to a phone monkey? I've been there man, it's a bad enough job as it is. Fun fact: If you sense that you have gotten a phone monkey who knows what they are talking about, speaking strictly in hypotheticals is an excellent way to get solid information off a solid rep.