With no-name Chinese manufacturers churning out 7", $80 android tablets by the millions, somehow I don't think this is true.

I'm not sure you understand how percentages work.

Here are the hard numbers for anyone who's curious:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html

- Intel 0.45% (against 1.73%)

- Samsung 0.48% (N/A)

- Corsair 1.05% (against 2.93%)

- Crucial 1.11% (against 0.82%)

- OCZ 5.02% (against 7.03%)

Return rates specifically for OCZ models:

- 40.00% for the OCZ Petrol 64 GB

- 39.42% for the OCZ Petrol 128 GB

- 30.85% for the OCZ Octane 128 GB SATA II

- 29.46% for the OCZ Octane 64 GB SATA II

- 9.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB 3.5"

- 9.59% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB

- 6.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB

- 5.43% for the OCZ Agility 3 240 GB

- 5.12% for the OCZ Vertex Plus 128 GB

Also if you have a Crucial M4 make sure you have the correct firmware as Crucial keeps releasing/shipping units with buggy firmware updates that can brick your drive.

OCZ Vertex drives have had a consistently 5% return rate (that's 1 in 20) since May 2012 now. I would stay the hell away from the Vertexes in particular, as they're closer to 7%, the company as a whole is closer to 5%. Granted, that's return rate, not confirmed failure, but a return rate that's been consistently ten times higher than the rest of their competition should give you pause when buying cheap hardware. Compare to 0.5% for manufacturers like Intel and Samsung.

Nokia had a hostile takeover by Microsoft, I think Dell's case is that they completely failed to enter the Android market with any sort of innovative or well marketed product. Nokia was doing just fine until they burnt their non-windows phone product lines to the ground.

My observations have shown that the upper middle class, "work hard, play hard" group smoke a whole lot of weed. In particular, those in Buisness Administration and Sales. Racecars, sailboats, girlfriends, houses and the lifestyle that comes with that can easily top half a million dollars. If you ignore debt the average American family probably owns close to a quarter million dollars in assets (including their house).

Yep. Obviously during the winter, cloudy days and at night you produce less to no energy, but you can certainly drive your air conditioning unit on hot days at a bare minimum, which is the primary cost of residential electricity here in Texas.

House was built in 1922, windows (single pane! argh!) were all sealed shut to keep the hot air out (and/or cool air in). Actually it would be really amusing to keep my computer outside in a doghouse outside, with just HDMI, eithernet, and USB running inside. With widespread adoption of thunderbolt just around the corner, I suppose you could limit that to a single cable.

The big factor for me is: how much heat does it put out? Texas in the summer can be brutal, and anything to keep my office half a degree cooler helps tremendously, especially in the era of multiple monitors. Higher efficiency = less waste heat.

Can we keep the reddit imgur spam on reddit please? If you can't explain your point in complete paragraphs without an image macro for assistance, you might want to look elsewhere.

Steam are not only douches, they are crooks.

Sure, but at least they're really nice about it.

I have yet to find someone who will take money to fix the DX11 bug in Mumble.

And yet, if you dig straight down anywhere on planet earth 50 ft, it's a comfortable 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Much like your kitchen stove and living room, the stove can get very hot, but has very little effect on the other due to differences in thermal mass.
 
Somewhere near the bottom of the crater, there's a very good chance that there's cracks or caves soaked in organically rich liquid water somewhere under the surface. That kind of stable incubator is better suited for life than the six week old sandwich you left in the fridge since last year.

Crystal Forest is supposed to have SSL acceleration built in. Ivy Bridge (2012) has AES acceleration built in on midrange i5s and up, and I think AES was supported by some processors as early as Sandy Bridge (2011). Crystal Forest is a platform rather than microarchitecture, and I'm not sure exactly when it will be released.

That, of course, presumes he's actually being falsely accused.

Innocent until proven guilty. That is, here in the states anyways. Besides the philosophical reasoning behind that statement, it gives the accused a proper fighting chance. People who are guilty tend to be very exceedingly guilty; there are very few violent criminal cases where someone was only marginally or technically guilty, and in that case we err on the side of "beyond a reasonable doubt". Removing someone's freedom without erring on the side of caution sets a poor precedent for us all.