Hard drives fail. A lot. At about 3% per year according to one study. They're one of the, if not the, most likely to fail components. Given the moving parts and speeds they move, that's not completely unexpected. In fact, if you count heat issues caused by broken fans, I'll bet you could trace a *majority* of hardware issues to moving parts.

You may have been lucky lately, but that's all it is. You're a statistical outlier. Hard drives are just not very reliable at the best of times, no matter the brand.

I realize everyone's piling on to you for using RAID 0, but they're absolutely right. Think of this way: Hard drives are one of the most common failure points for any PC. This shouldn't be surprising--moving parts bring into play all sorts of wear and tear issues that simply cannot be avoided in the long-enough term future. But when you set up a RAID array, you're courting trouble because each drive significantly increases your potential points of failure. If you have 6 drives, and each one has a 90% chance to be functioning properly at the 3 year mark, that's 47% chance that at least *one* will fail in that time frame. And with a non-parity raid setup, all it takes is one failure to cost you everything. Striped raid is great for increasing your speed and storage, but it comes at a huge reliability cost. Next time, assign one drive to parity and you'll be much, much safer. Even if one 1 failing is a likely event, 2 failing simultaneously will be very unlikely.

The iPhone 4s is down to just 1. Maybe that's just normal market forces at play, but the flash memory is now made by Hynix.

There were only 2 Samsung components in the iPhone 4, and the 4s is down to just 1--the A5 processor itself (the flash memory is Hynix). I'm sure in the long run Apple probably wants to find an alternate supplier for the processor as well, but TI's offerings aren't as impressive atm.

There may have been a time when that was true (and not just a rumor about why they chose IPS for the iPad), but I doubt it's the case anymore.

I suppose anytime you want to write something in your own handwriting or create some kind of art you do it by fingerpainting. After all, big fat sausage fingers are all you really need, right? Of course if you're like me, you get tired of washing paint off your fingers all day long and listening to bank tellers complain that they can't read the amount on your checks. That's why some crazy people are of the opinion that perhaps there are occasions when fingers aren't ideally suited to all the sorts of tasks you might want to perform on a piece of paper and/or a hand-held computing device based on a paper metaphor.

Old devices had styli because the screens were resistive and needed pressure to register touches. Since pressure is a function of force per area, a smaller area (tip of the stylus vs tip of the finger) needs less force applied in order to register touches. It was a necessity that capacitive screens did away with by making fingertips practical.

But just because they are no longer a necessity, doesn't mean they aren't actually still useful for some tasks. If you want to do artwork and or handwriting on a tablet, a stylus is still the best way to go. Just because a screen is capacitive like your iOS devices screen doesn't mean you can't use a stylus if and when it's the right tool for the job--you just need a capacitive stylus.

If you weren't of a mind to do any handwriting/art on your tablet/phone whatever, then simply don't ever use the stylus. Continue using your fingers and you'll enjoy the same user experience you would with any other device. Having the extra choice won't hurt you.

You can buy a capacitive stylus and it will work just fine if all you want it for is *note taking*. The only reason you need true pressure sensitivity is for art purposes--where you can control the thickness of a line, for instance, by how hard you press. There are any number of companies who are currently extremely eager to sell you a stylus for an iPad or iPad 2--just look for them and you'll find them.

""The IGZO technology is perfect in that it offers near-OLED power consumption while having a lower cost and thinness that is only 25% greater than OLED, based on our checks," said Jeffries analyst Peter Misek."

So let me get this right. It's 25% thicker than OLED and uses MORE power, but it costs less to make. On the face of it, that doesn't seem like a very Appley component choice. On the other hand, getting high quality (Super) AMOLED screens means dealing with Samsung, something which Apple doesn't seem to want to do at the moment for silly grudge purposes. So the question becomes, "Does Apple want to sacrifice product quality in exchange for a small savings and sticking it to Samsung?"

If Steve Jobs were still around, I'd say "Yes."--he had a well noted penchant for carrying a grudge to extremes. I'd like a bigger screen as much, or more than the next guy, but I'm not 100% sure how plausible this whole story seems to me in a post-Steve Apple era. On the other, other hand, it might have more to do with the fact that Samsung is too big to bully, and Apple likes to have total control over it's supply chains.

On the subject of freedom of religion, Thomas Jefferson once said "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

I've always thought that was a pretty good quote--that it more or less summarized what the Libertarian view *ought* to be. People should be free to do what they wish, so long as it neither breaks my back nor picks my pocket. But the fact is, the people who call themselves Libertarians these days are generally whiny self-entitled jerks who don't seem to have any understanding larger than themselves. Basically, they're still stuck with the same petulant mentality the rest of us had as teenagers, but thankfully grew out of.

Under that Jeffersonian maxim, your rights end when your actions have consequences for other people. When you don't get vaccinated, you put yourself at risk. Just like driving without a seat-belt. So far, no problems. But you also put other people at risk. Organ transplant recipients and AIDS patients who are immunosuppressed and people with allergies (usually egg allergies) who can't get vaccinated depend on the herd immunity provided by having the rest of us vaccinated. As long as everyone else is immune, there's no one to spread diseases to them.

If you choose not to vaccinate yourself or your child, you don't just put yourself or your child at risk, you put all those other people at risk too. It's only a small amount of risk, but in the aggregate it matters. It's just like driving drunk--everyone else on the road is a little less safe because of your actions. Maybe it'll amount to nothing, but those risks weren't yours to take. You don't have that right and it's the governments job, on behalf of the rest of us, to make damn sure you know it.

No, I believe he said the "intellectual equivalent". And also, nobody said anything about "mandating" anything, nor "drugs". Incentivizing vaccine use is hardly the same as "Forcibly injecting drugs".

An even bigger mistake was assuming he was serious. Obvious troll is obvious.

Sure, this is the basis for a police state, but only because its the basis upon which all criminal law is founded. Like drunk driving, your rights become curtailed when they may unduly cause risk to others besides just yourself. When you choose not to vaccinate, you do not simply risk your own health and safety (or more likely, the health and safety of your child). In actuality, you endanger many others--such those who are immunosuppresed or, by way of an egg allergy, unable to be vaccinated. These people depend on the herd immunity offered by the rest of us being vaccinated. By what right should their health be risked from the actions of others?

Of course its all a moot discussion anyways, because in this instance nobody is being forced to do anything for the greater good. They are being enticed--by financial incentive.

And more importantly, they might have lost potential *buyers*. They want to be bought up by someone else, and that can't happen while there's a tentative deal on the table with another company. So wasting all this time and not having the merger go through was a potential risk for T-Mobile, and they can't afford to take that kind of risk so the big player has to pick up the tab on it.

Also, it's not $4b cash, its compensation valued at $4 billion, I think like half of it is spectrum--which if you'll recall the 700mhz auction is super pricey these days.

They're pricing is amazing if you go with the prepaid Walmart-only plan. Even though you have to get the starter kit from Walmart, you can bring your own phone. For 30 bucks a month, you can get Unlimited data (throttled after 5 gigs, but still much better than AT&T's best data plan on a post-paid account), Unlimited texts and 100 minutes voice (who needs voice minutes when you have data anyways).

Buy your Android smartphone of choice, pop in the sim and you're saving ~70 bucks *a month* compared to AT&T's cheapest plan with similar features (more voice minutes, less data).

The only reason I don't dump my iPhone and do exactly that is that, because its prepaid, you can't expect to be grandfather into this plan. So if I make the switch, I not only pay an ETF on my AT&T account (which selling my iPhone 4s would cover and still leave enough for half the cost of a new phone or more) but then I can never get my unlimited data plan back. Even though I haven't jumped on it, its a pretty compelling offer.

They almost certainly contracted a private sector business to do this for them, and this was the bill they got.