I've had Cox for coupla months now and I find it pretty hassle-free. Call their number, a person answers quickly. Phone and ISP service work as advertised. Their website seem bit flakey, but could be my browser setting. And no surprise in billing so far.

The other option is AT&T for my area, so it's no contest really, but I figure a little 'kudo' for decent business practice might not be a bad thing in this ocean of nasty monopolies.

We have used a lot of WD internal drives in our workstations for the last year (few hundred machines) and the reliability has been outstanding (especially compared to the Maxtors before that, but it was Maxtors worse period). However we have had very bad experiences with their external Mybook series. I spoke with a support dude for the biggest computer store in my home country and he said the same, the external drives are dying a lot. Probably it's the power supplies or heat as the drives in side them are the same.

You had a broken/faulty unit, this can happen with any kind of disk. Even cheap USB flash sticks easily last over a year of the kind of use you describe. Intel X25-M SSDs for example, are specced for 24/7 use with 100gb of data being written to disk EVERY DAY and this is a consumer MLC SSD. Enterprise SLC disks are much more resilient then that (albeit a lot more expensive).

That's not how it works (from memory, so this may contain errors...).

If they fail to comply with the takedown notice, then they lose their safe harbour protection and become liable for any and all infringing content that they host. The person whose content they removed my file a counter notice, and then they can reinstate it. If the person issuing the takedown notice believes that it was valid then they can pursue the claim in court. If the court issues an injunction then, once again, Google must take the content down.

This is where it gets interesting, however. Both the takedown notice and the counter notice are issued under penalty of perjury. If you knowingly provide incorrect information on either then you are guilty of perjury. If you just made stuff up and didn't check whether it was true, you may also be guilt of barratry, fraud, or possibly both. I wouldn't like to be the IFPI at this point. I would love to be their lawyers though; they just charged their client for something that is going to generate them a lot more revenue in legal fees.

Uh, do you work for Apple, or are you just....not that bright?

"don't want to mess with the filesystem" - wait, what? who does that these days, and not only that, how is it a requirement of a Windows computer? at no point is this ever required.
"don't want a browser vulnerable to malware" - you can choose any browser you want on Windows, no-one is required to use IE.
"don't want to mess with drivers" - honestly, when was the last time you had to do this? Since XP and later generally shit just works.
"(or worse, dick around with file sharing over a network)" - uh, since when is this complicated. i open explorer, i click another computer on my network, get prompted for a username, i enter it, and it works - it's so simple it's not even funny, and it's pretty comparable to networking on OSX as a matter of fact.

Your "arguments" aren't really valid, it's as though the last time you used Windows was back at version 3.11. Either that or you just enjoy spreading FUD in service to the mighty Steve Jobs. I'm getting so tired of people parroting arguments against Windows that haven't been valid for many, many years.

At which point, the files are included in C:\i386, and a quick trip to Start>Control Panel>Features and Programs will install them.

Well, I’m currently looking at version 2.6.0, and the layers menu is a menu called Layer.

If you mean the layers dialog window, it’s normally docked in the “Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo” dialog window, and if that isn’t visible, you can open it from the Windows menu.

Um, yes...

Have scientists been able to throw together basic ingredients of living things and have the resulting pile resemble anything even close to life? Even in perfectly favorable lab settings?

yep

(Depending on how you define "life", of course)