As this story spreads you can bet a battalion of Attorney types gathering. What I find most disturbing, under logic like this A Stradivarius is also an agricultural product, Remember the former Nazi quote "I was just following orders"......once again common sense proves to be uncommon, Just My Take,,,

Incandescent lamps do have a few great qualities, cost effective accurate and consistent current limiting, in passive crossover and speaker / driver protection, test benches, transmitters, well head and regulator heaters,just to mention a few. they just suck for general lighting. Just hope the old government doesnâ(TM)t shoot us in the foot again

The first time I saw that label on a blow dryer I almost lost it, Take the damn labels off, If you’re really that stupid you don't belong in the gene pool. At four years of age I had a "Little Golden Book" (remember those?) featuring Donald Duck shoving a knife into a toaster, receptacle, lamp socket with the lightning bolts, glowing skeleton inside a silhouette, ya know, obvious results, Donald frazzled feathers spread out on his back with whiffs of smoke rising. Well I sure figured out that those were not good things to do and you didn't have to know how to read to get the message. I do not want to sound like a Nazi but our gene pool seriously needs a life guard, natural selection is now inoperative, Medical science with all the miracles and rewards, wonderful as it is has been circumventing Darwin for almost a century now, whats happening to our kids? The ever rising incidence of food allergies, ADHD, birth defects, asthma, neuro developmental disorders,autism. Blame it on pollution, chemistry, modern mass growing & food production these all sound like a good place to place the blame what is always left out, our egos and aspirations to preserve what would have been an unviable life. When I was born a infant to some degree had to prove itself of genetic viability through survival. Now when a life in reality is not viable what do we do... get ego's involved get the lawyers out, "Who's fault is this?" they cry! somebody will pay!!!! It's nobody’s "fault" it's nature way to fix the unrepairable, Nothing is always perfect! but no....It can't be the creator's better merciful choice NO It's got to be somebody's fault! enough Dollars will always make it right!!!! So we have infirm genes which should have been repaired through natural selection running amok, diluting our species ability develop successful genetic material for us to evolve, adapt and survive. Just trying to show 1 possible rational observation, I am a man of spirit and conscience, not an aspiring Nazi, sorry if it ruffles some feathers.

Amazon is a good vendor, outstanding service and to my experience a pleasure to deal with. I'm a child of the '50s and still carry the wide spread paranoia of the '60s, I don’t like anybody looking over my shoulder unless their a trusted pupil The fact that an open source distributor would stoop to such a "Microsquish" concept without a full disclosure is most disturbing, remember the concept of Linux and open source was to free us from the superfluous bullshit included with every windows version of anything. So Ubuntu is now off of any recommendation for my clients which is really ashamed considering all of the good work they have contributed, especially for the novice Linux user Is this bullshit going to be forwarded to the other Ubuntu based distros such as Mint etc ? Ubuntu needs to look back to disasters like Xandros, which was entirely too much like Windows.

For Mr Michael Lynton We all owe Mr Lynton a sincere debt of gratitude for his feelings on the internet, perhaps that explains the following facts of which Sony was found guilty and fined. After all, Sony technology is responsible for the development of "Root Kit" and "Drop Loader" technology as part of their original copy protect scheme. This Sony technology is the preferred delivery technique of almost all current malware, spy ware, Trojans, remote hijacking, spy bot, rogue and now BIOS persistent virus and remote system admin exploits. Thank You MR. Lynton for investing Sony's infinite resources and expertise to develop new ways of depriving computer owners the ability to control their systems, monitor hijacked ports and API invisible applications. Perpetuating the current epidemic of malicious rogue applications. Considering the billions you have cost business and consumers world wide in lost revenues, downtime, remediation costs, compromised national security of many nations, I think Sony Pictures needs to go back to 16MM film, be deprived of the internet and digital production resource. You should get an all expense paid extended holiday at Quantico to discover the delights of water boarding first hand and perhaps a cattle prod enema might also be in order.

As a kid in Chicago I began playing in blues clubs in 1963, if you were within city limits, you better have a card from musicians local 708, your ass and instruments /equipment would get busted up if you didn't. If you worked a major venue and even touched an extension cord or one of your amp racks and were not a member of IBEW local 134, don't expect to find an inflated tire or 1 piece of glass in any of your vehicles . And don't even think of carrying your personal amp or instrument into that venue unless you were also a member of teamsters local 714 or you will regain consciousness in an orthopedic surgical recovery room. Everybody has to get their cut of your sweat and dreams, thats how it works, you do the work they get the dough, even if you were going to do the gig free, just for fun, yea.... And while these thieving bastards were hustling us little guys playing for the door at some neighborhood bar, some sister act was lip syncing to tape at Arie Crown Theater for 30 bucks a head, that was a lot of money in the '60s. ASAP, BMI, RIAA, No matter what letters are chosen, you would be far better off dealing with the Mafia, at least then you would really know what the deal is and they keep their word and protect their investment in you. Ellis was a very dear longtime friend of mine that passed away last year, the world knew him as Bo Diddly, he did a tremendous number of tunes, covered hundreds of times by other artists, you know what he got.......NOTHING !!!! At 69 years of age he was still touring over 300 nights a year, just to stay afloat, he was tired, ill and still going. Those sonsabitches robbed him blind. I miss him. The thing is Bo's story isn't unique, it's typical and legal at this point in time. Ambiguity is how government, legal and cooperate structures empower themselves, look at the wall street BONE US were all paying for incompetence. An HST quote which unfortunately now fits much more than just the music entertainment fields. "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Hunter S. Thompson

Yes several months ago a rootkit which was completely invisible to API appeared, I haven't heard any more but I'm sure we all will soon. You mentioned Anti virus and Spy bot is this a fix that suddenly popped up on the web with a warning of eminent danger? If so you have been victimized. Trust anyone that comes knocking on your display about as much as the guy selling timeshares in Venezuela. Before you get frantic about dying drives etc unplug the net cable or disable the wireless, reboot. note the response, now plug in the net and open your browser, was your home page redirected? If so your definitely infected. At this point if you do not have the MS recovery console installed go to the MS site, download and install, this can save some stomach acid if things get dicey. I found a great free utility which has rooted out some pretty tenacious critters, stfw for avast!free and follow the instructions, you should tend the initial scan, follow the suggestions. I found them about 8 weeks ago and have been nothing but impressed, so impressed I bought the pro edition for windoze and Linux, so far it's pulled 13 XP-Pro and 1 millennium installation from the bit bucket. You may find the report surprising. I bet the system has survived, now right click my computer>properties>performance>advanced> it may be called page file memory or virtual memory, turn it off. Now reboot, after everything is settled in right click on the desktop, select properties> disable the screen saver and apply. open windows explorer, right click c drive> properties>tools>scandisk attend to any inequities suggestions will be provided, once this is complete defrag c drive, it may take a good while. I admit the MS defrag utility is almost as dangerous as accumulated fragmentation but were biting the bullet here. If you do lot of graphics or maintain a huge dynamic database disk keeper would be a good investment. Once defrag is complete go back to my computer and turn the page file memory on but set the maximum and minimum limits to the same value, generally this will be 1 ½ times the ram, windows dialog will usually suggest a number. Now this may sound a bit convoluted but it assures an optimized section of c drive will always be assigned to the swap file, every micro second counts. If the above solved the problem great, practice better browsing, trust no on knocking on your CRT, visit Tech Republic and view some white papers on enhancing XP performance, disabling un necessary services and enhancing security. Also take this opportunity to create a restore point and recovery DVD's I cant say that this is definitely what you are dealing with, I can say that since November I have seen a bloom of rouge virus scams such as I have never seen before, Vista Anti Virus 2009 for example by time line came in disguised as a Java update. It certainly could be a hardware issue but drives usually don't fail like light bulbs, there will be I/O errors logged, if you have a drive copy utility clone the drive, a new 80 G IDE is $40.00 if you don't buy it right. At least the question would be answered.