FYI, I do believe Arch linux does the perpetual upgrade thing.

I think you're looking to the wrong people. No offense, but Best Buy is the sleaziest computer store I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. In contrast, I had an iPod where the scroll wheel would work about half the time. I brought it in to an AppleStore, and even though *I couldn't reproduce the bug*, they trusted me, and swapped it out for a refurbished iPod. Similarly, when my power adapter gave out after two years of constant abuse, I just scheduled an appointment, came in, and swapped it.

Take my anecdotes how you will, but Best Buy is the one with the record of cheating its customers, not Apple.

No, there is not a great opportunity, as cities often sell local monopolies to telcos. This is very anticompetitive and IMO one of the greatest obstacles to the advancement of broadband.

Don't get an abit motherboard, or at least don't get their Intel P35-based boards. I can't speak to the rest of their stuff, but putting my Abit IP35-based computer to sleep and waking it back up actually *disables* the VM extensions, either freezing upon waking if any were running, or ensuring none start until I power off (reset doesn't cut it).

Other than that, I recommend a Core 2 Quad with lots and lots of RAM, and an array of 1TB SATA drives to RAID.

Also of note: Windows 7 doesn't let you use a real hard drive partition; it needs a hard disk file, at least on KVM, which is pretty awesome.

You can sell a car for parts, but who'd pay for a bunch of stolen .dll's?

The practical difference is that a stolen car deprives another person of a car that is presumably the owner's rightful property. In the case of an OS, the material cost for the data is essentially zero; the vast majority of the value of the product comes from the R&D that produced it.

If the cost of materials and assembly for cars were not a significant part of the cost, don't you think we'd have mass-produced open-source cars by now? Not to mention car thieves would be virtually irrelevant compared to, say, counterfeit car manufacturers.

I actually talked with Randy Katz about RAID, as I was in one of his classes at Berkeley. As late as last May, it still meant "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".

Sorry to burst your bubble.