I've had at&t gigabit fiber for about 6 months now, and it is absolutely fantastic. Latency and jitter are just as good as the enterprise offerings, I haven't had any downtime in the past 6 months, and I get 500+ Mb/s speeds to most speedtest.com sites in California. But yes, the copper based U-verse really does suck, and customer support is terrible across the consumerland products. Though I did get lucky and got a really great installer.

Source of the magic smoke identified?

Generating power by generating power. Brilliant!

And yes....it's "been in the bathroom". :P

I bought a Transformer Prime, really just on a whim, I just wanted to play with a tablet. I was honestly worried that it would end up just collecting dust, but it turns out I use it all the time. It's almost always on the coffee table, and when we have guests over, it invariably gets passed around the group as people look up random facts, or showing people Youtube videos. One thing that has become really popular at my house, is using Youtube in Chrome to remote control the youtube app on the PS3 on the big screen TV. Passing around a laptop is awkward, and no one really wants to hand someone else their phone. But passing around a tablet just *feels right*. And of course, when alone, relaxing on the couch with a tablet is quite addicting.

Lol...SaladShooter....FTW!

Ya, its the 5 gallon bucket effect. A small child is much more likely to die in a 5 gallon bucket with a few inches of water in it than many of the scary local news stories like cell phone radiation and power lines. Its the things that kill few people, but can't me mitigated by individuals that freak people out.

Especially when you look at the loss of life and property caused by other natural phenomenon. If sinkholes in Florida are such a problem that we question the rationality of building homes there, then surely no one should live in Southern California where loss of life and property are several orders of magnitude higher than that caused by Florida sinkholes due to wild fires and earthquakes.

Seriously. Mod parent up.

I really wonder if any other nuclear nation has the stones to launch a retaliatory nuclear response if PRNK were to nuke another country?

I heard that they're getting out of the socketed CPU biz. All CPUs will be soldered directly to the board....but I had not heard they were planning on ceasing production all together. If true, I will be very sad.

I used to feel the same as you about bios updates....don't do it unless its broken, but Intel has the process so silky smooth now, its just standard practice for me to update the bios on any Intel board that I work on. Don't do much individual desktop work anymore, but it still happens occasionally.

Not a bad idea. I'm rather curious myself. Was it flashed with a Windows executable? Or from a boot disc? USB flash drive or cd-r?

I have never had a problem since switching to using only Intel boards with Intel bios. The upgrade process usually goes quite well (I've probably flashed 100 or so Intel boards over the past 3 or 4 years) and if there is ever a problem, it automatically rolls the changes back. Out of that 100 or so bios flashes, 0 have been bricked. That being said, when it comes to consumer grade boards, especially when they're out of warranty, I just assume I'm on my own and if something like that happens, its off to EBay or Craigslist.

Are frequently caused by the devices installed to prevent them. Quite ironical.

AKA, the new normal.