The reason there's an Australian accent over the top is probably because you're watching it in Australia, where, because they've dubbed the narrative, the broadcaster is allowed to classify it as "local content"
They do that in the UK as well. It's actually a better show that way; it loses some on the US-style "shazzam!!!" that is popular and replaces it with a more BBC-like mellow presentation. It comes off quite well; I grabbed the U.S. season one off bittorrent a while ago and while most of the content is good, I just couldn't stand the presentation. Edit it around a bit and add a more adult naration and it actually turns into a show I'd regularly watch.
The documentary Outfoxed ought to answer a lot of your questions. You don't really need to analyse reporting content when you get it from the horses mouth in the form of whistleblowers and leaked memos. The reporters are told daily what phrases to use for particular incidents and how to report them.
The reason for their prominence as a laughing stock might be to do with their "Fair and Balanced" tag line. They are clearly anything but. As Stephen Colbert said to the whitehouse press corespondents dinner; "Fox News gives you both sides of the story. The Presidents side and the Vice-Presidents side".
We don't really have the wherewithall to handle a lesser fuckup when we got a major fuckup going on, which is also underreported.
Most people have turned against the War in Iraq and Bush but seem to think there are no alternatives.
That explains the lack of coverage. Ultimately all the news networks care about are ratings as it's their bottom line. Depressing news is hard to sell.
James made a statement something to the effect that this was a different kind of war because "other side" had no clear objective. If the US wanted to surrender what would the terms be. Since the terrorists don't have a clear end game (other than simple fear) what could the US offer to give up to concede defeat.
This sickens me and is an indicator of one of the largest problems. Your government is continually lying to you.
The terrorists have a clear goal. What do you think Bin Laden is saying in those videos you aren't allowed to see? In fact, you bomb the TV stations that dare to show them.
Their objective is simple. They want you to stop messing around with their countries in the middle east. From the CIA toppling democratic governments in Iran to the modern day occupation of Iraq.
They simply want to be left alone and will not stop attacking us until we do that. I'm all for just leaving them to their own devices. Instead we meddle and arm despots like Hussain (an enemy of Al Qaida) who brutally surpress their populations. Did we think they would just lie down?
Afghanistan? Didn't we win and pull most of our troops to Iraq?
Out of curiousity, is that how this is being reported where you are? Over here in the UK, the media is reporting that things are in the shitter big time. We just brought a load of coffins and the British Army is having a bad time at the moment. NATO have just begged for 2,500 more troops. We haven't "won" anything.
We exported freedom during Bush Seniors term, and continued it through Clinton's term. The Berlin Wall fell during Bush Senior, and we ended the Cold War.
No, the US unnessarily extended the cold war. It should have ended long before. Rumsfeld maintained that the Soviets must have some pretty kick ass capability despite all other intel suggesting otherwise. I think his logic was "it's so powerful we can't find it".
Source: The Power of Nightmares, which is required viewing for everyone IMHO. It's from the BBC originally.
Outside of McVey and Nichols (Murrah Bldg., OKC, OK), when was the last terrorist attack NOT carried out by someone arabic
Until Tony Blair made us a target, the UK had never had an Islamic terrorist incident in the UK. We've had hundreds of incidents of WHITE CHRISTIAN terrorism, known as the IRA. They hate a different type of white christians.
Ironically, most of their funding came from New York. See the folks floating around with buckets on St Pat's day? Your donation was used to build bombs that blew up busy shopping malls.
I don't. I'm not some moon-landing hoax nut. But there is enough evidence of wrongdoing to put everything under suspicion regarding flight 93.
The passengers never made it into the cockpit, but they would have - so the terrorists destroyed the plane.
My point exactly. There was a co-ordinated campaign to make the passengers into heroes and have them cause the crash in the publics mind. Why lie? Why not just say they regained control of most of the plane and the terrorists crashed out of despiration? Why restrict video/pictures of the crash site to one single feed? What about the numerous eye witnesses that say they saw a tailing aircraft when the official story denies that?
I have no problem with them downing 93. It's the lying I don't like. It reeks of "you are too simple to understand" which is your parents job to tell you as a child, not the governments when you are an adult.
that is not even close to how it works. Nothing is that black and white
Then you say:
We are great to our friends. We are easily made friends. We are terrible to our enemies. Why do you choose to be an enemy?
With us or against us? Sounds very "black and white" thinking to me. Why am I your enemy? Because I speak out? Isn't that the kind of thinking that America was built on? The (old) America that the rest of the world did consider a friend?
Anyway, you said earlier "that is not even close to how it works". Can you give me an example of Bush/Cheney talking about Iraq (before invasion) without trying to come off as scary? I doubt it, their focus was to make Saddam the bogeyman. Invade or you will die was the message I heard.
The only way it will end is when people love their children more than they hate the US.
I love the retro slurs, makes me feel so WW1. Do they eat their babies as well? I hear they do.
No one does that. You are an idiot if you think they do.
Decisions made years ago selecting the lessor of two evils are being reacted to
What? Decissions like "accept the democratically elected leader of Iran despite the fact that it may impact the bottom line of our oil industries there", or it's alternative "dispose the current leadership, install a hated figure and endure 50 years of distrust and contempt from all Iranians, boiling up to the 21st century desire for them to develop WMD".
Gee, I don't remember the Bush Administration doing anything like that with Mr. Moore's little fictional masterpiece.
Wasn't there a lot of controvesy at the time regarding cinemas showing the film? It wasn't so clear cut as you make out. IIRC numerous groups tried to stop it being show for various reasons. In the end it only opened in a fraction of the halls it was supposed to. And wasn't the distributer forced to drop it as well, to be replaced by someone else? Finally, I recall reading about moves to have it outright banned via the F.E.C.
Not that it changes the fact that Moore deliberately misleads people almost as much as Bush/Blair.
This rather puts the west in a tricky position - what do you do when people democratically elect extremely objectionable leaders?
Do what we always do? Subvert the democracy, assassinate key members, fund alternate parties, spy on undesirables and pass the info to our friends. We could arm the revolutionaries, giving them all the guns, ammo and cash the CIA can muster. We can fake stories about leaders, kidnap them. We could fake terrorist attrocities to justfy our attack.
All of these things except the last have been done by the west. The last was planned for Cuba but Kennedy veto'ed it. I could name a dozen nations where this is documented as happening, but I'll shorten it down to South America and the Middle East.
We only respect democracy when it goes in our favour. If the candidate stands up for his people or attempts to nationize the national resources we covet, then that's when the trouble begins. We destroyed more democracies than we've created.
Give it time. And then the "next big thing" will come along, and the Internet will be no more interesting than a ham radio today.
I disagree. You'd be better comparing the internet to the radio space that ham uses. It's a new "ether" for communications where IM, WWW and email sit on top of it. Ham got replaced by cellphones using similar technology. We may be using something like Tor in the future to route over governmental control, but it's still going to be the internet.
What's interesting is the net is already three or four steps ahead of the government. Tor and FreeNet already exist, the techology is there, we just don't need it yet in the west. They simply cannot take on the bazzar coding model and expect to win, there's too many of us. The media industry is slowly waking to this fact and they sell music. Imagine how many people would work together on something as important as government censure?
The next 10 years are going to be really interesting.
A case in point is a recent *front page* story on a lake where all of the fish died. The story in the paper ran with the excuse of the water temperature dropping from 40C down to 20C. If you do some research on oxygenation of water, you will find that the opposite is true: a lower water temperature holds more oxygen. Which then leads you to wonder, what really happened? (Most likely the continued hot weather caused the water to become too hot and the fish were going to die whether the temperature dropped or not.)
It's just the same here. As the saying goes: "Everything you read in the papers is true, except the one story you have personal knowledge of which is completely false".
From personal experience this holds, although I don't have too many personal exeriences in the media. But from those limited experiences and the coverage of tech matters, I hold all news reports at arms length and take them with a dash of salt regardless of the source country. One just has to watch Fox News to see how bad it is over here.
It's not about corrupting data, it's about the OS just not booting when it's out of disk space.
Sort-of. Any system would have issues with booting off a read-only medium. That's why linux distros such as Knoppix exist. However, the OS shouldn't let that happen in the first place, especially with a user-space application. That's the fundamental problem here, combined in this case with the fact that it's impossible to delete the file to remedy the situation.
Yes, there was a plot. The UK Police have started pressing charges against some of those involved. This is the first step to formal court hearings and criminal trials. Trials...remember then?;-)
HOWEVER, and this is a very big HOWEVER, they were nowhere near ready. They didn't have passports nor had they even started experimenting with the bomb components.
The security ramp-up at the airports was entirely unnessesarry except for one small detail...it got the Israel/Lebabnon war off the news headlines for a week or two. This was a continuing cause for embarassment for the UK and US governments as we were the only civilised countries on the planet that stood out against internatial calls for an immediate ceasefire. We were the only ones saying that the fighting was valid. Hell, we were supplying the weapons and the intel.
In the UK press last week it was mentioned that the UK security forces did not want to move on these guys. Due to the non-risk that they currently were, they wanted to continue to observe and learn more about any other connections. However political pressure came from the US to make this story happen.
And we all looked the other way as more bombs and rockets were launched in the last few days of the war. You know how when you are in a bar and there's 20 mins left and you knock back a couple of drinks quickly? That's exactly what happened. Both sides, but particularly the Israeli's (better armed), were pretty nasty during the "only 48 hours left of fighting" stage. Lebanon is now littered with unexploded municions.
The real problem with an analysis like this is that it ignores one thing: motive. Truthfully, Americans are not afraid of terrorists - we the people took down a plane ourselves once we knew what was going on.
No, the one thing that it all comes down to is beautifully illustrated in your post. Lies from your government. Like the "passengers taking over the plane" meme. Go back and read all of the official releases. They say nothing about the passengers taking over the cockpit. Some officials even hint to "the real story" getting out one day in the future.
The debris pattern indicates that the plane broke up in mid air. Most notably, one of the engines was found many miles away from the primary crash site. This is indicative of a head seeking missle downing the plane.
The real problem is that your government doesn't trust you with the truth. They lie to you about why these terrorists hate you. They manipulate you using things that many of you stand for; things such as freedom and liberty. Bin Ladin couldn't give a toss about your freedom or liberty. The real reasons he hates you are somewhat embarassing to your leaders. Things like toppling democracies and installing corupt dictators in his homeland are what pisses him off. Things that would piss you off, hense the need for the lies.
But as long as you let them lie to you, you will continue to be manipulated into spending 50% of your annual budget on warfare; more than the rest of the world combined. They will continue slinging $10 billion dollar contracts (no bid, no tender) to the inner-party's commercial interests. And they will continue invading Middle Eastern contries for their own strategic goals, stoking more hatred. It's a vicious cycle that will continue to benefit those that deal in terror.
Ask yourself this question...who is it on CNN that is using fear to deliver what he wants? It's not Bin Laden...look for the rich white guys.
How exactly? By stating that the specifics of the problem are different to the perception? It's still a massive problem and spinning over it doesn't make it go away. The solution is simple; the OS reports the file as read-only when it cannot be written. Attempts to write should fail cleanly and not damage existing data. Granted an app may zero a file in preparation for a 100% re-write and then subsequently fail with data loss, but the OS shouldn't be doing that sort of stupidity on a day-to-day basis.
That's not the point. A malicious user can hose the entire system by running 'cat/dev/zero >>/opt/junk'. And I mean hose as in "system unusable, 100% of data lost"; the worst kind of hosed. The fact that Final Cut has options to manage this doesn't detract from the fact that the OS should manage itself better. Writing over track 0 on the HD? Creation of undeletable files? What is this, a return to the 8-bit days again?
When you get to 100MB free, the OS should tell the applications to go away. It should never fill 100% of the drive. Let's see you boot to remedy it when you can't write to log files.
But then MS made the brillant decision to reboot the system right when the BSOD appeared, robbing it of any usefulness.
When my PC hangs, it is useless. The auto-reboot is both configurable and useful in this circumstance. I generally connect in over VNC or Remote Desktop and a lockup would require an international phone call. Give me the auto-reboot any day.
Also, as said in numerous messages in this topic, 99% of users do not have any use for the BSOD data. For the one 1% that does (e.g. someone with persistant problems), we can turn it off.
...just talk dirty to them. Ask them what they are wearing. If it's a girl, ask if she is wearing tights and whether she is menstrating just now. They won't be phoning you back ever again and it's not an obscene call as they dialed you. Everybody wins!!
Another classic would be a three-way call, though I've never done this with an incoming sales call. Simply put them through to the customer service desk of one of their competitors. Sit back and laugh as they argue with each other.
Other people suggested get an answerphone. That's just not practical for most people. If the volume of sales calls grows over the volume of personal ones then it might be worth it. But I don't want to spend the rest of my days listening to short "could you call me back?" messages from friends. If I'm going to be doing their tech support they might as well be paying for the call!;-)
For TV interviews and the like, he usually has a number of preprogrammed responses for likely questions etc.
One of the most cringeworthy pieces of television I've ever seen was when Hawking was on live TV in the UK. The bonehead presenter asked a question that wasn't prearranged. This was followed by the most awkward two minutes of standing around that I've witnessed.
I've gone 3+ years with no issues at all. Works like a charm.
If you are fed up reinstalling Windows, check out "Ghost"; it'll let you take an image of the drive. Try this: format HD with space 2gig FAT32 partition. Install & patch windows as normal to give yourself a baseline. "Ghost" the drive to the FAT32 partition.
You can now restore to the known state in approximately ten minutes with zero human interaction.
That's not my experience. I've had the same XP install for over three years on my primary desktop. The Start menu went to three additional pages on a 1600x1200 display before I tidied it up last month to try and stay sane. I had just about every popular codec on it, as well as conversion tools to/from any codec/container. It's had every piece of hardware I own hooked up to it over this time. The drive has been ghosted to a larger capacity at least three times, and it's been repartitioned several times, most recently with the addition of a dedicated XP install for gaming (no services, anti-virus etc).
It's as solid as a rock. The only blue screens I've had lately are when I was trying to use a USB webcam that I later found out to be broken (intermitant connection in the wire).
The only problem I've ever had with it was when dust clogged the CPU fan, but I heard the strange sound before it caused any noticable effect in the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
They do that in the UK as well. It's actually a better show that way; it loses some on the US-style "shazzam!!!" that is popular and replaces it with a more BBC-like mellow presentation. It comes off quite well; I grabbed the U.S. season one off bittorrent a while ago and while most of the content is good, I just couldn't stand the presentation. Edit it around a bit and add a more adult naration and it actually turns into a show I'd regularly watch.
The documentary Outfoxed ought to answer a lot of your questions. You don't really need to analyse reporting content when you get it from the horses mouth in the form of whistleblowers and leaked memos. The reporters are told daily what phrases to use for particular incidents and how to report them.
The reason for their prominence as a laughing stock might be to do with their "Fair and Balanced" tag line. They are clearly anything but. As Stephen Colbert said to the whitehouse press corespondents dinner; "Fox News gives you both sides of the story. The Presidents side and the Vice-Presidents side".
That explains the lack of coverage. Ultimately all the news networks care about are ratings as it's their bottom line. Depressing news is hard to sell.
This sickens me and is an indicator of one of the largest problems. Your government is continually lying to you.
The terrorists have a clear goal. What do you think Bin Laden is saying in those videos you aren't allowed to see? In fact, you bomb the TV stations that dare to show them.
Their objective is simple. They want you to stop messing around with their countries in the middle east. From the CIA toppling democratic governments in Iran to the modern day occupation of Iraq.
They simply want to be left alone and will not stop attacking us until we do that. I'm all for just leaving them to their own devices. Instead we meddle and arm despots like Hussain (an enemy of Al Qaida) who brutally surpress their populations. Did we think they would just lie down?
It would certainally have made Nixon's life a little easier as well.
Out of curiousity, is that how this is being reported where you are? Over here in the UK, the media is reporting that things are in the shitter big time. We just brought a load of coffins and the British Army is having a bad time at the moment. NATO have just begged for 2,500 more troops. We haven't "won" anything.
No, the US unnessarily extended the cold war. It should have ended long before. Rumsfeld maintained that the Soviets must have some pretty kick ass capability despite all other intel suggesting otherwise. I think his logic was "it's so powerful we can't find it".
Source: The Power of Nightmares, which is required viewing for everyone IMHO. It's from the BBC originally.
Until Tony Blair made us a target, the UK had never had an Islamic terrorist incident in the UK. We've had hundreds of incidents of WHITE CHRISTIAN terrorism, known as the IRA. They hate a different type of white christians.
Ironically, most of their funding came from New York. See the folks floating around with buckets on St Pat's day? Your donation was used to build bombs that blew up busy shopping malls.
I don't. I'm not some moon-landing hoax nut. But there is enough evidence of wrongdoing to put everything under suspicion regarding flight 93.
My point exactly. There was a co-ordinated campaign to make the passengers into heroes and have them cause the crash in the publics mind. Why lie? Why not just say they regained control of most of the plane and the terrorists crashed out of despiration? Why restrict video/pictures of the crash site to one single feed? What about the numerous eye witnesses that say they saw a tailing aircraft when the official story denies that?
I have no problem with them downing 93. It's the lying I don't like. It reeks of "you are too simple to understand" which is your parents job to tell you as a child, not the governments when you are an adult.
First you say:
Then you say:
With us or against us? Sounds very "black and white" thinking to me. Why am I your enemy? Because I speak out? Isn't that the kind of thinking that America was built on? The (old) America that the rest of the world did consider a friend?
Anyway, you said earlier "that is not even close to how it works". Can you give me an example of Bush/Cheney talking about Iraq (before invasion) without trying to come off as scary? I doubt it, their focus was to make Saddam the bogeyman. Invade or you will die was the message I heard.
I love the retro slurs, makes me feel so WW1. Do they eat their babies as well? I hear they do.
No one does that. You are an idiot if you think they do.
What? Decissions like "accept the democratically elected leader of Iran despite the fact that it may impact the bottom line of our oil industries there", or it's alternative "dispose the current leadership, install a hated figure and endure 50 years of distrust and contempt from all Iranians, boiling up to the 21st century desire for them to develop WMD".
Oh yeah, that's the lesser evil, baby.
Woah cowboy, the Iran PR campaign isn't finished yet. We need to justify then carry out that conflict. One thing at a time buddy!
Wasn't there a lot of controvesy at the time regarding cinemas showing the film? It wasn't so clear cut as you make out. IIRC numerous groups tried to stop it being show for various reasons. In the end it only opened in a fraction of the halls it was supposed to. And wasn't the distributer forced to drop it as well, to be replaced by someone else? Finally, I recall reading about moves to have it outright banned via the F.E.C.
Not that it changes the fact that Moore deliberately misleads people almost as much as Bush/Blair.
Do what we always do? Subvert the democracy, assassinate key members, fund alternate parties, spy on undesirables and pass the info to our friends. We could arm the revolutionaries, giving them all the guns, ammo and cash the CIA can muster. We can fake stories about leaders, kidnap them. We could fake terrorist attrocities to justfy our attack.
All of these things except the last have been done by the west. The last was planned for Cuba but Kennedy veto'ed it. I could name a dozen nations where this is documented as happening, but I'll shorten it down to South America and the Middle East.
We only respect democracy when it goes in our favour. If the candidate stands up for his people or attempts to nationize the national resources we covet, then that's when the trouble begins. We destroyed more democracies than we've created.
I disagree. You'd be better comparing the internet to the radio space that ham uses. It's a new "ether" for communications where IM, WWW and email sit on top of it. Ham got replaced by cellphones using similar technology. We may be using something like Tor in the future to route over governmental control, but it's still going to be the internet.
What's interesting is the net is already three or four steps ahead of the government. Tor and FreeNet already exist, the techology is there, we just don't need it yet in the west. They simply cannot take on the bazzar coding model and expect to win, there's too many of us. The media industry is slowly waking to this fact and they sell music. Imagine how many people would work together on something as important as government censure?
The next 10 years are going to be really interesting.
It's just the same here. As the saying goes: "Everything you read in the papers is true, except the one story you have personal knowledge of which is completely false".
From personal experience this holds, although I don't have too many personal exeriences in the media. But from those limited experiences and the coverage of tech matters, I hold all news reports at arms length and take them with a dash of salt regardless of the source country. One just has to watch Fox News to see how bad it is over here.
Sort-of. Any system would have issues with booting off a read-only medium. That's why linux distros such as Knoppix exist. However, the OS shouldn't let that happen in the first place, especially with a user-space application. That's the fundamental problem here, combined in this case with the fact that it's impossible to delete the file to remedy the situation.
Yes, there was a plot. The UK Police have started pressing charges against some of those involved. This is the first step to formal court hearings and criminal trials. Trials...remember then? ;-)
HOWEVER, and this is a very big HOWEVER, they were nowhere near ready. They didn't have passports nor had they even started experimenting with the bomb components.
The security ramp-up at the airports was entirely unnessesarry except for one small detail...it got the Israel/Lebabnon war off the news headlines for a week or two. This was a continuing cause for embarassment for the UK and US governments as we were the only civilised countries on the planet that stood out against internatial calls for an immediate ceasefire. We were the only ones saying that the fighting was valid. Hell, we were supplying the weapons and the intel.
In the UK press last week it was mentioned that the UK security forces did not want to move on these guys. Due to the non-risk that they currently were, they wanted to continue to observe and learn more about any other connections. However political pressure came from the US to make this story happen.
And we all looked the other way as more bombs and rockets were launched in the last few days of the war. You know how when you are in a bar and there's 20 mins left and you knock back a couple of drinks quickly? That's exactly what happened. Both sides, but particularly the Israeli's (better armed), were pretty nasty during the "only 48 hours left of fighting" stage. Lebanon is now littered with unexploded municions.
No, the one thing that it all comes down to is beautifully illustrated in your post. Lies from your government. Like the "passengers taking over the plane" meme. Go back and read all of the official releases. They say nothing about the passengers taking over the cockpit. Some officials even hint to "the real story" getting out one day in the future.
The debris pattern indicates that the plane broke up in mid air. Most notably, one of the engines was found many miles away from the primary crash site. This is indicative of a head seeking missle downing the plane.
The real problem is that your government doesn't trust you with the truth. They lie to you about why these terrorists hate you. They manipulate you using things that many of you stand for; things such as freedom and liberty. Bin Ladin couldn't give a toss about your freedom or liberty. The real reasons he hates you are somewhat embarassing to your leaders. Things like toppling democracies and installing corupt dictators in his homeland are what pisses him off. Things that would piss you off, hense the need for the lies.
But as long as you let them lie to you, you will continue to be manipulated into spending 50% of your annual budget on warfare; more than the rest of the world combined. They will continue slinging $10 billion dollar contracts (no bid, no tender) to the inner-party's commercial interests. And they will continue invading Middle Eastern contries for their own strategic goals, stoking more hatred. It's a vicious cycle that will continue to benefit those that deal in terror.
Ask yourself this question...who is it on CNN that is using fear to deliver what he wants? It's not Bin Laden...look for the rich white guys.
How exactly? By stating that the specifics of the problem are different to the perception? It's still a massive problem and spinning over it doesn't make it go away. The solution is simple; the OS reports the file as read-only when it cannot be written. Attempts to write should fail cleanly and not damage existing data. Granted an app may zero a file in preparation for a 100% re-write and then subsequently fail with data loss, but the OS shouldn't be doing that sort of stupidity on a day-to-day basis.
That's not the point. A malicious user can hose the entire system by running 'cat /dev/zero >> /opt/junk'. And I mean hose as in "system unusable, 100% of data lost"; the worst kind of hosed. The fact that Final Cut has options to manage this doesn't detract from the fact that the OS should manage itself better. Writing over track 0 on the HD? Creation of undeletable files? What is this, a return to the 8-bit days again?
When you get to 100MB free, the OS should tell the applications to go away. It should never fill 100% of the drive. Let's see you boot to remedy it when you can't write to log files.
When my PC hangs, it is useless. The auto-reboot is both configurable and useful in this circumstance. I generally connect in over VNC or Remote Desktop and a lockup would require an international phone call. Give me the auto-reboot any day.
Also, as said in numerous messages in this topic, 99% of users do not have any use for the BSOD data. For the one 1% that does (e.g. someone with persistant problems), we can turn it off.
...just talk dirty to them. Ask them what they are wearing. If it's a girl, ask if she is wearing tights and whether she is menstrating just now. They won't be phoning you back ever again and it's not an obscene call as they dialed you. Everybody wins!!
Another classic would be a three-way call, though I've never done this with an incoming sales call. Simply put them through to the customer service desk of one of their competitors. Sit back and laugh as they argue with each other.
Other people suggested get an answerphone. That's just not practical for most people. If the volume of sales calls grows over the volume of personal ones then it might be worth it. But I don't want to spend the rest of my days listening to short "could you call me back?" messages from friends. If I'm going to be doing their tech support they might as well be paying for the call! ;-)
One of the most cringeworthy pieces of television I've ever seen was when Hawking was on live TV in the UK. The bonehead presenter asked a question that wasn't prearranged. This was followed by the most awkward two minutes of standing around that I've witnessed.
I've gone 3+ years with no issues at all. Works like a charm.
If you are fed up reinstalling Windows, check out "Ghost"; it'll let you take an image of the drive. Try this: format HD with space 2gig FAT32 partition. Install & patch windows as normal to give yourself a baseline. "Ghost" the drive to the FAT32 partition.
You can now restore to the known state in approximately ten minutes with zero human interaction.
That's not my experience. I've had the same XP install for over three years on my primary desktop. The Start menu went to three additional pages on a 1600x1200 display before I tidied it up last month to try and stay sane. I had just about every popular codec on it, as well as conversion tools to/from any codec/container. It's had every piece of hardware I own hooked up to it over this time. The drive has been ghosted to a larger capacity at least three times, and it's been repartitioned several times, most recently with the addition of a dedicated XP install for gaming (no services, anti-virus etc).
It's as solid as a rock. The only blue screens I've had lately are when I was trying to use a USB webcam that I later found out to be broken (intermitant connection in the wire).
The only problem I've ever had with it was when dust clogged the CPU fan, but I heard the strange sound before it caused any noticable effect in the OS.