Shall we play a game?

Today, Alexandra Marks of the Christian Science Monitor writes:

"As they work to unravel the mystery of Air France Flight 447, aviation analysts and pilots are now urging investigators to focus attention on the plane's tail fin, known as the vertical stabilizer, in addition to the design of the Airbus's computerized flight controls.

"The vertical stabilizer is one of the largest intact pieces of the plane recovered so far, and the Times of London reported this week that 'one of the 24 automatic messages sent from the plane minutes before it disappeared pointed to a problem in the "rudder limiter," a mechanism that limits how far the plane's rudder can move.'"

Later in the same article, she writes:

"Judging from the wreckage and bodies recovered so far, and the few clues sent electronically in the last four minutes of the flight, investigators believe the Airbus 330-200 jet probably broke apart in flight, then scattered over several miles."

It is the belief of the Man-Bunny Matrix that a rudder malfunction had nothing to do with this accident, but more importantly: the randomness with which damaged computer systems tend to report error messages renders this sort of investigative track useless. A simple and fun home experiment should demonstrate this nicely. We in the Man-Bunny Matrix call this "Guess What's Broken".

All you will need is:
1 magnifying glass
1 pair of needle-nose pliers
~2 dozen personal computers, complete with monitors (The game "Guess What's Broken" is compatible with both Mac and PC)

Connect each computer. Turn on each computer. Open the CPU case. Select a different spot at random on the motherboard, and select at random just one of the tiny surface-mount resistors or capacitors soldered to the board. Gently slide the jaws of the needle-nose pliers over the surface-mount component, and crush it like a bug.

The results should run the gamut, from absolutely nothing; to simply powering down; fireworks from the power-supply; blue screens of death; seizing of magnetic or optical media; and strange error messages such as "Cannot write to drive C:", "Windows Registry Corrupted", and "BLARGH! I'm dying."

Let's say you manage to receive a straight-forward error message such as "Cannot write to drive C:". Following the logic Ms. Marks' "aviation analyists and pilots" are using, you might go to your local computer store and replace the hard-drive. Try this, see if it works.