I have a friend who has a 360 and can make it RRoD on command, yet it is perfectly fine and doesn't brick. True Story.

The Aztecs fought bionic alien monkey robots with lightsabers.  True Story.

People in the SA forums have also had failures of 65nm units (it's in the 50 paged 'my xbox broked' thread).

I'm with Naz on that one.  I also wanted to point out that some people are smart enough to know that forum posts are not rock solid indicators of the 360's reliabilty.  It's not the millions of forum posts on this topic that sways most gamers but the stories from reputable gaming sites about swamped 360 repair facilities, 30-35% failure rates, all of their staff going through 4+ 360's, not to mention MS' $1.2 billion warratny extension and confirmation that every 360 made (at least up until the statement in July I believe) suffered the flaw causing the excessive failure rate. 

Now what this forum post does seem to show is that the switch over to Falcon that was supposed to fix the problem may not in fact have fixed it.  It could be an isolated incident but it means any gamer waiting for MS to get the failure rate to a more normal rate would be prudent to hold off on dropping $500.  When reputable gaming sites talk about mass layoffs at the 360 repair centers, a failure rate that seems more normal, and MS can go a year without a warranty extension then I think most on the fence gamers will make a decision.  Even though threads like this will still exist to some extent most won't care because they aren't the deciding factor to most.

Agreed.  The problem is that MS has established the Xbox 360 as the least reliable device in the history of personal electronics.  Few the 30-35% failure rate figures any more -- most suspect it is 60%+

Rather than looking at 'The Internet' you can look at a small for-pay community like the SA forums.  They have a 50 page thread of hundreds of people reporting their xbox failed.  Many of these people stood up and said, "hey, if yours failed you did something wrong" and ended up coming back with "I never thought it would happen to me."  What's even more distrubing is that they keep track of their cases with Microsoft and many of them receive broken units, units in poor condition, or they have something other than their problem repaired.  Recently, a guy with the extended warranty sent his 360 to Microsoft because the DVD drive wasn't working and they replaced the motherboard.  The DVD drive still didn't work.  More commonly, people get someone else's refurbished unit and it may RROD within a week of ownership.

Even units manufactured in August and September (brand new units) have been failing for people, as have been elites that people have been buying from the store in the last few weeks.  The failure rate is incredible, and a smaller sample like the SA forum is imperfect but it's a great indicator of what is happening.  And the SA forum has been very pro-xbox 360, so these aren't fanboys cheering the 360's demise.  These are honest-to-God 360 fans frustrated that their units fail or that they've had to deal with several failures.

Next firmware update, there should be a screen, during the bootup, reminding gamers that 4 rings just mean to check the plugs, that is if firmware can't correct the ring setup anyway.

That confusion has led to a lot of perfectly working systems sent for repairs (meaning the 30% return rate is at the very least inflated), causing real repairs to be backed up.

If it is the 65nm ones that sucks, so everything everyone was talking about the new "falcon" no more RRoD were wrong. Even if it wasn't the "falcon", at this point in time, every new 360 needs to have a falcon in there, not specially marked ones. It's been two years now, Microsoft needs to step it up.

 I don't completely believe that since you're supposed to call their tech support if you suspect you have a problem. Maybe some people got it wrong, but I'm sure one of the top things to check for on the tech support checklist is the warning the red rings are giving you. 

Damn these threads are getting old, it's like some people don't have any games to play except this one.

 Yeah, one of the first questions they ask you is if you have red lights and how many.  I personally hope they don't give you an extra screen at startup telling you this since 1) you have to go through tech support to send in your 360 and they ask you and 2) it would be as annoying as the Wii startup screen.