Why am I getting a red ring of death on my Xbox360?

I haven't played my Xbox in two years and even then I played it once a month. I played it last night for a few hours and decided to go get some food. I come back 20 minutes later and see my roommate turning it off. I start it up again this morning and play for 10 minutes and it freezes on me. I turned it off, unplugged it and plugged it back in and it would freeze as soon as I turn it on. How can this be a hardware failure if the parts have hardly even been used? Hardware generally has a life expectancy, but I haven't even used this enough to even say it's been used for a month. Did Microsoft set their products to stop working after an internal clock is triggered? WTF?