I think there are levels in between, such as having some older games that you want to play at decent quality but not the latest stuff.

This said, the AMD IGPs tend to be limited by RAM bandwidth. Discrete graphics cards with similar numbers of shaders tend to beat the AGPs in graphics. I think AMD needs either quad-channel memory (too expensive?) or stacked VRAM on the APU itself. Without that, it is only a matter of time until Intel's HD graphics catch up...

If you quit because the employer fails to pay you, you can also get out of the non-compete ($90a III HGB, culpable conduct of the other party).

Again, IANAL and the above is my best guess as an interested layman who has access to online law texts. This said, non-competes have become rare anyway in Germany as the employer has to pay some compensation for them, otherwise they are illegal..

It is a chip for cheap machines without high performance requirements. Sort of an entry level CPU and entry level GPU in one, with a bit more emphasis on the GPU than the i3.
And where you call the AMD "slightly less underpowered" in GPU, the i3 is arguably overpowered for typical office applications. Read, the A10-7800 can do those adequately.

Overall I think the A10-7800 has its market, for home use where you want to do a bit of everything or maybe as HTPC. It is nothing very impressive, but neither is an i3 without discrete graphics card.

Technically (under German law) the employment contract still exists and you could sue them for the unpaid wages. Which may fail if the company is already bankrupt. In that case, you'd be thowing good money after the bad.

But at the same time, AFAIK (IANAL) not paying wages is a bad enough breach of contract that you can get away with immediately terminating said contract. So if you have another job lined up, go for it.

Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.

But if adwords does not give you statistics about this, I agree that dropping them would be the smart thing to do.

And I'm tempted to compare it to the behavior of users who want the latest and shiniest, but complain about the shinies eating performance.

Desktop analogy:
I sometimes suggest to users of Vista and above that they switch back to the "traditional" XP look of the desktop. Most of the time that suggestion is met by derision. Only those who disliked the change in the first place tend to like my suggestion (if they have not already changed their desktop settings themselves).

IANAL, but from a layman's perspective it looks like a breach of contract. A more sue-happy person might have taken that incident to court.

But the new corporate headquarters overseas would presumably not be bound by the subpoena. In that case, it sucks to be the guy in the US subsidiary who just got subpoenaed. Because he is unable to comply.

Exactly, all articles I can remember offhand for the cathode talk about a capacity of less than 200 mAh/g for existing cathode chemistries. So the cathode would make up most of the weight of the battery.

If the technology from TFA works out, maybe we can get a 20% - 30% improvement in overall energy density.

Many years ago, I joined a group of audiophile students at my university and we were building a pair of two-way loudspeakers with semi-expensive chassis. Students' budget, but it still had potential. When experimenting with crossover components, we soldered things together at first, then someone had the idea to use alligator clips (two each connected by a cable soldered to the clips) for faster turnaround.

The sound quality, which had been quite good up to that point, suddenly dropped to that of a cheap speaker from some supermarket. The ohmic resistance of the cable between the alligator clips was IMHO too low to have much of an influence.

Conclusion:
It must have been the alligator clips, and good contacts matter. Since that experience I like to use gold-plated connectors, but with standard cables to connect them. That combination tends to be cheap enough and works for me :-)

Depends on your main board.

My last purchase from 2011, an ASUS M4A7LT, has an onboard sound chip that cannot drive headphones at more than low volume.

At low volume it sounds good, and I'm sure it would be adequate to drive the input of an amplifier. But when I put in my (low impedance, maybe 30 Ohms) walkman headphones it fails miserably. Severe clipping as soon as I turn up the volume a bit.

Instead of putting an external amplifier on my desk, I put a sound card into the PC. Problem solved.

Correcting myself:
Tepco itself has estimated a damage of $137 billion, see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-07/fukushima-137-billion-cost-has-tepco-seeking-more-aid.html

Considering the low probability of a serious reactor accident, individual utility companies might bet on not having one in their powerplants and have no insurance unless it is mandatory, like compulsory vehicle insurance.

Set the minimum coverage to something that would cover Fukujima (estimated $100B) and there is your market-based solution ;-)

Sure there is some monkey work at the lower levels of support, especially in a "free" hotline where you don't get billed for calling. Several years ago I met a guy who did first level "support" for Microsoft, following a script from a database. But even there, I think second level should have some actual skills, as they are the ones who handle the cases that are too complex for the script monkeys.

At my current, relatively small company, the hotline (which is AFAIK costing more than peanuts to call) offers what you might find at second level support in a company that follows the above pattern. People who are familiar with the product and don't need to follow a fixed script. Some of them are actually quite good, based on years of experience.

Cases that are too hard for the hotline go to the "repair team", those are software testers who otherwise do QA on upcoming releases. I guess they are at least the equivalent of 3rd level support at a place like Microsoft. The "repair team" can talk directly to software development and ask for fixes, we trust them to distinguish bogus calls from real bugs.

Unspending users can only hold back technological progress if software vendors keep maintaining obsolete technology to please them. Which doesn't make much sense, except in the context of trying to keep meaningful competition from arising. But maybe that is exactly what Microsoft is trying to achieve, even at the expense of earning less from the well-paying customers who might embrace faster progress.

There is the following Bill Gates quote:
  "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." (Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9)
A clear case of trying to keep competition down even among the ultimate unspending non-customers.