You can get an mSATA or M2 small ~32-64GB SSD drive (which many motherboards have direct attach slots for now) for about $60. If you use that as your boot / OS system / critical-app drive and get a slow multi-TB spindle HDD drive for your bulk load-and-save storage you'll get huge improvement in your startup/shutdown times and general system operation while still having cheap mass media. Is that far too expensive?

As Dr FrankNfurter says in RHPS "I didn't build him for YOU!!!" It's amusing whenever new datacenter/server technology gets posted on /. that half the posts evaluate the proposed product in terms of how affordable/practical/useful it would be to them in their little client desktop or notebook. All of these Intel drives are intended for server (or at least technical workstation ) use, so they need to be evaluated by ROI they give a business doing high-throughput work. If you think they have great stats but are too expensive, maybe you are not the intended market.

Well you can't argue with that, but certainly a whole industry would argue with your assertion.

The hemispheric disaster has not happened yet. But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
How bad things are after that is still up for debate, but reactor 4 is a clear and present danger.

...from becoming a hemispheric disaster..
Even the laughable freeze-the-ground-around-it plan seems to have been hatched to mollify Olympic commission voters who still gave Japan the 2020 games as the 'safe' choice over Istanbul and Madrid.

Do they think they will be cheaper or more capable or exceed Elon Musk's company by any metric in 5 years?

... when some foreign visitor sends a strongly encrypted message they the Russian authorities find difficult or impossible to decrypt. If this were a typical Russian citizen, this would probably merit a visit from some representative of the authorities who will persuade you that the encryption is a bad idea based on bad consequences if you don't. In the case of the international attendees, one assumes the Russians will not able to do this quite so casually. But they will probably be pretty obsessed with those visitors...

... the truth is well managed companies are still making money by making PCs. Ergo, all the companies doing badly in the PC market and whining about how the shift in consumer tastes is taking them down should look in the mirror for the culprit.

Slashdot technorati will dump all over this, but the only truly open ecosystem in user-purchasable computing available today is x86 from Intel and AMD. All others esp ARM based platforms (except for -albeit interesting- toys like Raspberry Pi) are vertically integrated closed systems that you have to explicitly defeat the original vendors efforts to keep them closed to use in non-approved ways and in many cases (eg Apple IOS devices) are virtually impossible to reload a different OS on.
This is deliberate and the anomaly of x86 is a result of a series of happy accidents and mistakes several vendors incl IBM made in created a monster they never wanted but have had to live with because it became such an unslayable monster. Let's hope it lives on so that in 2020 we're not all using closed hardware/software bricks that are totally at the mercy of vendors. (We'll just have to join hobbyist cliques of people who like to work on "vintage computers" from the early part of the century...)

Apple is simply one of the higher margin, higher innovation PC OEMs Intel has. (Yes Virginia, Apple makes personal computers that run Mac OS, WIndows, and various *ixes while other OEMs make personal computers that run all those except Mac OS (legally that this - Hackintoshes violate OSX licence).)
Apple's margins are higher than other PC OEMs because they add more value which users perceive to be worth higher ASPs (average selling price).
There's nothing about Intel's sales model which forces OEMs to have low margins.

A real city with real people that's doing cutting edge tech not just a bunch of expensive suburbs like the valley, Fantastic cheap place to be.