Source? This is the first I've heard of this, I haven't seen any articles on the subject, so this would be very enlightening. Generally Thinkpad quality is very high, even if their screen quality went to garbage starting around Thanksgiving 2012... It would be interesting to see more details on this, as I have been tracking the downward spiral of Thinkpad quality ever since the Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing announced that they were going to square off the Thinkpad vs Ideapad brands under lenovo at the cost of giving users worse quality products under both brands....

You can print sintered metal now. They're printing in plastic because it's cheap. Cheap sintered metal printers aren't far behind.

If you figure out who at your office does the perks purchasing, a birthday card and a phone call can go a long ways towards upgrading you from folgers to starbucks coffee grinds and generic to fanta brand orange soda, etc.

This is basically a laptop without the expensive bits - i.e. the screen and battery. I would be surprised if the bill of materials exceeds $500 this time around. Technology has come a long ways in 7 years.

That's not the point, the point is that if Google+ (or whatever they're naming their "standard") isn't open, then the cottage industry of third party IM clients (some of them are actually pretty decent) would roll over and die.

I use my phone's camera to record unmemorable but unusual things that happen throughout the day. Helps jog my memory.

This isn't realistic in large suburbs which are criss-crossed with 6 lane (3 lane each way) "surface roads" with 40-45mph speed limits, especially at rush hour. This is about 90% of most people's commute in the DFW (Dallas) area & suburbs (google "dfw metroplex").
 
For whatever reason, the yellow lights at these 45mph intersections by my mom's house in Plano (DFW) is shorter than the 30mph yellow light near my house 15 miles away in Dallas. The one big difference is that the 30mph intersection has no red light camera and is a low traffic intersection.
 
If anything, high traffic intersections should have 10-12 second yellow lights, not less than 5 seconds...

AMD is still hear and

Not for long, if you're representative of the quality astroturfer that they can afford these days...

Win8 offers cool features like storage spaces/drive pools (poor man's software raid) and hypervisor (Virtualbox)

Dealerships also create quite a bit of property tax at the city level and (I assume) commercial taxes for the state. When GM shut down something like 3,000 dealerships across the country during their restructuring, it crippled a lot of small towns who depended on that source of property tax income. In a rural, agricultural area that may have been the largest commercial source of property tax, equivalent to one city worker's salary in a town of 300.

Currently running the official Google version of 4.1 (the version after ICS) on my2.3 ddevice, Nexus S. LTS phones exist, I'm typing on one. Sadly 4.1 is the last major OTA update I'm getting.

We should probably include summaries of what companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Intel and IBM do in each story as well then. Cyanogenmod is probably a B or C tier brand name, but it's in no way unfamiliar.

Everything was going great for the Atomic Nuclei, until it all went pear shaped.

There were 13 iterations of the Saturn V, they didn't even have the same paint job, let alone configuration. The first stage had anywhere between 7 and 12 helium tanks inside of the kerosene tank depending on the version. About the only similarity between each rocket was the diameter of the last stage, where it met with the Apollo capsule. Each engine was different, custom built.

Modern CPUs are so fast nowadays that the bottleneck is feeding them, not processing the data. The bus between memory and the CPU allows it to process 24GB/s, but most computers only come with 2, 4 sometimes 8GB. And then there's the issue of reading from the drive. The only way you're going to consistently peg an i5 for more than a few second (let alone an i7) is crunching terabytes of scientific data. Otherwise it's a software issue like Kerbal Space Program which only uses 50% of one core instead of 80% of all cores.