We can achieve fusion without too much trouble. The elusive white whale so far has been a sustainable fusion reaction that puts out more energy than you have to put into it.

Do you suppose there's any technological reason why some of their servers MUST be doing the work for you? Perhaps there's some code they couldn't possibly get to work on a local client, despite plenty of games over the past forty years working just fine locally? Or is it more likely that they intentionally designed the game to be split between client and server so that you had to be connected in order to play it? Because that latter scenario sounds a lot like DRM to me. They don't have to be using military-grade encryption for it to count as DRM.

Why did the "norwegian major" go to Finland to find their guy?

I recently bought a Clevo P170EM with a hybrid Intel HD 4000/Radeon 7970M setup. The Intel card was supported perfectly in Linux out of the box. Getting support for the 7970M took a few months, but the most recent Catalyst release supports it under Ubuntu 12.04, and setup was relatively painless. The only minor hassle of this setup is the need to restart the X server to switch the active card. I understand 12.10 is a little dicier due to the new version of X, and I don't know about any other distros, but I've been running this setup for a few months now without any problems and can highly recommend it. If the P170EM is too big, the P150EM is essentially the same hardware with a smaller screen. Every other hardware component except the fingerprint reader works perfectly in Ubuntu as well.

System76 also sells machines with Ubuntu pre-installed, and they recently introduced a model with discrete graphics, so you could also look into either their computers or the Clevo computers upon which their models are based (I believe the Bonobo, their discrete-graphicsed model, is based on the P370EM).

Large sequential reads/writes (which are, obviously, a huge part of audio and video production) are one of the very few places where HDDs still have an advantage over SSDs. I work in audio production and don't know anyone who uses SSDs for scratch.

Well, were you root?

This was true only for Honeycomb, and even then only for a while; they eventually released the source for that as well. All other Android versions have had source drop before they were available on a device. Anything else you want to be wrong about today?

The Nexus One was made by HTC, so I doubt Samsung got into any trouble for it.

The controversy is that this is the latest in a long line of examples of AT&T bitching about people overburdening their poor network with their evil data-hogging ways instead of spending a goddamn dime to upgrade it from its current twine-and-tin-can infrastructure into something that can handle the needs of a 21st-century world superpower.

You might find it worthwhile to try to sell that MacBook. Everything else you said is spot on, but older Apple hardware tends to hold its value for way longer than would seem reasonable. Poke around eBay and see what similar models are going for; it might surprise you.

Whenever I see people saying this, I wonder how many people actually use their computer to do real work.

I work as a recording engineer. You can buy non-PC devices to do the actual recording if you want, but even in that case mixing and post-processing really does require a computer with vast amounts of local CPU power and storage, in addition to some highly specialised equipment (such as external audio interfaces that connect via Firewire or even PCI cards). You can't record ten simultaneous tracks of uncompressed 24-bit, 48 khz audio to the cloud. I'm sure the same is true of many other fields like video and graphics production, software development, and scientific number crunching.

Sure, grandma probably doesn't need a full-blown PC to look at emailed pictures of her family, and maybe the "post-PC" era will benefit her. But I do worry what will happen to the PC world if major manufacturers keep taking their focus away from people who really do require serious equipment. (Hello, Apple, selling 2010 Mac Pros for 2014 prices, with an operating system that's leading the charge towards turning your desktop computer into an iPad!)

Except that this case deals with the Galaxy Nexus, for which Google controls the updates directly.

...so I don't *think* Android...

2.3 is over 18 months old so I don't Android is incrementing terribly quickly.

Federal INCOME taxes. Have you heard of the payroll tax?