Generally agreed that Thinkpads should be at or near the top of the list.

But maybe not quite "any Thinkpad": some of the more recent models have RAM soldered to the motherboard or have just one SODIMM slot. The first makes it hard to upgrade (likely on purpose: you want more RAM, you have to buy it from Lenovo) and the second hurts performance (single channel rather than dual-channel RAM configuration).

I looked at Thinkpads recently and liked the specs and price on the Thinkpad 13: two SODIMM slots (supports 16 GB of RAM, maybe even 32), an i5 or i7, and a 1920x1080, matte, non-touch 13" screen. I liked the old Thinkpad keyboards more than the new ones, but the latter are still much better than your average laptop keyboard (and, of course, you get the Touchpoint---a must!).

At higher price points there are other good options, but you should be able to get something like the above for under $1k. Hard to beat.

> People, the very same issue would exist if this happened with savings accounts. There's nothing wrong with savings accounts,
> but if a chain of people did stupid things with the money in them causing it all to be lost, would we be up in arms that savings
> accounts are bad, or would we be up in arms about the criminals who misused them? I hope the latter.

The key difference is that a loan is leveraged, a savings account isn't. The maximum damage you can do in a savings account takes that
account to zero, which by definition is limited by your actual earning power (how else did the money get there?). The maximum damage you
can do with a loan, especially one that's based on a fraudulent assessment of income, is multiplied by the leverage ratio. This is an extremely
nontrivial distinction.

If I have $5, I can lose $5 and end up at zero. If you let me borrow dollars at 100:1, then I can borrow $500. Now when I lose all the
money I have, I'm in a much worse position.

This is a hoax. JP Morgan doesn't have a massive short position in silver, and you will not hurt them financially by buying silver. You will, however, hurt yourself, considering how silver is riding a massive bubble right now (compare its performance to that of the other precious metals over the last year). Don't take investment advice from people who motivate you with spite.

Power dissipation and heat are generally considered system-level problems. That is, the chipmaker specifies "max power dissipation X" and the board designer has to figure out how to move that amount of heat off the part. For example, NVidia says "this will dissipate 200 Watts max," and Asus builds an appropriate cooling system. This is an area that gets neglected a lot because it's expensive to move that much heat around, and because lots of people are just bad at doing thermal design. Given a few boards with precisely the same chipset, it's very possible (likely, even) that some will fail and others have no issues.

(In other words, s/chip makers/card makers/.)

They both have jobs; they did this in their spare time.

No it's not. A clueless person can be 100% convinced that they will get ahead as a result of their actions, and just be wrong about that fact. It's not altruism that makes them clueless, it's, well, cluelessness. So yes, an altruist is clueless, but not all clueless are altruists.