Haha

this kind of technology if not fool proof. but it does provide the tool to take your notebook as hostage.

image all of your data being hold hostage by third party.

i just cant image, my kids messing with the notebook only to get it bricked. 

LOL

"There are no obvious flaws to the system this time, and that is a good starting point"

Are you serious ? Yes its looks like they've thought it through some but its all the bits they've missed which will cause the problems. 

Any time you create a system for blocking people out of things you open up a massive denail of service vector. 

Can you imagine what would happen once the h4x04z work out that they can brick peoples machines over the internet, using a replay attack or through a buffer overflow with the software that controlls this stuff.

maybe no flaws now, but you forget the potential for misuse. Lets for an instance imagine, there is a worm. 100k laptops go brick, or worse the program rewrites the chip set. How do you treat such an infection? You can use the computer, but it is forever infected and nothing is secure from that point. There is a government deployed check in enforced, what if aliens landed on America and not Canada or Romania. what if jeff was on the fourth season?

There are few important factor why someone stole your laptop, the most general is to get money. There are 2 way to do so. 1. Stealing company secret. 2. Sell it.

Both of it need the laptop to be unbroke. If Lenovo or Intel or someone else manage to program auto self destuct program, then there isn't any use to stole a laptop.

Because you can get what you want with broken laptop / destroy laptop. I hope Intel will do so with something like Startrek. Perhaps when someone buy laptop, the need to be initialize with captain, first officer, and commander (you, your mom, and you dad). 

When the laptop stolen, three of you use the other device to confirm the auto self destuct. When it it verified, the laptop will be blowen :D.

"This also addresses the problem of large scale theft. If Lenovo puts Computrace in at the factory"

...

"There are no obvious flaws to the system this time, and that is a good starting point."

Well yes, except the one where I won't be buying hardware where there is any possibility that some disgruntled asshole working for the manufacturer can remotely brick it, or where my system pings a manufacturer system (or any I don't designate) every time I turn it on. Undesired location/activity tracking is bad.

Expect many companies in the future to be not available and closed and support blocked while they try to reset systems of employees who can't be bothered to follow all those silly instructions.
Oh and your salary will be 2 weeks late and your cheques will bounce too no doubt while accounting or your bank wait for the IT staff to issue new authorisations because the boss didn't bother to not get invalidated.

Sounds like a tracker/immobiliser for pc's. Can it also be fitted to cars, phones, tv's?

If theives cannot steal items to sell on, then will that mean that the thieves will have to attack us for the money we carry?

And what about when the money is mostly digital, what will the drug addict theives do then?

Making items less valuable if stolen is excellent.

We also need to look at changing prisons into places where prisoners have to live as the rest of us do. Make them work 9-5, 5 days a week, cook their own meals in a shared apartment and shop in the prison supermarket twice a week. To leave prison they should have a place to live and a job, which they must attend. This will mean that they are remodelled to be like the rest of us.