Forbes's intrepid testers used the Toughbook to crush soda cans, used the screen as a dartboard, ran over it with a Volkswagen, gave it to a tiger as a chew toy, had an elephant stomp on it multiple times, and then the to top it all off, shot it with a .22 pistol. And the damage?

The only things that managed to do any lasting damage were the elephant and the gun; the elephant put two cracks in the case (purely cosmetic, however), and the gun did actually pierce the screen. But! The damn thing was still usable even after being shot! It never once ceased to boot and Forbes claims they were able to log into Windows even with a hole in the screen.

We ourselves have absolutely no use for the Toughbook-30, but we're tempted to get one in case we ever get that pet elephant we've always wanted. [Forbes]

Taking the test is simple. There are 50 statements. Mark down one point for yourself for every one that applies to you. At the end, score yourself. We can't solve your problems, but at least we can help you figure out just how bad your problems are. And that's something, right?

The GSAT
1. I own and wear t-shirts featuring the logos of computer/operating system manufacturers.
2. I am over the age of 22 and live with my parents.
3. I am, according to the medical definition, obese.
4. On an average day more of my human interaction happens on message boards or in blog comments than with actual other people.
5. I have ended real friendships over arguments about computer or product choices.
6. I very seriously and passionately try to talk people into buying or switching to my OS/phone/product of choice.
7. I commonly use very specific technical jargon without considering whether or not the person I'm talking to understands it.
8. I hold an engineering or IT degree.
9. I have made a member of the opposite sex sit and watch me play video games for an hour or more.
10. I play with my phone at restaurants.
11. Almost all of my jokes are actually just catchphrases or references to The Simpsons, Family Guy, Borat, or any other popular comedic film or show.
12. I have a medical problem that makes me sweat a lot.
13. I live or have lived for an extended period completely nocturnally, sitting at my computer all night and sleeping all day.
14. I generally do not leave my home if it's not necessary for work or food retrieval.
15. I have over 50,000 Xbox 360 Gamerpoints.
16. I work in electronics retail.
17. I generally am only friends with other Apple people/Windows people.
18. My sense of humor is more in line with 4chan than any other comedic source.
19. I hang out exclusively with members of the same sex.
20. I own and wear a cowboy hat, Kangol hat, fedora and/or bowler.
21. I am the dominant talker in most conversations I have.
22. I think the Star Wars trilogy/Star Trek series is the greatest thing ever put to celluloid and will argue all night about it.
23. When I hang out with my friends, we usually play Risk, Axis and Allies, Dungeons and Dragons and/or Settlers of Catan.
24. I have a level 80 character in World of Warcraft.
25. I've dressed up as a video game character/manga character in public on a day other than Halloween.
26. I say internet acronyms such as LOL and BRB out loud.
27. I own a sword, nunchucks and/or throwing stars.
28. I'm an obsessive collector.
29. I make my own image macros.
30. I am really, really into my cat. Like, really.
31. I have corrected someone's spelling or grammar on a message board or in blog comments.
32. I have authored and obsessively updated Wikipedia entries about cartoons from the 80's.
33. I breathe through my mouth, mostly.
34. I've read all of the greatest novels ever published, all of which happen to be graphic novels.
35. I suffer from halitosis and/or a laziness-based aversion to dental hygiene.
36. I vote for politicians based on their stance on net neutrality.
37. My dream girl has eyes the size of dinner plates, is part robot or, optimally, both.
38. I am a very active member of a private, invite-only BitTorrent tracker with extremely strict ratio/bitrate requirements.
39. I regularly ingest caffeine through unconventional means.
40. I'm convinced that I would be happier if I worked on the Starship Enterprise.
41. I do things for the "lulz."
42. I always have the last word in online arguments. Always.
43. I wear sweatpants more than any other type of pants.
44. I am a guy and I have a ponytail.
45. I believe that it's the rest of the world that's awkward and I actually have everything pretty much figured out.
46. I have a hard drive exclusively dedicated to porn.
47. I write letters to companies and consumer interest blogs whenever I feel that I've been wronged.
48. I'm married in Second Life but single in real life.
49. I read Gizmodo more than the New York Times.
50. I am offended by this test.

Now, for the scoring. Simply add up your points and click on where you fall below to get your diagnosis.
-0-10 Points
-11-20 Points
-21-30 Points
-31-40 Points
-41-49 Points
-50 Points

Always.

As you can see in the test, the LG Renoir survived without any problem all the tests: freezing it to almost 0º F, being centrifugated at 500rpm in a washing/drying machine for 15 minutes, put into a car compartment fool of dust and keep it there for a while, and finally being submerged in water and wine. [Mobile Mail.ru—Thanks Kalle]

Gizmodo readers like you tend to think they know more about technology any other people—including (or especially) Giz editors. You're the person your friends and family come to with computer problems, what those in the know call a geek. But there are varying levels of geekdom. In order for you to prove where you stand, I've compiled a handy list of 50 key geek skills. Many of them are straightforward, some are tough as hell. Only the most dedicated shut-in basement dwellers will score a perfect 50. How do you stack up? Hit the jump to find out, and be sure to keep a tally as you read—there's a poll at the end to see how you measure up to your fellow Giz readers.

1. Install a hard drive in a laptop
2. Perform a clean OS install on a machine with two OSes
3. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone
4. Jailbreak an iPhone
5. Wire your house for Ethernet and Coax cable
6. Use BitTorrent and RSS to automatically download new shows from trackers
7. Use an A/V receiver to its fullest capability (every port is taken)
8. Calibrate an HDTV without the manual
9. Use a DSLR in full manual mode
10. Hack the encryption and mooch your neighbor's Wi-Fi
11. Solder cleanly enough to get around a circuit board
12. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point
13. Shove the guts of a modern game console into a retro game console
14. Design a webpage in HTML by hand that features a picture of your cat
15. Use Photoshop to imperceptibly doctor a photo
16. Abstain from buying extended warranties
17. Know where to buy cheap cables and accessories
18. Fix your parents' computer over the phone without looking at a computer
19. Enter the Konami code
20. Comment on Gizmodo from your phone
21. Type quickly using T9 texting
22. Program a universal remote
23. Contribute code to the Linux kernel
24. Hide porn from your significant other
25. Avoid DRM on everything
26. Know how to back up your data to networked storage—and actually do it
27. Watch TV shows on the internet for free
28. Edit together digital video ripped from YouTube
29. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator
30. Reset expired trial software by messing with the registry
31. Hackintosh your PC
32. Download pre-release movies from Usenet
33. Hack the Wii to play homebrew games
34. Get around web content filters on public computers
35. Get into a Windows computer if you forgot your password
36. Securely erase your data so it can't be recovered
37. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network
38. Build a fighting robot
39. Write your own Firefox plugins
40. Navigate and reorganize the files on your computer in DOS
41. Get something on the front page of Digg
42. Get through to executive customer service
43. Rip a CD to V0 quality MP3s
44. Rip a DVD to DivX
45. Build your own computer from parts
46. Swap out the hard drive in your DVR for a bigger one
47. Get an NES cartridge working again by blowing in it
48. Calibrate a 7.1 surround-sound system
49. Play downloaded games on a Nintendo DS
50. Talk about things that aren't tech related

You probably only read Consumer Reports if a) you are at your grandparents house or b) you are a grandparent yourself. But that's too bad, because tucked quietly away in the NYC suburb of Yonkers lies one of the biggest and best electronics testing labs money can buy. And what goes on here at Consumer Reports main test facility probably puts most other tech pubs to shame.

We got a chance to look at all of the top dollar gear used to put everything found in CR's electronics pages in a complete vacuum of testing, basically removing every possible outside variable to test the pure hardware performance. That means anechoic chambers built on their own foundation (at a cost of $2.5 million in 1980) for total sound isolation; industrial-quality cell tower base station generators inside fully RF-shielded rooms that can crank out every possible mobile phone frequency at any strength; a "head and torso simulator" named Pedro, able to be calibrated down to the millimeter for testing every aspect of cellphone call quality possible, and a nameless human finger simulator composed of, well, meat (in action below as well). See our captioned gallery for a closer look:

Unfortunately, what makes CR so exemplary as a reliable testing lab also contribute to its fate to be found mostly on grandmother's end table next to the bowl of fossilized peppermints. As a non-profit organization, CR doesn't sell any advertising to anyone, anywhere, nor do they accept any review units or advance loaners from the company—everything they test, from a new BMW to an electric toothbrush, they buy.

While that means employees get pretty sick re-sale discounts on new cars every year, it also means CR is fighting an eternally uphill battle vs. the other tech pubs that don't keep such high standards, and that CR must keep all of its online content walled within a pay site for subscribers only. The subscribers it has are among the most loyal of any magazine, but the vast majority of them are older.

(The aforementioned human finger simulator gets put to the test on a mower that CR's resident high-RPM blade expert refers to as "the most dangerous thing i've ever tested." - video edited by BBG)

And due to the natural constraints of a magazine with no ads, the mountains of test data gathered for any particular product end up truncated and distilled into CR's famous comparative charts, where their scores are rendered in linearly receding bars and crimson doughnut dots. CR's benchmarks are designed to place all new products on a relative continuum, rating them "fair" to "excellent" in comparison to how products over the last several years have fared with the same rigorously standardized tests. But a problem there, obviously, is that often it looks like CR loves just about everything—this year's television are naturally going to present marked improvements over what's been available over the last few years, which tends to stretch the data toward the good end. Kind of like how you have to search forever find a review on CNET with a score of less than 7.0.

(Inside the soundproof womb of the anechoic chamber - video edited by BBG).

Such are the dilemmas of serious hardware testing that makes any type of claims towards ultimate authoritativeness. But it's also the reason why the old bound volumes of Consumer Reports are the most well-worn volumes in the periodicals room of the public library where I used to work. The data is there, and it's rock solid. Taking a tour of their labs and meeting the engineers that do the work, it's immediately apparent that what goes on in Yonkers is among the more vigorous and pure analysis of technology being done by anyone, anywhere.

After all, don't you just have to trust folks who keep this poster hanging above their main laptop test bench?

[Consumer Reports, video courtesy Consumer Reports, edited by the good gentlemen of Boing Boing Gadgets - see them for more]

In Manhattan, I loaded the National Geographic site on the N95's browser without Flash about 10 times. Each result was different, but the bulk came up in the 37-43 second range, even slower than Jobs' 33-second claim. Spotty reception could've been to blame, because the status indicator switched between 3G and 3.5G several times. Or that the local tower was being utilized; remember, 3G bandwidth is a shared resource. This stuff is hard to quantify without true side by side tests.

Over on the left coast, our intern John ran the test on his N95 too. The site loaded for him in 31 seconds without flash, and about 37 seconds with it turned on.

He also gave it a go with Opera Mini, and without flash the page loaded in an astounding 10.6 seconds, less than half the time advertised by the iPhone 3G. However, Opera works a bit differently than the default browser—it only loads optimized content filtered through their servers in Norway. But John was able to zoom in on any part of the page and see full image quality instantly, just like Mobile Safari.

What else is interesting is that the side by side EDGE/3G tests from iPhone to iPhone show a 2.4x increase in speed. But Apple uses the Lonely Planet website for benchmarking, according to the iPhone 3G website. So, despite the tests on stage at WWDC, were they showing numbers for Lonely Planet? I doubt it, but I'm also confused as to why they'd switch up metrics. (The fine print is here.)

So what's the answer? Well, we're not entirely sure. Jobs' test results look kosher, but the implied winner here is Opera Mini. Progressive loading in half the time of Safari? Sign me up. But when it comes to the speed of the stock browser on a Nokia N95 using 3G, let us know if you've had better results.

[iPhone 3G FAQ, Nokia N95 Review]

Additional reporting by John Herrman

Battery Test: DRM vs. Non-DRM [DAPReview]

"We etch silicon chips in ways that are very similar to what are used to make Pentium and other computer chips," McDevitt says. "But instead of transistors, we create little test tubes — these little test tubes are miniature reaction vessels that hold artificial taste buds."

To test a sample, you drop some blood onto the chip and then place it into a reader which then tests for the blood CD4 count. Not completely portable—yet—but definitely a step in the right direction.

Handheld Puts AIDS Fight in Field [Wired]