Although it's clear that Intel is addressing the very valid concerns people have always had about coltan, there are a lot of good comments in this thread about the vagueness of "conflict free." Perhaps a more interesting and useful metric would be a "living wage supply chain," where everyone involved has been paid enough money to lead at least a lower-middle-class lifestyle. I don't have any clue how this would work, but hey -- this is an online comment, not an economics paper!<p>Of course you'd have companies claiming that $1/day is middle class in certain countries, etc, so maybe you'd have to set some sort of standardized chart based on CPI, but y'all get what I'm saying here. I think it would be more informative than "conflict-free", especially since it gets to the root of ensuring a lack of slave-labor-like conditions for workers. Most of the fashion industry, for example, would never manage to hold itself to such a standard. "Made in Italy" is a lot more expensive when you can't pay table scraps to your Chinese "guest workers"...