I don't buy this as an excuse to not eat decent food. A 3-mile walk doesn't take more than about 45 minutes. Include the return trip, and you're up to an hour and a half. Even if every person in your household works fulltime, you have time to do this at least every couple days. If you're underemployed, you've got even more time. If you're working multiple jobs, you can probably afford a bus pass.

Perhaps I'm more dedicated to decent food than most, but I wouldn't let a few miles keep me away from it. Sure, it would suck to live in one of those "food deserts" and have to walk a few miles to get to decent food, but being poor typically sucks in general, if your idea of a good life is to be able to pay people to do things for you (eg, provide transportation).

Since we're talking about health, I'd feel remiss if I didn't point out that the extra walking helps improve your health, too.

I agree that these things rock. I've been wearing the Keep-Stuff-Out model for a few months now for boating, trail-hiking, and other general wear.

The few weaknesses I've found are the following:

1) They suck in scree fields. A solid boot protects the top of your foot a lot better when you're sliding through sharp rocks.

2) They suck for bushwhacking through the woods (at least in New England). I tried this a few times, but the pointy sticks in old logging sites and various underbrush got me between the toes too many times. I'd love a model where the sole continued up between the toes, so you'd have the rubber to protect you there instead of the light fabric on the current models.

3) They suck in the mud. The soles just don't grip well there, despite their impressive performance elsewhere; they probably need some sort of lug or something to fix this. A friend recommended wearing a sock over them for improved mud traction, but I haven't had a chance to try this yet.

I'm really surprised at how well they work, though. I love them for trails and water especially. I haven't carried more than 35 pounds or so with them yet, but was surprised at how much I prefer them over more sturdy shoes for light backpacking and climbing approaches. These are definitely my favourite shoes.

If you go this route, make sure you get their Enterprise product. We used that for several years and had no problems with it, but were eventually moved into their SMB offering due to our size (~30 licenses), and I found the SMB product's management capabilities to be awful, the interface to be buggy and unstable, etc. Our VAR recently gave us a heads up that they'd changed the product again, and confirmed it would require another round of uninstall/reinstall, so we took the opportunity to evaluate our options and have moved to another vendor.

The I/O. On a mainframe, you can run a query and generate large datasets so fast it'll blow your mind (in 2002-ish, say tens of gigabytes). On the mainframe it's no big deal, and you can run queries like that all day and never have any idea how much data you're moving around until you try to move it somewhere else and wonder why it's taking so long.

The mainframe isn't about looking pretty, it's about getting work done, and the folks touting their benefits generally aren't exaggerating. Mainframes aren't generally designed for CPU-heavy tasks, although they certainly can be clustered pretty impressively if you really need lots of CPU. The biggest advantage is that you can really use the CPU's you've got. There are service processors to offload things like memory management, encryption, I/O, virtualization overhead, etc. There are really really fast I/O channels. You typically attach them to really really fast disk and tape. These things together allow you to move a lot of data around very quickly, and get a lot of work done.

Additionally, lots of large companies have lots of man-hours invested in systems that run their businesses. I've seen attempts to reimplement some of the beasts to get them off the mainframe, and they typically don't go well. I've also seen assembly code written in the late 1960's still running in production more than 35 years later. The underlying hardware had been upgraded many times, but IBM made sure the old stuff would still work.

Things like this are worth a lot of money to a certain class of purchaser.

Buy more RAM.

I know how this feels first hand. In the 6th grade my parents sent me and my two younger sisters to a private school. The Dean was pretty strict, but we were getting a good education, a lot of individual teacher attention and really exceeding in our studies. The second year the Dean decided that we (the students, not just me and my siblings) were rebels that needed to be controlled, which he thought he could do through a strict dress code. The kicker was that it was to be enforced even when we weren't at school. We (supposedly) were not allowed to wear jeans (ever) and the girls had to wear skirts or knee length shorts, always. Even on Saturday. That, and no "excessive jewelry".

We didn't stay much longer. These poor kids in the article though.. I don't imagine they have that luxury.