...The owner will have to decide between passing the overhead to the customer by raising rates (potentially losing customers due to the rate hike) or terminating a helper plus working longer hours to compensate. This type of hard choice happens all the time for small businesses anytime a major unexpected change occurs in the mechanics of the world that power that business. Computer repair shops weren't doing so hot a few years ago when Thailand flooded and new hard drive prices literally doubled overnight, for example; I wonder how many of them went out of business because of the spike.

And since the Internet as we know it has become, thanks to scum-sucking advertizers, a hive of scum and villainy,

No, it really wasn't. The internet was invented to be an interesting communication protocol. Later on, commercial entities and the general public got connected to it. For a _long_ time, it was .edu (as latter became) only.

I'd love to see the "last mile" connection maintained by public utilities, breaking all cable company monopolies everywhere,

If a city or state wanted to have a public utility type state owned ISP instead of the current craze of profit/rent seeking privately owned ISP, this would incentivize the status quo.

In general, don't do anything that isn't your core business. Or another way of saying it, Do What Only You Can Do.

If you are an insurance company, is building and maintaining hardware your business? No, not in the slightest. You have no more business maintaining computer hardware as you have maintaining printing presses to print your own claims forms.

Maintaining hardware and the rest of the infrastructure stack however, is the business of Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, etc. The "fantasy" you're referring to is the crazy idea that you, as some kind of God SysAdmin, can out-perform the world's top infrastructure providers at maintaining infrastructure. Even if you were the best SysAdmin alive on the planet, you can't scale very far.

Sure, any of those providers can (and do, frequently) fail. Still, they are better than you can ever hope to be, especially once you scale past a handful of servers. If you are concerned that they still fail, that's good, yet it's still a problem worst addressed by taking the hardware in house. A much better solution is to build your deployments to be cloud vendor agnostic: Be able to run on AWS or Azure (or both, and maybe a few other friends too) either all the time by default or at the flip of a (frequently tested) switch.

Even building in multi-cloud redundancy is far easier, cheaper, and more reliable than you could ever hope to build from scratch on your own. That's just the reality of modern computing.

There are reasons to build on premises still, but they are few and far between. Especially now that cloud providers are becoming PCI, SOX, and even HIPAA capable and certified.

Please tell me the novel doesn't wreck the ending in some weird appeasement to religion like the movie did.

Please tell me the novel doesn't wreck the ending in some weird appeasement to religion like the movie did.

This raises the question of why people don't just avoid the pedantic bickering by saying "raises the question".

Because, generally speaking, pedants are tedious and annoying, and no one else cares about the trivial minutiae in which pedants like to get bogged down. It's irrelevant to the topic at hand.

At least, that's what my wife tells me. ;-)

...Better yet, use Amazon EC2 for your infrastructure so you can spool up as many redundant systems as necessary.

And hook up a TV and big speakers to isolate the signal. Then once we decode it, we can transport a volunteer to the alien planet. Though, we should build two, just in case a religious terrorist blows one up. If we do this carefully, with Small moves, it's possible. Small moves.

The age bracket in question is, today, decidedly not non-violent. Opposition to a draft today might not take the form of "flower power" and "sit ins." More likely, it would provoke the militia movement into actual violence.