I agree, legacy technology is the best case use for C.

Barring specialized service providers, compute costs are seldom the biggest item in company expenses.

1. C is not portable, it's tied to the architectures/OSs/APIs the programmer chose to target at write time.
2. Leanness and close-to-the-metal speed are irrelevant in most business scenaios (time to market rules, cores and memory are commodity, see ABAP and related monsters successfully running most of the world transactions regardless of C).
3. C is not a language meant to implement business solutions, it's a wrapper for ASM for idiots who can't write ASM themselves.(rethorical)
4. Writing string processing libraries is tuff stuff, text can have different endings, (rethorical)
5. You haven't done anything really complicated that requires your focus to shift away from "bare-metal" to "time-to-value", by your own logic ASM is better than C.

As an H1B every time you switch jobs, your Greencard progress goes back to zero. Unless you have one, you are paying regular taxes with none of the long term benefits.

I give you, "Ken Lee":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

For certain services, commoditization makes it very unlikely that your internal organization will be able to compete in cost/quality ratios with specialized service providers. Example: Banks used to manage all aspects of their networking due to downtime impact, nowadays redundant providers can deliver networking with adequate SLAs (contractual, penalised) at lower cost than their internal staff, are there any banks that still lay their own fiber?

According to:
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/

200K in Brooklyn is equivalent to $101K in Austin, TX.

Not that hard to make 100K in Austin, the only issue is that is surrounded by Texas.

I can't remember who said it, but it gets the point across nicely: "Money is to business what blood is to a human body, you need it to survive but is not the point of your existence."

Reminds me of this gem:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/china_strong

That gets you RAID1 (between the server and your wife). for another layer of redundancy with no hardware investment, ask your wife to share your little mishaps with her mother. Far better availability and reliability than the best SAN.

If a person (adult or child) cannot make an effort to make the game enjoyable for the other player, the other player won't play for long.

You assume the plan was to benefit Americans by invading Irak. It was quite the opposite, the plan was to use tax money to finance operations while profits went to private companies, this is not a new concept.

Understand that modern warfare is ultimately governed by profit of the few at the expense of the masses, the economy was artificially inflated to mask the cost of the war.

Sadly, it is only when personal pockets of comfort are affected that the public at large start to question their government, when is too late.

And even then excuses will be made to defend the mental image that the exploited cling to, it was not my country that did this to me, it was something else.