Okay, I was a bit off - been buying 12 port switches. Here's a SMC 24 port switch for $200. This one is managed and runs $300. I did see them running about twice as much, but I don't know enough to really say why you'd buy those ones.

The point here is that thin clients make the 'switch box first' approach a full fix from the perspective of downtime. And yes, you can set up GP so that saving to disk is hard to impossible, but most places I've been don't do that.

Cost of maintenance, loss of value when someone loses unbacked up data in a machine failure. Downtime due to hardware failure (thin clients => simpler repair procedure). It's not a 100% win, but it's great for a number of use cases, so use it where it works. Of course, I'm a dev, so I get a fancy box, or a slice of a monster build box sitting in the closet.

Extra switches cost about $100 for the leaf versions, possibly $300 if you want management. If your company is as cheap and irrational as what you describe, you're basically fucked.

Hogwash, economic starting points are a bigger indicator of success than raw brains - when you're poor and smart, getting ahead is HARD. When you're rich, you don't have to worry about paying for college, summer jobs, or much of that - you have a lot of free time for sports and networking, which helps you get ahead later on.

Ok, top 2 or 3. This has little to do with IQ (although you need that). It's more about willingness to work.

it's cheaper to manage and back up a more centralized installation. You can also build a thin client about the size of a book that is pretty much silent. Stick a shared monster box on the back end and maybe you'll think differently.

Replace switch with spare. Back online in an hour or so.

I wondered about that, being an occasional user of firearms. I'm still not going to use my range bag as carryon, though.

Actually that would be quite cool...Sam Flynn takes over Encom, and he eventually thinks his crap don't stink. And furthermore he has millions of fanboys exquisitely sensitive to his Reality Distortion Field.

The Tron sequel idea I had would have had Kevin Flynn basically becoming a Bill Gates-esque zillionaire with a Jobsian fanboy following. He eventually rewrites and unleashes the MCP on the Internet cloud because he craves complete ownage. However, there is a young Eastern European hacker kid who steps up and saves the Cloud...and the world. Yeah, the young hacker would be kinda sorta based on Linus Torvalds.

However, that story was better and less hokily done as Summer Wars. When Funimation unleashes that in theatres...GO. Actually, come to think of it, Summer Wars was what Tron: Legacy should have been. And Oz is so much more visually interesting than The Grid 2.0.

Every computer outside the Grid was running Mac OS X. Didn't you recognize the Darwin command line? No big thing: Steve Jobs is the biggest shareholder in Disney now so he gets mad props. That's the way that goes.

Actually having to go into Flynn's Arcade on the way to Flynn's secret office is one of my favorite scenes in the movie. I gather that you were in diapers in 1982. I was 18. Tron was big stuff for geeks of my generation.

Oh yeah, you didn't notice the most telling nostalgia object in young Sam Flynn's room? Mac Classic. Pristine.

Get off my frakkin lawn, youngling.

fine; pick any other country. We still jail more people than them.

Use metal detectors and bomb sniffers and you're done. What did you think a knife was going to do on an airplane?

per capita? We imprison more people than China period.

There is a legal concept of 'coming to the nuisance' - it was obvious that the asphalt plant was in operation, so it makes me wonder how these guys aren't laughed out of court. "you built a subdivision next to an industrial plant? Really?". The fact is, there's more than simply pollution - industrial areas are loud and smelly. If we're just talking about an extant externality, the existence of the residential area would be irrelevant - a developer could buy land, sue the neighbor, then build.