Your analysis misses a few important implementation details.

First, at least one company (ATTO) already makes thunderbolt adapters for 10GbE and FC. ATTO and SNS makes iSCSI initiators for OSX. I've used both. They work fine. But iSCSI on Mac rarely makes sense.

Second, the typical usecase for these is for a video editor. Few use iSCSI, and the better funded ones will be connecting to a nice SAN or NAS over 10 GbE.

Third, who cares? The SSD fails, you get it replaced. These are workstations, not servers, and any important data should be going to a more redundant system.

Wow... thank you for sharing that! Can't believe how low it is :|

(emphasis mine) I really hate it when people either lie or fail to read their own links... The "Momentum Limited" Orion would have been 133 years on-way to Alpha Centauri.

Care to share a real plan for faster-than-light travel?

Laugh all you want, but it is a very pretty cable.

And you didn't even mention the vibration resistance!

Do they seriously consider linux sysadmin to be the same task as Windows admin? Do they at least differentiate other admins, like storage and network?

You have $30-50/hr staff doing $15/hr work. Just quantify it. You have an easy case to make, although the current IT manager should have done this by now.

Document the hours spent on helpdesk work by higher paid staff. That should be enough justification on its own. But also document any delays, setbacks, or lost productivity from having you guys cover helpdesk crap.

Management will see that they are losing high-value productivity to low-value tasks. That is only acceptable your IT department is overstaffed.

I can't speak for the GP, but I think you're conflating "not all that complicated" with "so easy even master_kaos could do it in ten minutes".

From my own experience, a person with a small business, 5 rental properties, a house, a recent divorce, and two kids in college has a moderately complicated return. Extremely complicated (and far out of my league) would be the 500-page returns of the top 0.1%.

There are plenty of mistakes that tax software can't help you with. Common issues I have seen: incorrect filing of amended W-2s/1099s (IRS now thinks you have more unreported income), failure to retain source documents, failure to take any deductions for 1099s, failure to deduct mileage/vehicle expenses. From some larger tax firms that employ barely trained seasonal workers: blatant lies that will get flagged.

If you get a single W-2, don't buy or sell securities, have no other income, rent a small flat, and are absolutely sure you don't get any other deductions or credits, file an EZ on your own. For anything else, I would at least consult with a tax firm that is open year-round.

Aren't those only for reading glasses?

I can't speak to the veracity of your claim, but this is what piercing the corporate veil is for. Any decent lawyer should be able to win that sort of case and get through to real parties with real assets.

Sure, by at least 1.5 degrees to >90% probability.

Ok, not technically accurate for CO2, just total GHG, but you're a truthful cynic so I am sure you will agree.

Definitely not the same rate, and sequential I/O is rarely the determining factor (at least in my field). For many applications, when deciding the number/type of drives, IOPS are the determining factor.

Even if 4x denser drives had 4x the sequential performance, it often comes down to random reads or writes. And for that you will want (36) 1 TB drives over (18) 2 TB drives. Spending extra on larger disks is counter-productive.

This is why low capacity 10-15K SAS drives are still so popular.

I've been waiting a few years to have a reason to post this on Slashdot...

The Carbon Cycle - Lyrics here

Your points are all valid, but it's worth noting:

Isn't fully true. The military does want to cut certain wasteful parts of the budget, but the Pentagon isn't asking for a significantly smaller overall budget. They want to modernize a lot of the old crap that will be very expensive, and they know they need to get other costs down to do it.

One big example: the USAF. They're still flying planes that saw action in Vietnam. They have serious maintenance problems and want to modernize. The bulk of their airframes are either past retirement age or scheduled for it. They want a bigger budget...

Other posters are spot-on. The bandwidth isn't the issue, it's the latency. I had trouble just getting ssh work done over a consumer satellite connection because the delay for characters I typed to show up killed me. Pointy-clicky stuff is even worse.

I don't know what your exact setup is, but find a way to artificially induce 1-2 seconds of latency in your connection. Test it and see if you can still work with it before you commit.

No way in hell they allow her to resign until well after Obamacare stops being controversial. Why? They'd never be able to get a senate confirmation for a replacement.