Because some posters speak more than one language? and make occasional mind farts when writing in English?

"en" is a pluralising suffix in Dutch, and might well be in other languages.

1. We can do it for sewer/subways, so we can do it for this.
2. ...and trucks, roads etc don't neet maintence?
3. ...unsticking trucks when they get stuck on bridges / ontop of passanger cars.
4. ...have you ever been on the M25 (or insert-name-of-big-highway) on a Friday afternoon?
5. ...you think it'll be worse than shoplifting / 'falling off the back of a lorry'?
6. ...and this is worse than road deaths / train deaths right now?
7. Fuel strikes?

Sure, you've raised some valid points, but you've completely omitted any mention of perspective. What's important is how such a system would compare in relation to the alternatives... and from where I'm standing, it certainly sounds like it's an idea worth investigating.

> I threw up after looking at that nerd. He has the whitest skin I've ever seen

Racist.

Her, and she doesn't even know what RAM is let alone how to upgrade it. The Apple Store have done everything for her.

Not sure what version she has, but her macbook's about 18 months old.

I dunno about the whole 'just works' thing. A friend of mine is a big mac user (non-techie), she seems to have the mac equivelent of BSOD several times a week. Graphics designer, so the mac is needed.

I gather that this is pretty standard in the Mac world.

Haven't seen BSOD in Windows for a long while.

26 years supporting Windows Desktops and Server Products
10 years VMware.
BA in Computer Science from Correspondence University of Pennsylvania.
Post-it-note with "Please hire me ;-)" attached to a USD bill sporting the face of Ben Franklin

and a picture of the hiring manager in a compromising position with he CEO's wife?

Microsoft's Small Business Server isn't that expensive, and is as idiot proof as Microsoft OSes go.

Now, considering that the OP seems to have 0 experience in IT (so he/she is either a kid out of uni, or has blagged it), it would be prudent to recommend he look at the simplest solution from the market leader. Something he can't mess up.

Anyhow, my 2p:

Computers: buy them from dell. Best price/quality ratio. Pick a cheapish desktop for office-based users. Consider buying 1-2 extra as hot swaps (cut downtime during repairs). Laptops for users who're mobile (Dells are again okay, especially the Latitudes).
Internal network: buy a general purpose server with Windows SBS. That'll be your domain controller, file server, and exchange server.
Web server: host it externally. either rent a server, a colocation or just rent shared space.

Depending on just how much media you've got, you could invest in a NAS box / SAN. QNAP are pretty well rated.

Backups: you're probably looking at USB drives. You'll have too much data to have to rely on tape.

What the ORM gives you (in addition to the obvious) is the power to make large scale changes to your persistance infrastructure quickly and easily.

Take caching as an example. Every time you touch the database, you pay a relatively high cost. If the data you're accessing doesn't have complex sorting or querying, then you can dramatically improve performance by caching in the webserver's memory. If your db is on the network, then the cost is even higher. Guess what? With an ORM such as nHibernate, you can have this data cached, with just a runtime setting. No downtime. No code changes.

For projects of a certain size (not tiny, but not google/facebook size) the ability to be able to tweak your data access via configuration is well worth the initial 'extra' cost of using an ORM.

As you say though, there are too many poor developers out there who don't understand their tools. However, you can't disparage a whole technology just because a certain group of users are too stupid to be able to use it right. It's actually a good thing: inept developers / architects / 'engineers' are flagged early on when they treat an ORM as "magic persistance layer". Much better than hiding in the woodwork until it's too late get rid of them.

...with any kind of accuracy. Apples can't self pollinate, which means you'll never get the same variety of apple out of its seeds. Sure, you'll get an apple, but not the same apple you were expecting.

Google for more info:

http://www.google.nl/search?q=growing+apples+from+seed

As far as tomatoes go I was refering to certain popular crop tomatoes which, as I understand it, do not produce viable seeds.

I understand that a lot of the varieties grown commercially have similar problems. They've either been designed to be sterile, or they involve splicing one plant onto another (see: apple tree) or something similar...

Like most crop varieties of apples, bananas and tomatoes?

Or do they manually pollinate them? Whilst crossing fingers and hoping for the best (apple trees take a long time to grow to fruit bearing age so it's hard to validate)..

We Europeans tend to forget that the US is massive. It's twice the size of the entire EU, though only has 3/5 of the population. Population wise it's comparible to the Eurozone countries.

The major difference is that the culture seems to be based around 'city states' more than 'countries' as it is in the Eurozone..... your average Texan is as close to someone from New York as a Finn is to a Greek.

Hans Rosling expained it really well at TED.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Research here in Netherlands points towards to daylight lighting having large influence on the performance of school children.

Link is in dutch: http://www.ed.nl/onderwijs/6474024/Meer-profijt-scholen-door-beter-licht.ece

Summary (paraphrased): modified lighting leads to a 15% increase in concentration of school children. Followup research must be done to prove any link to performance. Trial was done at two schools, and sponsored by Philips.

My personal experiences back this up: daylight lamps in particular are fantastic, they're more effective than coffee at keeping me alert.

> Not much you can do about the virus ..except vaccination...

Not sure how you'd deliver a vaccine to the bee colony, though.

Their lawsuit gives them leverage over her.

If she wins, she gets power.

It's good for business to have leverage over people in power.