The promise of thin clients has never been on upfront costs. The advantages have to do with maintaining the clients once they have been deployed. Think patches, service packs, O/S upgrades, memory upgrades, HD replacements, etc. With traditional desktops many of these changes can only be done by going to each machine individually. Additionally, thin clients make backup/restore trivial whereas trying to enforce data retention standards on desktops is always a battle. While these issues may not present themselves in a small to medium sized company, trust me when I say that with thousands of installed desktops there are hundreds of people dedicated to maintaining the hardware and managing the environment.

I'm not sure what you mean by "there aren't suitable thin client options for most businesses." Most of the actual business of say a bank, or an insurance company, or a web vendor, or just about any company that isn't a full fledged software developer comes down to a few apps that rarely require huge amounts of memory, the latest video card, or even a hard drive since most of those apps just run as a client and save data on the server anyway. In fact I can think of few businesses where thin clients shouldn't represent the majority or installed systems.

I've got the stupid magic box they're searching for. It's called the ballot box and if any politician were to grow a spine and stand up to these goons I'd use it. The box that comes next in the series is far less peaceful.

And it would be compatible with the proposed new system that only has 2 settings: "elevated" and "imminent".

Annual defense budget: $700,000,000,000
Average annual taxes per American adult to defense: $3,050

NSF budget: $7,000,000,000
Average annual taxes per American adult to NSF: $30

No no no, it's the X-terminal with WIRELESS!

To: alicethesurfer@gmail.com
From: alf@nbc.com

I found your cat. It was delicious.

I'm buying this to run on my Windows phone!

Biggest way to improve the recommendations is to stop recommending things I already have in my queue!

The bottom line is that the dumbphone market is already crowded and Wal-Mart is late to the game. How's Wal-Mart's DVD-by-mail program going? Oh they sold out to Netflix. How about their online music store? Cheaper than iTunes but still not competitive. Unless it's cheap shit from China the power Wal-Mart brings to the table is negated. I give this 6 months.

Within a year of moving to a state that used an ethanol blend my head gasket went. Coolant got into the cylinders and produced a wonderful smoke screen. Not sure how many gallons of ethanol I'd have to buy to offset the $1000+ repair.

The best part of that commercial is when she says she's "not cool enough to be a Mac person" you see she's driving a VW.

Pickens is on record as saying that Peak Oil is not only real it's now. As one of the last wildcatters it's not wise to bet against him. Then again he really likes Oklahoma State football so he's not right about everything.