There's a road going near the building, and across the street, there's a bus stop
One of the neighbours has wlan called IsItColdAtTheBusStop?

If I'm laid off, my union salary kicks in and I get ~60% of my salary for 500 days.(where regular unemployment would be ~25-30%)
Now if after say 3-5 months I'm called back to work, I can continue with my normal salary.

If I would agree on a paycut instead, my salary would remain cut until I'd switch to another employer.

I would never agree to a paycut personally.
But thats probably different between countries, it works that way in Finland.

Seriously, $3500 for that? There really are people with too much money to spend.

Granted, it would be a nice woodworking project to build one.
But looking at the size of it, the wood would probably cost less than $200, throw in extra $100 for lacquer/varnish.

There are NO BUGS in the software!
You're hold^wrunning it wrong!

Combine this with AppleTV, it's only $99, and you have somewhat sane system.
It comes with remote already so one less extra step to tinker on.

Your question is about media and entertainment. Are you entertained by tinkering stuff or consuming entertainment generated by others?

That is a personal opinion, but I'm thinking of the power grid here.
When you're using electric equipment to heat water directly during usage, you're causing massive drain spikes to the network at mornings and at evenings depending on how people take showers.(doesn't apply to gas utilities, but I'm assuming electrical here)
Properly insulated tank can be heated during off-peak hours(the electricity might be cheaper) or using solar/wind, tankless rules those options out.

It's just a question of "do you have room to place that massive water tank?" mostly.

I don't like the idea of tankless water heaters at all. There are plenty of things you can do to reduce water heating costs.
If the house is in a windy place, think about getting a small wind mill, something you can easily place on your property, (think something like this)
Add directly attached heating element to the water tank and add temperature control relay to switch off the current when the water temperature in tank reaches desired level.
Second grid-connected heating element could be low-level triggered, if you're using up water faster than your wind power can heat up, the more expensive heating method kicks in and keeps your reservoir going.

Place the stuff you need on a livecd and give usb sticks to the users if they need storage, remove the hdds entirely during the event, then place hdd back afterwards to reset situation?
Samba/nfs share for storage could work also.

Other solution would be to use G4L to ghost all the laptop hard drives, first to backup them, then to image it with your preinstalled linux stuff.
Then repeat after event to restore original system image, but that would take ~10 days to do, both ways, and you'd need ~5-10Tb space to hold copies of the laptop images.(depending on the size of the original hdds)

Duh. Their fusion works with solar power..

I've never used Openfiler but I agree with expanding the storage with iSCSI, though iSCSI traffic should not be in his local network.
Each disk node should have dedicated 1Gbit connection without switches between the master server and the disk node.
If direct links are not possible and switches are needed, those should be manageable and configured with iSCSI in its own vlan.
Also important, unbind all other services from the NIC dedicated to iSCSI.
The disk node can be connected to the local network using 10/100mbit card for management via ssh etc.