Actually, gold bricks can do more damage at impact than canned foods ...

You paid 1250 for that laptop ... and you are still on slashdot ? .. I thought slashdot is for nerds ... only 2-3 thousand laptop owners should be allowed here ...

I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?

Oh stop with the morals and ethics stuff. I should be able to do whatever I want to do, regardless of what I promised or said I'd do or what is good for my relationships with other people or what is good for other people. And, by the way, all this corporate and political corruption is really getting on my nerves, why can't they be good, ethical, moral, scientific, non-hypocritical promise-keeping citizens like me?

[/sarcasm]

Ask for the "reimbursement" to be made in the form of a bonus so it's clear who owns the laptop - what you do with your bonus is your business. Yes, you'll have to pay taxes on it (I assume your tax laws count a bonus as income) but that's cheaper than the full price of the laptop and now it's yours, without question.

So long as there's 1) no contract to spell things out clearly and 2) the computer is "theirs", there will always be the risk of someone claiming the data on it is owned by them, not you. You may have an amazing relationship with your current boss but that situation may change (new boss, turn-for-the-worse in your relationship, whatever). If there's a contract in place, fine, but I suspect you're hesitant to ask that a contract be drawn up for just this situation.

Thus, if the company is willing to fork over the money, have them fork it over in a way that does not link it to the computer.

Or, of course, pay for it yourself. You obviously thought it was worth it given that you already bought it. Yes, an extra grand in your pocket is nice but you already decided you were willing to part with the money so if ownership of the data is important then you're not really out anything - it was an expense you were willing to pay.

You have a point, but even if a doctor doesn't know how exactly to perform brain surgery he is certainly able to describe the steps involved. I'm not against specialization, I'm against having a narrow view of your specialization.

As for the cost of learning C or any other language, the more languages you are familiar with, the easier is to learn a new one. The principles are the same ..

And who will write the Java interpretor for the next generation of processors ? Knowledge is power, knowing how the instructions look to the processor is helpful in many situations, being able to read 20 year old C code to implement something similar is also useful. You don't have to write in C or Assembly to make good use of that knowledge.