"...they're seriously underpowered for any sort of PVR work..."

- And yet my Mini equipped with a EyeTV receiver performs pretty well as a PVR (even streaming recorded shows to other boxes in the house using CyTV but unfortunately I have not yet been able to make it stream the live TV feed - Damn! I miss a Snapstream like app for OS X).
At the same time The Mini serves as my family mailserver and webserver ... as well as an audio server using airtunes to access the stereo.

My latest mini-ITX experiments did unfortnately not end equally well - But that may have been due to the fact that I tried to use a VIA Eden card as a PVR. (A fanless 800 MHz C3 simply was not up to the job) Hopefully the mini-ITXs have improved more than a lot over the past year - would be nice for the competition.

As for "copying large amounts of company data", what ever happened to employee trust? i.e. You should only hire someone you can trust to do job you put them in, because there's no getting around giving them access to sensitive information. It's like telling the company accountant that they can't have access to the financial records, because they might embezzle money!

Unfortunately, in real life people have the amazing ability to turn on a dime, especially when they feel violated in some way or another. You can do all the background and personality and polygraph tests in the world but there's no way to know how someone will react if they perceive a slight-- epecially at a large and impersonal corporation, where layoffs and passed-over promotions are common. It only makes sense for a company to do its best to prevent trade secrets and other confidential information from walking out their doors... It's one thing to have a disgruntled employee with knowledge, since human memory is faulty and hard to prove. It's another to let them download the whole database to use against them later.