4,677 hours of failure in 4,344 hours of time means that at any given time, an average of 1.07 locations were offline.

There are 131 DMV offices in Virignia; I don't know how many other Department of Transportation locations are included in the same bucket. If we assume that it's *only* the 131 DMV offices, 1.07 failures at any given time means that the system means that 130.3 locations are working, meaning that this statewide patchwork of network connections is 99.45% reliable.

If your 'redundant' connections cut the failures in half (which they wouldn't), you'd have 99.59% reliability at more than twice the cost for the network.

Adding 'redundancy' would more than double the network cost (since presumably currently they're using the lowest bidder), and in most places it wouldn't add any real redundancy anyway. Getting actual network redundancy is *fiendishly* difficult, even when you're spending a lot of money and siting a facility in a place that's well-served for networking. In small-town Virginia, you're almost certainly going to wind up paying for having redundant wires hanging on the same poles.

Nah. The OS X girlfriend is very low-maintenance, except for the fact that she'll only consent to live in a house with everything already built in at construction time: a built-in coffee maker, microwave, etc.

Sure, a built-in coffee maker costs $300 while one that sits on the counter is $30. Windows likes the cheap coffee maker, but when it breaks you frequently find that you wind up having to tear down the whole house and build a new one around a replacement coffee maker.

The built-in coffee maker (almost) never breaks, and when it does it's easy to fix. However, it appears to be totally incapable of making cappuccino. You're not really sure, though, because the documentation just pretends that cappuccino doesn't exist. You seem to remember hearing that Steve Jobs thinks that cappuccino is stupid.

The Linux girlfriend waits for someone to deliver coffee for free. Amazingly, this actually works, every morning When you find out that what's in the cup two days out of five is actually tea, you figure that that's close enough.