[ Citation needed ] I did a quick Google for this and the statistics I found at http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... showed this to be wrong. There are plenty of other resources which show the same thing.

I don't believe the bit about NZ is true. The Trans-Pacific cables (as far as I'm aware) charge by the megabit, but this price has dropped dramatically - to the point where flat-rate is actually becoming "reasonable" in New Zealand - due in part of-course to Kim Dotcom. Also, the claims about peak performance are exaggerated, and in practice you can still over-subscribe at peak times as not everyone is utilising it at *exactly* the same time.

Nope. Everyone else in the world has an exactly average or slightly below average sleep requirement - all 7 billion of us.

Not so. Your old car just gets automagically swapped for a new one 1 mile from home.

It is relatively straightforward to use DRBD to loopback across 127.0.0.1 and protocol A to set exactly this up. I'd link to the blog which demonstrates how I did this, but don't want to get slashdotted. (Googling "drbd-for-ssdusb nz" should hopefully show you how to do this if you care enough to google for it)