ASICs start to play a big role at scale. To me the phrase "big iron" signals towards them.

In that case, things like Mikrotik's would be considered as "big iron". (I happen to be a big Mikrotik fan)

Just making the case that "just buy Cisco" doesn't do anyone really any good in a very wide market with a lot of very good options - sometimes paying for the brand doesn't mean you are getting something better.

you are getting "market familiarity" meaning they aren't beholden to you or your "crank" operating system and any schmo with a CC can bilk/bill them for support.

it's not #dogecoin-market, that's the public channel that they push positive messages to. They run their schemes in #marketmakers, an invite-only channel on freenode.

You're sitting on $80m in BTC, head down to the local electronics store in Great Aunt's/Grandma's town and buy a new one.

I just confirmed this with my account, it's truncating at 8 chars.

Google Fiber is a disruption play in a limited market. While not a loss leader, this type of roll out isn't cheap, especially for existing plants.

That being said, I'm jealous, so very jealous of Kansas right now.

If Google's roll-out significantly more expensive than any other type of facilities-based build-out?

In fact Google's product is rational: If you are going to bother to build out in a competitor's territory, you want to get all of your competitor's customers to switch, so you need a disruptive product.

My understanding is that the new build out is cheaper than traditional HFC builds. The difference here is incumbent providers would need to abandon large swaths of their infrastructure to compete with a disruption play in Kansas.

Google is spot on to roll out FTTH, but existing plants aren't going to disappear any time soon, and likely will not react to the disruption play at large.

RAID5, they can only sustain one failure.

Incorrect. From the fine article (SpaceX's release):

  "It is worth noting that Falcon 9 shuts down two of its engines
   to limit acceleration to 5 g's even on a fully nominal flight.
   The rocket could therefore have lost another engine and still
   completed its mission."

These floors are too clean, we should fire some of these janitors.