Well, there’s roughly 8 billion people on Earth, and the Wikipedia article for “human” says:

The average mass of an adult human is 59 kg (130 lb) for females and 77 kg (170 lb) for males.

Male vs female is roughly 50/50 IIRC. Ignoring distribution of adults vs kids for simplicity, then roughly 4 billion times 59kg + 4 billion times 77kg = 544 billion kg or 1.2 trillion pounds, if I did my math right.

Pretty sure you can do much better than that now (plus or minus tariff insanity) – quick check on Amazon, NewEgg, etc. suggests ballpark of $5K for 1TB RAM (Registered DDR4) + probably compatible motherboard + CPU.

You can get motherboards with enough slots if you’re willing to pay enterprise prices for them. I have a system with 1TB of RAM at work that I use as a fast data cache. I just mount tmpfs on it, write hundreds of gigs of data into it (overwriting it all every few hours), and it works great. Cost was somewhere in the $10~15K (US) range a few years ago, IIRC. Steep for an individual, sure, but not crazy for an organization.

What they mean is you can just do something like mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk to get a file system using regular RAM already.

What was the most ridiculous or funny boundary push you saw?

Trolling someone by attaching a camera to the ceiling right above their keyboard. I’ve been paranoid since I saw that stunt pulled… They got their point across about physical security though.

I’ve worked for a university before and it was very common for staff to remote into their systems from home – usually with SSH for CS types or Remote Desktop/Team Viewer/etc. for less computer-focused folks. (The former usually didn’t have much issue – the folks using the latter mechanisms got compromised a number of times… -.-) There was also a campus provided VPN that was required to access certain systems with instructions to students and staff on how to use it, but other systems just got public IP addresses.

If what you’re doing is related to your work and campus IT doesn’t object, you’re probably fine to do it. I’ve run various kinds of websites and web apps for colleagues to collaborate on research projects. Being able to do things like that is kind of the point of the internet.

Having seen a number of students, uh, push the limits and find the boundaries of acceptability the hard way though… I’d strongly advise you not to install cryptominers, run TOR exit nodes, or torrent TV shows/movies/etc. That kind of thing tends to get your systems in hot water with IT or other parts of the bureaucracy…