It's certainly more risky when you are buying hardware only to mine - although I guess that is bounded by the fact that even if FPGA or ASIC miners were to make it unprofitable, the GPUs are still valuable and you can sell them.

Yes, there is risk in buying dedicated hardware but the risk is quite reasonable. The R9 290x GPUs are brand new and in high demand. If for some reason the altcoin market collapses I can sell them close to their original cost.

Do you mine on linux with cgminer? I'm having terrible reliability issues. I have to restart cgminer every hour or else it crashes. Even with this measure, it crashed yesterday night and I sadly lost mining time :)

Why not write a script to get called by cron to check up on things?

"I" meant "cron". The system does this on its own, but it's still a cheap hack. I'd like the crashes to be more predictable, but maybe this is the best I'll ever do. I've spent enough time setting this up already, other things to do!