TOR exit nodes are in very short supply, and as a company you already have the protection of incorporation that prevents the biggest fear of exit operators (and the reason there are so few), being caught up in an investigation by police who kick down doors first and ask questions late

LOL....

Clearly you read neither the slashdot text (which says "what should we do with these resources") not "what should we do with this website content." It's not even said that the setup is running a public-facing website, or even a website at all.

The commenter very clearly meant "donate the equipment to us."

Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.

Did you miss the part about them trying to cut opex? *siiiiiigh*

Even that aside...Maybe the latter, but not the former. One of the most common mistakes of failover environments is using the "old stuff" for failover/backup.

That works great, until you exceed the computing/storage capacity/bandwidth of the original hardware.

Let's say in a year traffic is up 30%. Something goes wrong, big time, with Teh Cloudz. You've done a good job of keeping the old hardware current and replicated. You 'flip the switch'...and the old environment promptly chokes...oops.

Unless you're getting power donated as well, you definitely should not be accepting every machine you can get.

If this stuff more than a few years old, the power bill is going to quickly eclipse the cost differential of better hardware.

Electricity costs vary, but a ballpark of 1 watt/year = $1 is roughly right around here. That doesn't include cooling. A probably conservative but very rough ballpark power estimate would be 3kW for that equipment...I didn't count hard drives, the firewall, the router, etc.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

That's how a friend's father, an eye surgeon, put it.

It doesn't always go right, and (yes, rarely) it goes very wrong. There are no take-backs with the laser surgeries.

If you must, do the surgery that is reversible - they insert a small piece of plastic that corrects the lens shape.

the seller has no clue about what Zorro cards are inside

I can understand the display cards and SCSI cards - those have function - but everything else (framegrabber cards and such) seems like rather hopelessly outclassed stuff?

230,000 were killed by the Banquiao hydroelectric dam disaster.

Not quite. 20,000 were killed in the immediate flooding. The rest were killed in the epidemics, famines, etc that followed.

Even if the worst nuclear accident in history happened EVERY YEAR, it would still be safer than hydroelectric.

If you're going to claim indirect deaths as you did above, then I'm going to claim indirect deaths too.

http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...

Chernobyl didn't kill that many people directly/immediately, but it has impacted the health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. It will continue to do so, for generations. Nuclear disasters never go away.

Where X is 10-100 times larger than Y: Increasing the cancer risks for X people isn't 'better' than immediately wiping Y people off the map.

I'm sick and tired of the notion that it's OK to pollute, as long as you don't pollute "too much."

200+ chemicals found in samples of people's blood: http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/...

200+ chemicals found in newborn's umbilical core blood: http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.cdc.gov/exposurerep...

These chemicals by and large don't go away...and time after time, we find chemicals that were thought to be "safe"...aren't. When are we going to learn that? When are we going to require chemicals be considered dangerous until proven otherwise, instead of the present situation, where chemicals are only later shown to be dangerous once scientists and environmental groups collect a mountain of evidence?