Why is custom hardware needed? Im just curious. There seem to be plenty of cheap ($100) SOC boards out there with ethernet ports. You only need one to route. Not sure what sort of hardware performance requirements the encryption and tunneling software would require, but surely one can be built for much less than $7500. Even a desktop with a bunch of 4x1GB port PCIe cards wouldn't cost a grand... its a desktop I know, but still....

He should consider using virtualization to increase his uptime since he is worried about multiple important systems on a single server. Virtualization gives you such good yields in consolidation, you can come out ahead while still using redundancy features like VMware FaultTolerance. Your vm runs "in-step" on two hosts, and will survive even if either host fails. Just requires 2X the used memory. That's still only the most extreme case though like for databases, as most servers should be able to survive a reboot (which is what happens when your host dies and there is capacity left in your cluster. The VM powers back up on another host.

Responsibility must mean liability. You can't claim to be responsible for something and then when it goes all wrong, stick your hands up in the air and say "not my fault!". If you are not liable and responsible, then you shouldn't have kids. They are under your control, thats what society has determined over generations to be the appropriate path to raising human beings.
Now, I do agree with you that they are not totally under your control. For example: you can not beat your kids, even if you believe that it is the best way to encourage the behavior out of them that would yield better results. You could say that the state prevented you from administering the discipline you believed would have corrected their behavior and sue the state. But if you need to be that strict with your kids, and feel you need to beat them, and don't have that option at your disposal (as we do not in the US, for obvious and good reasons), then you should be able to reach out to those limiting your choices, and limiting your liability, as they have limited your ability. Thats fair.

I acknowledge things are not that simple. But to say "I have responsibility, but limit my liability", I disagree. By having kids, you assumed that liability, and took the risk. If you are not able to judge, and assess those risks, then you shouldn't be having kids.

At worst, the parents are guilty of "contributory negligence" for not being software engineers.

Nonsense.

If your kid is in a park, grabs a rock, throws it at someone and causes harm, then you are responsible. Not the parks office, not the city, not the state, and not in the case of this incident, the school.

As a parent you are responsible for the actions of your kids in place of themselves since they are children. If you want to understand if the school should be blamed, ask yourself, would the school be blamed if the person was an adult? No. Of course not, that would be silly. The School had as much to do with the activity as the ISP serving the school. It isn't accepting full liability because you chose to exercise their facilities to perform your actions. Just like an ISP isn't responsible if you use their network to organize a murder (see Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). The school is not liable, the person is. But, because the person is underage, the person's parents are responsible. Its as simple as that. You are responsible for your kids actions, you in place of them. Don't like it? Don't have kids. Having kids involves accepting responsibility for them. Its that simple.

So, no sir, you have it wrong.

So if I post a stock trade on the internet, am I not liable if it looses money? What if I repeat on the internet what someone has said IRL? What if it wasn't on the internet, but on some other network, or on a cell phone that traverses the internet using a VOIP backend or even better still, just a land line? If a terrorist posts a command to others to attack some entity, is he not liable because it was on the internet? Where does liability start?

To impose that whatever happens "on the internet" is not real and shouldn't count is just plain unrealistic. What you say should count, you said it! I think you should be free to say it anonymously as well, and be free of "backtracking" that comment to you. But if you connect yourself to the comment, then absolutely you should be liable. Why are you so against personal responsibility? People are responsible for their actions. Plain and simple, and thats a good thing. If you post a great work of art on the internet, you are entitled to its copyright, so you are reaping the rewards from that work, and you can't have benefit on one hand and reject liability on the other. By great work of art, imagine your photography, a game you made, or some other product.

Is it ridiculous to state that tangible harm was done because of said comment? Maybe. If so, prove it. We have a mechanism for managing the relationships between people and the harm they might inflict with their actions. That's why we have courts. Its a good thing, and a good system.

On Slashdot, clearly you can, or your last post would not have appeared. Being a peer-moderated system, approval only gets you modded up or down, but slashdot doesn't delete bad comments like yours, and neither does Facebook.

Why would posting defamatory remarks make the profile fake, or warrant its deletion? Also, just because you can delete something doesn't mean no harm was inflicted. Granted, it limits the extent, but if you post something derogatory, and cause pain and suffering (or for example in a worst case scenario: suicide), deleting it only limits the damage, it doesn't undo that damage.

If your kids happen to make money, parents control that money until they are 18. They should also suffer the liability as well. You can't have one without the other. Either children are responsible or they are not.

The Municipal provider has the advantage of not needing customers to subscribe to collect it's fee's. It does this through taxes, which is coercion. I'm sorry, but it is. Your forcing someone to pay for something irrespective of the fact that they think it may be a good choice or not. Comcast will cover the cost and sell its service to everyone under the sun if they could, since they are GAURANTEED not to have competition, because your city gives them that guarantee. If such a guarantee was illegal, I imagine it would be too risky for one company to go in on it alone, at which point, multiple companies would form a corporation to SHARE THE COST AND ACCESS, or research cheaper methods, or lease their network to others who think they can do a better jobs like the ILECs. Competition is good, and as Milton Friedman explains so well, no decent law can prevent a monopoly, only create them.

No, No No No!!!! It doesn't matter if they are a wolf in wolf's clothing! They have a service to sell, and users should be free to to use it if they so choose.
What we should be against is any subsidization, special treatment, or monopolistic practices, always rooted in government. It is a fact, that monopolies can only exist for any great length of time with the help of a government law or regulation insuring their monopolistic status (with only one notable exception: The London DeBeers Corporation) . A monopoly exists and extorts their customers by jacking up prices, or delivering goods and services of a less than desirable quality. Barring any regulation preventing new competition, a competitor will always enter the market; because someone will have a business plan to either lower the cost, holding the quality constant, or raise the quality, holding the cost constant. In the US, capital is not a barrier to entry, as some investment house, or other financial mechanism is always looking to exercise their capital on a solid business plan.
That is how free markets work. When there is good competition, you have the highest available quality, and the lowest cost, the market will bear.
Choice is good, so long as the costs are realized, and not passed on to tax payers, who are then forced to be come a customer (via a lack of options, or because their taxes have already paid or partially paid for a good or service).

These councils need to get out of the business of "selecting" the internet provider and let the free market run its course. The outcome will always be what the customers choose, which is usually a variety of competitors, and thats a good thing!

Thats true if you do not have solar arrays that rotate to take advantage of the sun's maximum incidence, but in a commercial installation, thats non-sense. On a roof top, there are limitations such as aesthetics of having the panels flat against the roof, and maximum height of the structures that come into play that don't need to be considered for commercial installations. The commercial installations move their collectors to attain a maximum incidence throughout the day, by remaining perpendicular to the sun, as the systems are far too cheap and panels far too costly to not take advantage of. In California, the conservative estimation given clouds and hours is 7 useful hours per day on average throughout the year (less than the 8 I was estimating).

I was just giving an example for easy maths (8 hours is one third of a day), etc.. but you are right in the sense that you would have to scale up the lower amount of sunlight you have. I would also argue that my assessment assumes you want to remain energy-neutral and not economically-neutral. Since sunlight produces peak power, your KW/h is more expensive when you sell it than at night when you buy it back.

Right, and any area has to be evaluated for its most economical method of night-time power. But as I said, most data centers will be able to be powered by the relatively low-cost off peak power at night. Cities get their street lights powered at little or no cost because the power companies need to "burn off" the power they generate at night because they can not power off the plants, and there needs to be some load (I'm not sure if this is still relevant, but its what we were taught in H.S. in the 90's physics class). Im sure its also dependent on the kind of power system and plant design in use. As I said, the grid will be happy to take excess power in the day and return it back at night. If you truly gave the daily amount of power, in and out, you would also make money. Peak power (which you are providing via solar in excess of your load is more expensive than off-peak power which you are consuming at night, KW/h for KW/h.

Can a certain number of solar panels power a datacenter with a given load? Sure! Just not 24/7. But that doesn't mean they can not. Your datacenter takes 1 MW/h. You receive roughly 8 hours of usable sunlight, so you need 3MW/h capacity of solar panels to produce the power you need. During the day, the power company will take your excess power, and light up factories, offices, Air Conditioning, etc... During the night, you will use the power company to power your datacenter, when it has to keep its power systems up anyways, and therefore has excess capacity. Look up the terms "base load" and "peak load", understand that not everything that plugs into the power grid needs to be up 24/7 ( not even all servers, look up "DRS"). So can that much power be produced to have a "net neutral" load on the grid? Sure!

But there is always the desire to be completely self-reliant. In this area, I always liked the idea of using the excess power during the day to lift water to a lake high up, and running hydro at night to power the datacenter. This is of course expensive, especially since power companies have excess power at night anyways, since the cycle time to stop / start producing base power won't allow the company to shut down X generators at night.

It's fair, but to be fair, there should be bandwidth to support that at the peering sites. In the LA area, Verizon Fios is so bad accessing Netflix, it buffers and reduces quality so often, I usually go to HBO GO just to avoid the quality issues. I'd pay more for better bandwidth.

Mod parent up!

Comcast enters into agreements with various municipalities to have an effective monopoly for a type of service in that area (coax). The original ideals of these arrangements helped the cable co. justify the costly process of installing the coax network, as it would be assumed that X% of lit locations would then subscribe, making the service feasible.

The problem here is you don't have the rules that regulate LECs to ensure competition, yet still provide effective monopolies on a class of service backed by local government regulation. LECs must resell (or lease) their lines to other carriers at fair market value. So you can order say a T1 line or a POTS line from other carriers, and they can deliver that service to you via the wires of the LEC, which will terminate in the 3rd party carriers datacenter.

Coax works different: The company installs the coax network in a neighborhood, and are guaranteed exclusivity in those neighborhoods. No other entity can install Coax (or sometimes anything else, e.g.: fiber; depending on the local agreement). The right answer is to remove exclusivity deals, as I'm not in favor of either government provided service, or regulations from the government. Both would yield a worse situation than what we have now in terms of
1. customer service (just visit your local DMV office for something to compare it to)
2. price (look at the cost per student of your local public vs. private schools)
3. privacy (google Edward Snowden).