I note that you did not specify which Xeon chips you actually have, which kind of suggests a set of E5450 or something similar. FiOS does not charge you enough for a continually saturated link, whether it is 25 or 500mbps, so you are still contending with some hard and secret GB limit (starts to make the $/GB model seem more appealing). Game servers tend to be pretty light, and most could run on very modest AWS hardware. Beyond that, EC2 costs nothing when the machines are powered down, and they provide a robust API & access control that would easily allow your friends to boot/stop the machines on demand. That setup is how my friends game, and you really should at least consider it when the service life of your server machine finally ends.

Wah wah, for some reason it needs to run on under powered hardware in an uncontrolled environment over an asymmetrical residential connection, because, for reasons!

Probably closer to 99.999%

Tiered residental water pricing is fairly normal where I live as well (like $0.50-$20/CCF), is it not in CA?

There is something that we agree upon vigorously. Not letting all users of water bid on available water is a subsidy.

I was reading interesting stuff about using forward osmosis to recover energy from desalination effluent, or even as a pre-treatment step before final desalination.

Note that I said energy, to which you responded with several sources of alternative energy that might be employed. At the end of the day, the hypothetical pipeline might be driven by wind or solar energy as well. The wind or solar energy generated at the desalination plant could alternatively be sold, and so has monetary value that must be used to desalinate water.

Desalination also uses energy.

Soil and climate and water determines that and,...

There, I fixed that for you.

Let's stick with an analysis of the text in question, the post to which mine replied.

The text begins with, "There are two types of civil forfeiture", indicating an intention to describe two and only two types of scenario. Following this are two paragraphs clearly defining two types of persons from whom property is seized. First the text describes guilty people who totally deserve it, "There's the kind where they arrest you, take your stuff because it's evidence, or involved in a crime, and then, because it's involved in a crime, after you're convicted, they keep it." After this, the other situation where civil forfeiture occurs, "There's the kind where they arrest you, take your stuff because it's evidence, or involved in a crime, and then, because it's involved in a crime, after you're convicted, they keep it."

Characterizing the debate in this way makes it easy to dismiss the actual problems. In the latter case, the cops are implied to be corrupt, and in the former case the criminals deserve it. Sadly the issue is much more complex than this. Questions like, "who should benefit from the sales of seized property?", and, "since almost any physical object can be used in the furtherance of a crime, should a guilty person have all of their property seized?"

It is perplexing when you say, "Ignoring the outrageous cases that do occasionally happen is no less erroneous than what you accused us of", because this usage of us implies that I intended to say anything to you, Jane Q Public... a terrible mistake, which I already know well to avoid.

As I said earlier:

Whining about an absurdly uncommon occurrence, while ignoring the people who are being robbed every day, does a disservice to the debate. Framing the debate as the guilty and the never charged, is terrible to the point of being a straw man, which makes your anti-civil-forfeiture position confusing.

You are dangerously misinformed on this issue. The latter case mostly does not exist. The former, mostly nobody disagrees with. One of the major problems with the system is not so much that the stuff is sold, but that it usually goes directly to the budget or even pension of the police department that does the seizure. Giving police officers fiscal incentive to subvert justice is bad, period, even in the hand holding nice case. Really it is mostly something between the first and second case, where a person is found innocent of a crime, but their stuff has a second forfeiture trial where the burden of proof is on the accused to show that it could not have been used in a crime. The stuff has a lower standard of justice, and the people that take it have an incentive to lie.... The math is simple.

Without physical access control, setting folders to read only and stuff is mostly security theater. Either trust the guy or kick him to the curb.

Any petty bickering on the issue should probably at least briefly cite the opinion and dissent of the US Supreme Court from District of Columbia vs Heller. The document has excellent arguments for both positions, and establishes some of the most current case law on the matter. It also shows what knowledge and consideration real adults use to settle constitutional matters.

Switching from the straw man fallacy to the ad hominem fallacy, classy.

Odds are, somebody thinks you are a douche bag too. Do we need a campaign to rid Slashdot message boards of punctuation disrespecting, fallacy flinging, intellectually immature douche bag, bibliophobes?

Sarcasm is a frequent veil on the straw man fallacy, but in reality you are portraying the original argument in a reduced way which appears so stupid that it is obviously incorrect, which is the textbook definition of said fallacy.