His manner is coarse

It's not "coarse", it's abusive. Namecalling, mocking, ridicule, hyperbole. That's abuse.

you must admit that he's gotten the job done. Linux advances on schedule, patches get incorporated, code gets tested, and all proceeds smoothly.

I sacrificed a chicken yesterday and successfully committed code. You must admit that the ritualistic sacrifice got the job done.

("Getting the job done" does not, and has never required being abusive to others. Getting the job done while being abusive is not proof that being abusive is required or even was part of, "getting the job done.")

Strawman argument. Nobody except you has posited that "all opinions are valid", and nobody suggested that criticisms can't be made. You invented that position to attack it.

I specifically said: it's fine to tell people they did something wrong. What you may not do is be abusive.

...the people who deserve the apology are the people who were subject to an abusive tirade.

You can point out someone made a mistake. There's no obligation to be "nice" when doing so. There is an obligation to not be abusive, which is what Linus repeatedly does. Abuse includes mockery, ridicule, name calling, etc.

He's being a bully, pure and simple - using his popularity to shove around others. That should not be tolerated, full stop.

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.

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?

" Do you seriously think they are going to produce coal at a loss? "

Yup. One of the ways the coal industry has been fighting "green" technologies? Plunging the price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

The coal industry has a century or two of establishment. They have no startup or R&D costs; everything is amortized; they have a heavily legislative-friendly environment.

Johhny Come Lately Solar And Wind is counting on profits within a certain time period to become profitable.

  All the coal company has to do is undercut them on price long enough to bleed them dry...or endanger investments enough that further investment dries up.

Citation required (seriously, you couldn't be bothered?)

I can't find anything to back your claim.

These are documents that he personally worked with, rather than a cache of documents acquired for the purpose of copying and releasing them.

Nope, guess again. They're releasing edited versions, not the originals or even direct copies or direct typed copies.

"In accordance with the deposit agreement, the Churchill Archives Centre is opening Mitrokhinâ(TM)s edited Russian-language versions of his original notes.The original manuscript notes and notebooks will remain closed under the terms of the deposit agreement, subject to review."

Also, you have to be a researcher, provide multiple forms of ID, etc.

Oh, and two sections are closed, for undisclosed reasons.

I am rather surprised that the National Academy published the results of a study which violated multiple ethical guidelines put in place to protect human subjects.

The only real point of being accepted to the National Academy is access to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They don't turn down anything from members.

For NA members, it's where you publish when nobody else will accept your paper.