It should be very clear from portions of my post such as "To be frank, none of us here really know enough about the situation" that I was discussing things in general terms.
Did I need it to put in it red bold blinking script to avoid being used as your strawman?

me and dblll (whom i still suspect may have multiple accounts, regardless of UID)

With nasty shit like that you wonder why you get downmodded?
You owe me an apology.
Of course I do not think you have the integrity to do it.

Threatening to call the police for something so trivial lands it in the "but I only fucked one donkey" territory as a judgement call that is especially bad and gets noticed.
Your "one wrong judgment call" is enough for dismissal if the call is bad enough. Whether this case is bad enough or not is up to the person's employer whether either of us think that is a good idea or not. To be frank, none of us here really know enough about the situation to know whether the person involved should lose their job or not, all we know is it would be better for everyone if the same situation was not repeated. If a person is so far out of their depth that they wish to escalate to law enforcement over a triviality that's probably more a failure of allocation of responsibility than the person out of their depth. Why wasn't it escalated to a manager that would know that calling the police is not only a very stupid idea in that situation but also very threatening?

Just add this to the end of a very long list of why it sucks to fly in the USA at the moment.

Sadly if the police were called they may have actually tried to find something to charge somebody with to avoid it being booked as a total waste of time, and that somebody is far more likely to be the passenger than the airline employee due to less likely consequences on the police involved.

Funny how all those assumptions are fine but assuming there is a simple motor under a parabolic mirror trough is not. It's 1950s technology FFS.

The analogy is fine because it describes capability versus actual usage. Reading anything more than that into it is ridiculous - it's an analogy.

In this case the PSU is capable of supplying a lot more power than a fully fitted out server can consume at maximum load, and then some. If the server doesn't have a dozen disks it's likely to still have the same model of PSU as the one that does, and even that one with a dozen disks is not going to be running them all at maximum power consumption all of the time. For example I've got compute nodes with a single SSD and a dozen empty bays because that's the cheapest decent chassis for a multi-socket board - the max load on those PSUs would be a small fraction of wjhat they can do.

The real answer to this is just look at the power bill to see usage or run a server via one of those now really cheap meters for a while and see what it really draws.

Apart from outliers like the Pentium IV (netburst) stuff, and storage of course, the power consumption of typical machines under typical loads hasn't dropped as much as we'd all like over the past few years. That old Sun machine sitting idle most of the time is not going to use much less power than a new Xeon sitting idle most of the time.
If you go beyond the typical and use an Atom or ARM chip and SSDs you win big time (if your software is portable enough) but comparing like to like you don't.

In practice, most enterprise-class devices will use somewhere between 65-80% of their max PSU rating under load

Where on earth did you get that from? Also why assume stuff is running at full capacity 24/7/365 anyway? I've got some stuff that's fully CPU bound for weeks at a time (geophysical software), but even then it adds up to only about 1/8 of a year. Other places with less time sensitive stuff can queue things up and get 100% usage out of the resources they have but it's not common outside of specific fields.

The specs are for peak consumption for whatever can normally be expected to fit in the box. That design criteria can mean speccing it for a couple of dozen power hungry disks even if they are not in 95% of the servers of that type.

the point is the same; even if the server only used 200W

With respect, basing a precise number on a wild guess (eg. $13k vs $10k or $1k) is pointless numerology even if it is a common bad habit.
In general terms you have a point but in specifics you are probably out an order of magnitude or two, especially in terms of little servers that probably draw under 100W while fully CPU bound despite having a 500W rated power supply.

Such accusations of trolling tend to attract that sort of modding. You'd already be at the karma cap from being here a few years so I suggest just ignoring it as noise that has no chance of bringing you down from the level where every new comment is at 2.

I get modded down every time I suggest that X is not utter shit and you are getting modded down for calling someone a troll - IMHO it's best to just accept that some mods just do not like certain types of comments and move on.

Or do you mean jobs in real life? Because nobody says that in real life and keeps their jobs.

Really? "In The Loop"/"The Thick of It" is just about a documentary of how some people speak in some offices, let alone the shop floor or out in the yard.

There would be a point if I had something else a new sparc could be doing. Until then two old bits of kit with almost zero resale value will keep things going, with no real problems unless both die at once, and even then the original SparcStation10 the original software runs on still turns on but is slowwwww.
A sparc VM on x86 that actually runs sparc solaris would be nice, and apparently such things were seen in the wild in the past but are unavailable now.

it''s about 'dblll' or is it 'dbIII'....trollers use screen names with lots of capital 'i' and lowercase

Look at the UID - I've had that account since before trolling was a problem here.
It is my second account but was set up because I lost the password to the old one (mandelbrute) and had it linked to an email address that I could no longer access - so I have not posted on the other account for something over a decade.

How is any of the above a troll? How is it even critical of you?
Just because you disagreed with me about the usefulness of X some time back enough to mark me "foe" should not be a reason why I can not discuss other unrelated issues where it even appears we agree, but I just have a bit more to add (look at Rei's post for detail, that poster has much more again to add on the subject and shows what I was attempting to convey).
And what's with the threat? If you feel you really are being trolled then just do it instead of threatening to do so.

so figure about 350w under typical usage

It doesn't work like that.
To use a car analogy that would be like assuming each car is moving ten tons all the time just because the motor can do it.

You'll also need to buy a lot of those pizza boxes to make up for the processing power that you can find in a box half its age, let alone the newer iron.

It entirely depends on what you are doing with it. If the task is not CPU bound on an old box you don't need a lot of them.
I've got one old sparc box for occasional use for some legacy software from 1996 and 2002 - it flies on a machine from around 2008. Another has a pile of old tape drives of various types hooked up to it, once again, for occasional use. The only gain in either situation from replacing them is theoretically increasing longevity. Neither case lends itself to a virtual machine unless the thing running that VM has a sparc processor, in which case there's no point for a VM.