Jimmy-
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
Yes. A $100K fundraising drive makes sense, but at least *some* content should be up - at least the squids serving pages in offline mode. That's because many of our visitors come from Google, and if fundraising is the first thing they see - and no content - they will be turned away.
We should also have realtime updates of funds coming in, this can dramatically increase participation. This isn't that hard to do as PayPal provides an interface for it: https://www.paypal.com/en/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/ipn-intro
Lastly, I think hardware alone is not enough. We need a fulltime professional systems administrator with direct access to the machines. Within a $100K budget that is certainly viable. If Brion wants a new job, I'd say he should be immediately offered this opportunity.
Regards,
Erik