Unless you really trust your neighbor, how do you know he/she didn't receive multiple donations from several people, pocketing the extra?

Two reasons not to do that. One, charities are, in principle, experts at spotting and filling such needs, and I am not. Second, if I spend more time working at my job and give that income to charity, it could pay for someone who makes less than I do to work for even longer. If I make $20/hr doing whatever it is I do and the charity pays someone $10/hr to fix someone's house, for every hour of additional labor I put in the charity gets two hours of labor, probably from someone more competent than I at that task.

Actually it's far better to give the soup kitchen cash. They buy food at wholesale prices, you're wasting money buying it retail. See this article.

How do you know that the gift wasn't squandered?

That is illogical. First, why would it make a difference whether I send $100 to the Red Cross in my town vs the Red Cross on the other side of the country? Second, less overhead =/= most good. If I give the $100 to a charity that gives free medical care overseas, where it is more needed than in my community, there might be overhead that is unavoidable in running long-distance operations, but the work won't be done otherwise. And finally, there is a certain fungibility to donations. If, for example, a charity gets free advertising from media sponsors, none of its donations go to that, whereas another agency might have to spend part of its income on publicity. It's not clear to me that the second charity is worse for doing so.

Bad plan. If you don't get the lawyers involved and ask the people involved to sign a waiver, your "gift" will count for nothing: they can say "thanks for the new minivan" and still sue you for the loss of the old one (and in court the act of doing all this so quickly might be taken as a sign of guilt). Sometimes you do need to call in the lawyers and insurance companies, and this is one of those times. It would probably also be a no-no not to inform your insurer about an event like this, since when your policy is up for renewal it does not look good to have hidden a previous accident.

If you really believed that you would have posted as AC.

Maybe if the company had given itself a name it would have been easier for it to keep track of information.

I'm not saying I support this, but in order to understand this proposal you have to understand what an exempt employee is in US (and state) law. (IANAL: this is my rough-and-ready understanding of the system). There are two categories of employee, exempt and nonexempt, and different labor rules apply to each, about things like overtime, unionization, and benefits. There are several tests for whether a given job is exempt or non-exempt, including salary and job description. In general, people with managerial or administrative responsibilities are exempt, whereas those who work hourly and do not supervise others are nonexempt. But it's incredibly complicated (see, e.g., this page). So many IT workers were in a grey area, and this bill proposes to put those above the salary cutoff on the exempt side of the line. It does not mean singling out IT workers for some uniquely debased, exploited status, but rather putting them in the category of professionals/administrators/managers (which confers both downsides and potential benefits). You can agree or disagree with the move, but you need to appreciate how it fits into the context of American labor law.

How could it not be specific? It's a law. What did you expect, "25-30 bucks or so?"

You obviously never had to type in hexadecimal bytecode from an Apple II magazine.

Often, when a court does something like this it's because the real world analogy makes sense, but doesn't translate well into electronic contexts. Here it seems to be the opposite: the meatspace equivalent would be to not only shut down a business that is selling counterfeit goods, but also to order that the business be delisted from the Yellow Pages, at the expense of the phone book publisher. I'm confident that this judge would not have done that, but probably imagined that the company is responsible for its presence in search engine results the way it would be responsible for buying advertising space.

On the contrary, they're GREAT at censorship.

So that's why they attack people with pikes..