I'll presume that you're a troll but you drag out the age old "If you've got nothing to hide... argument"
Here are a couple of issues with this argument.

1. Retroactive violation of new laws:
Let's imagine that you're a smoker and that you smoke in your house. The government could pass a law saying "Smoking is not allowed inside any building. Anyone caught must pay a $500 fine." They can now either go back and look at their surveillance data and retroactively charge you for smoking in your house in the past or they can put you on a list of people to watch and then catch you smoking in your house.

2. If this is your stance that you have nothing to hide.... I presume that you don't have shades. Why don't you post your credit card statement on your front door for your neighbors to inspect "Hey, you've got nothing to hide". In fact let's make your browsing history completely public. How about your health records?

You may nothing to hide but I suspect you're also not eager to share your personal details with the world.

So when these 40 members showed up did you take a poll to figure out what people were interested in?
Do people want to build video games? If so, show them pygame. Show them scratch.
Do people want to do robotics? There are only a bazillion cheap robotics kits that use Arduino's, raspberry pi, etc.

You need to figure out what direction you want to take the club and go in that direction.

Just my two cents. I've been actively involved in running a LUG (http://www.wlug.org) for more than a decade. This formula has worked to keep our group active.

You forget the jingoistic nature of Joe Sixpack... I think spun the right way you could convince a large chunk of the populace that we need to punish China. Throw out all the arguments about how they're stealing our {jobs,secrets,money,babies,clowns}

Don't even go the tariff route, just convince enough Americans to boycott all Chinese goods. Have the government kick start some domestic production. Using automation and better production techniques we have great examples of domestic production that destroys the Chinese labor model.

Then just as a kicker let the interest rate go up a quarter point. That would basically obliterate billions of dollars of T-notes that the Chinese are holding in reserve.

1. This stuff should be on air gaped networks, nuff said.
2. The US should punish china with ugly tariffs over this. Make it not in their national interest to do this. Cut china off from our scrap market for 6 months, etc.

China needs us way more than we need them. I think it's time we make this obvious to them.

I'd be much more okay with it if they were forced to wear a jumpsuit ala Nascar style with all their sponsors on it. The big patch across the back... that's 100k sponsor... the small 5" x 5" patch... that's 5k... etc.

Then by just looking at their jumpsuit we'd know immediately where their allegiances lie.

Nobody is ever going to trust this guy near anything production ever again... Yeah it sucks when you get terminated. There's nothing that would ever warrant this type of behavior no matter how egregious the conditions or the people were. I won't be surprised if his former employer goes to the feds and tries to argue that he be arrested on computer crimes.

I'm shocked a social networking company that makes its money by selling as much data as it can possibly mine out of its userbase has created an uber app that runs on your mobile device and gives them unfettered access to all your information.

Really? People are shocked by this? I would have been much more shocked if a report came out showing how Facebook Home actually protected your privacy.

Honestly I never had any interest in running this on any mobile device I own. Firstly I care about my privacy and secondly I could give two shits what the highest score my aunt has achieved in Candy Crush today. I always wondered what would happen if Farmville and Bejeweled had a baby... it's truly a Lovecraftian horror or tentacles, eyes and mouths..

To this bad idea, I say no thank you. Why don't we actually treat college students like adults.

Fast forward 25 years...

"Mr. President, we have here a log of your reading of your 'systems of government' textbook and you underlined all these passages about communism, would care to respond to the claim that your actually a communist?!?"

Nothing about this idea is evenly remotely good. It's so bad that who ever thought it up should be fired along with the manager who approved it.

So I actually read the article and this is what I got out of it..

"I had this very particular grand vision in the 1970's about how I wanted this ubiquitous computing environment that people would use to do everything...and the iPad doesn't live up to that vision"

I couldn't help but think that the guy was grousing about with a serious case of sour grapes.
With the clear evidence of the tablet market being in complete freefall...oh wait that's netbooks... I would argue that the android tablets come closest to his vision if anything does. Basically an Android tablet that had a slide down keyboard would in fact be a dynabook.
While Apple has slick products, just they're just too locked at this point.

This article is so wrong, let me count the ways...

Firstly, the cost savings only apply at the small end. If you're to the point where you've got a medium sized data center, having the whole thing hosted elsewhere isn't going to save you a dime. It's merely going to burn you terribly when you start to scale up. Worse once your data and apps are hosted elsewhere they've got you by the [insert genitalia here].

Secondly, as an IT guy who happens to do data center management, virtualization, etc. If there's one thing that I refuse to do and that's to be siloed. I pride myself on knowing every square inch of my lab and what everything in it does. My co-workers are the same type of people. When shit breaks knowing the how and why of our network, storage, servers, etc. ensures that I can fix the problem and better off I can actively design to prevent it from happening in the future.

Lastly, there's no such thing as a free lunch. You've got fast, cheap and reliable, but you can only pick two.

~10 years ago I wrote on slashdot that I couldn't wait until my PSP/GPS/Phone/Point & Shoot/MP3/FM radio were a single device... that has now been achieved in spades.

Basically I've culled my setup down to a smart phone, a tablet and a DSLR.

I'm routinely mounting things in a 42U cabinets that ought not be mounted in them, so I've got *some* insight.

The standard for airflow is front to back and upwards. Doing some sticky note measurements, I think you could mount 5 of these vertically as a unit. I'd say get a piece of 1" think plywood and dado cut channels 1/4" top and bottom to mount the motherboards. This would also give you a mounting spot that you could line up the power supplys in the back. This would also put the Ethernet ports at the back. Another thing this would allow would be for easy removable of a dead board.

Going on this idea, you could also make these as "units" and install two of them two deep in the cabinet (if you used L rails).

Without doing any measuring, I'm suspecting this would get you 5 machines for 7U or 10 machines if you did 2 deep in 7U.