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Comment Re:Yup (Score 2) 168

>The response has often been that I'm over-reacting

Because you are.

Allowing children under 13 to disclose identifying information online, without parental consent, is not only a bad idea, it is illegal. Read up on the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. If these kids are using their real names, their photographs, or their email addresses online without written parental consent, then the school may find themselves in legal trouble. COPPA lays out some pretty specific rules, so if you are using the internet with kids under 13, you need to be familiar with that law.

Comment Re:Except, you're dealing with introverts (Score 1) 395

Have you been to silicon valley? There's plenty of bustle, just with worse traffic and no good restaurants.

Sure, but the traffic has always been bad, and there has never been good restaurants. If this is what it takes to "kill" Silicon Valley, then Silicon Valley would have never existed in the first place. People have been regularly predicting the death of SV since the 1970s.

I live in SV (San Jose, to be exact). The weather is great. My kids go to public schools that are in America's top 1%. The restaurants aren't as good as in SF, but they aren't that bad. Workwise, there is plenty of talent, and it is easy to find people with almost any skill I need. If I get sick of my job, I can walk across the street and find another. Very few other locations has all these benefits.

Comment Re:Cheap (Score 4, Insightful) 458

Can anyone who understands the US TLA agencies explain why the FBI was doing this, rather than the CIA?

My guess is that the FBI was trying to catch American citizens in the act of whistleblowing, so that they can make an arrest. America is not kind to people that expose corruption. Although we have "whistleblower protection programs", they have so many exceptions that they are a sham. Whether they go to the press, the police, or directly to the FBI, many whistleblowers end up in serious legal trouble and often spend time in jail. Citation: List of whistleblowers.

Comment Re:Cheap (Score 5, Informative) 458

Isn't wikileaks supposed to be about opening all secrets?

No, they are not. They believe in transparent government. But they also believe in personal privacy.

What secrets is wikileaks hiding that he traitorously revealed?

The identity of people exposing corruption. Some of these people have risked their lives to do so.

Comment Re:I don't mind (Score 5, Informative) 132

there are many, many desperate children that feel so hopeless and lonely right now in some orphanage

Adoption in many countries is very difficult, and plenty of potential parents do not qualify. My wife and I are financially secure, and are very successfully raising two of our own kids. But we had room in our home and our hearts for at least one more, and looked into adoption. We were turned down. The reasons given were that we were too old (I am in my 50s and my wife is in her 40s), and we already have kids of our own, and childless couples would be given priority.

If there really are orphanages full of desperate children, then governments are doing an incredibly poor job of matching them up with willing and capable parents.

Comment Re:Take HR out of the loop as well some of staffin (Score 4, Insightful) 274

HR is for the cattle.

Indeed. Most of our people were hired either through referrals, or through our internship program. Less than 10% were hired by submitting a resume to HR. Instead of shotgunning resumes, you should be using your network. If you don't have a network, you need to start building one: go to meetups, volunteer for a FOSS project, etc.

Comment Re:Middlemen: the official plague of the modern ag (Score 5, Insightful) 309

Manufacturers, factories, etc don't want the headaches of dealing with uniformed idiots.

If manufacturers don't want to deal directly, they why do we need laws prohibiting them from doing so?

Middlemen provide slack, and options for the supply chain.

If middlemen really added value, then customers would be willing to pay for that value, without government coercion.

Comment Re:Technicians and engineers, really? (Score 2, Informative) 213

'our [human] workers will then become unemployed ,' Gou said.

FTFY

Unlikely. Automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, and there is little reason to think this time will be any different. China is transitioning to a service economy much faster than western nations did, and due to the one child policy, China's labor force has already peaked, and it will be more and more difficult for companies to find enough workers.

Comment Re:This is what happens (Score 2) 224

it is difficult to make money with free software, more so than commercial software.

I have seen no evidence that this is true. Most people that start a free software business fail. Most people that start a proprietary software business fail. But among the people I know, the failure rate for the former is lower.

Comment Re:Microsoft and Bill Gates (Score 1) 577

PV isn't a 24/7 solution

PV produces electricity in the midday when demand is highest, especially on hot summer days when the demand is even higher. PV certainly isn't THE solution. But is better than solar thermal. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a single solar thermal project under construction anywhere in the world. PV has displaced it completely for all new solar installations.

and requires exotic materials for the high quality cells, with undeveloped mass production processes.

Solyndra used exotic materials. Solyndra is also bankrupt. Current producers are using more conventional processes. The Chinese seem to be doing mass production just fine. Mass production has failed in the west because our governments tried to "pick winners" and ended up directing subsidies into losers instead (Solyndra, etc.).

Comment Re:Microsoft and Bill Gates (Score 4, Informative) 577

We already have an actual solution. Its called building a massive solar thermal complex in the southwestern desert

Solar thermal projects all over the world are being cancelled because they can no longer compete with solar PV. I don't think this is the "actual solution" we are looking for.

Invest a trillion dollars in it over the next 10 years ...

Maybe we should find something that actually makes economic sense before we add another trillion to our national debt.

Comment Re:Two words (Score 2) 330

'Amazon' and 'antitrust'.

It is not illegal to dominate a sector, nor is it even illegal to have a monopoly. It is only illegal to use your dominant position to engage in anti-competitive practices. Standard Oil was notorious for this. Microsoft also used their OS dominance to muscle in and crush competitors in office applications and browsers. I haven't see Amazon doing anything like that. Their competitors are just a click away.

Comment Re:Thank Edward Snowden (Score 1) 216

the United States university system is pretty much at the boundaries of how many Chinese students it can bring in without displacing other foreign nationals and even hurting US students as well.

Foreign students usually pay full, unsubsidized tuition. So they do not display US students. The limiting factor in education is money, not the number of chairs in the classroom.

Comment Re:Open source equates to freedom. (Score 3, Insightful) 356

That's what I've been telling people since the beginning. The IRS is/was in an impossible position. If it didn't investigate every group which applied for a tax exempt status, then people would whine about them not doing their job.

Baloney. People are not upset at the IRS for being picky. They are upset at them being partisan. Your claim that they "looked at groups from both sides" is more baloney. Sure they looked at a handful of progressive groups, but the tea party groups were subjected to far more scrutiny.

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