So I can believe Google's peer reviewed and published study of hundreds of thousands of devices, or I can accept your "personal verification". Wow, this is a tough decision.

Eventually. But not as soon as you might think. Modern servers can tolerate heat fairly well, and many data centers waste money on excessive cooling. As long as you are within the temp spec, there is little evidence that you gain reliability by additional cooling. Google has published data on the reliability of hundreds of thousands of disk drives. They found that the reliability was actually better at the high end of the temperature range. This is one reason that Google runs "hot" datacenters today.

If you are claiming that COPPA allows "implied consent", you are flat out wrong. Parental consent must be explicit.

If their disclosure says that, they should be fine.

My view is utterly irrelevant. All that matters is the view of the judge your lawyer is trying to convince that your organization was COPPA compliant after a parent sues you.

Look, this is not complicated. Google for "COPPA checklist", click on the first link, then read it. If you are compliant, fine. If not, fix the issues to get in compliance. That is all.

The summary also says there is a "lack of disclosure in the parental consent process." Just getting parental consent to "use the internet" or "use Google Apps" is not enough. Unless the parents are explicitly giving their consent to the disclosure of identifying information, then this school is breaking the law.

Maybe the OP is being alarmist, and he certainly doesn't appear to be very competent, but the obvious solution is to read the applicable law (which is COPPA), go down the legal checklist, and make sure his school complies.

From the summary.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.).