The problem is that Wikipedia is supposed to be a repository of human knowledge, and the community has created an environment that is hostile to fifty percent of the human species. Now one could argue this doesn't matter as much when it comes to topics that are dominated by men or, a bit more of a stretch, topics that are gender neutral, but if they are finding hostility from men on articles about female sexuality, womens' clothes, gender in the workplace, etc. then there's something seriously off right now.

Some corrections needed here:

1. SAS wasn't created as an undergrad project, it was a large, multi-university and government agency collaboration with Professor Goodnight, at that time a member of the faculty, one of the researchers.

2. Universities spinoff new companies all the time: this is hardly the first or last time that students and faculty at a university have used their research to start new companies. Nor is NC State particularly unique in this IP clause, and this clause hasn't stopped start ups in the past or present.

3. Goodnight was a statistician, not an engineer (different colleges).

4. Despite your implications that there's bitterness between the two, Goodnight and NC State have very strong relations and a history of collaboration; just this past year, he's got at least a million in scholarships for future statisticians at the university. There's also a lot of research funds, support and materials that flow between him and the university, the Statistics department in particular. I would go so far as to argue that the Statistics department's reputation and ranking are in part driven by the success of SAS.

Gross oversimplification for someone trying to score cheap points and apparently has not been following the adventures of Uber in the United States. The constant, very public fights that Uber has been having in cities across the United States are those very same types of "minimum standards for public transport" that you refer to in the EU.

In particular, I don't know if the Democratically-controlled Senate really wants to create an opening for Republicans to go after their wounded and weakened Democratic White House.

Who knows, maybe the President will come out and say that Senator Feinstein and her congressional staff are connected to foreign terrorists and thus a legitimate intelligence target. Why else would he continue to stand up for Director Brennan? Even in the political cynic in me is surprised that the White House didn't sacrifice him just to make the attention go away.

What gets me about this story isn't that they sold their children... you're going to have one or two parents out there in any society that are so screwed up in their heads that they'd contemplate such an option to fund whatever addiction they may have. The significance is that it's so easy to do so in China.

No, they would freak out because where do you think the survivors in that massive neighboring country are going to go? Also, what nation would want their immediate neighbor to be covered in nuclear fallout that may just blow your way...

Lot of people are dismissing this, but I think there is sound logic to what they're saying for two reasons. One, by becoming a purely focused battery manufacturer, Musk becomes platform agnostic and will have a much better chance of licensing his tech and selling his batteries to all auto manufacturers. This could benefit the broader electric vehicle industry as the technology is now available to dozens of well established manufacturers who can produce vehicles on multiple orders of magnitude greater than Tesla could possibly reach in a decade or more. If they do it right, they could make a huge amount of money this route, dominating a key control point in the electric vehicle.

The second thing is that they will continue to be highly constrained in their manufacturing capabilities for a while. I love Tesla and would love to own one of their vehicles, but the company's production system will take at least a decade or two to even get anywhere close to the order of magnitude that more mainstream auto manufacturers are able to make. This may not matter much if you want your Tesla to be unique, but if your goal is to see the mass deployment of electric vehicles in the near future, organically scaling up Tesla may not necessarily be the way to go.

All that being said, I HIGHLY doubt Musk will go in this direction. His MO at other companies has always been platform oriented with tight vertical integration, and I don't see that changing anytime in the near future, not with him at the helm.

I think you make a good point. I do believe there is a welder shortage, but it's for niche or highly experienced areas. Companies allowed the pipeline to dry up, and now they are paying the price and scrambling to make up for years of neglect. Don't think you can make a H1B crisis as easily with welding however: people may be confused or intimidated by what advanced scientific and programming fields do, but welding is one that tends to fall more neatly into traditional territory of organized labor. They may be weakened, but they can fight tooth and nail on that one.

That's a silly statement. They're government bureaucrats. At least in the United States, you never join the bureaucracy if your goal is to make money. Even contracting for the government, while better paying than direct government employment, still pales compared to more lucrative areas of the economy, especially for the skill sets we're talking about.

I'm REALLY curious as to what they expect to replace the coal mining business with in the middle of rural West Virginia. Even assuming you could retrain all those workers, that simply leaves an entire army of now skilled workers sitting in towns that have had their economy completely decimated by the elimination of coal. One doesn't simply regenerate a brand new, magic economy there from scratch. Even something as basic as building a new factory, say a solar panel factory, would require not just the cost of building the factory, but the infrastructure to support said factory (roads, water, power, rail links, etc.), and $50B is not going to cover the cost of doing that for 87,000 workers.

Yes, just in case you haven't been following all the coverage from the last three or four days, the United States has been providing a large amount of satellite data, even leveraging their missile launch detection system to search for possible explosions. The more interesting question is why it took the Chinese this long to provide satellite imagery to search for a plane full of primarily their own citizenry in its own region.

This program is probably focused on members of the bureaucracy, but I wonder if they're going to cover another very significant group of government officials with security clearances: Members of Congress and their staffs. A lot of your leaks happen over on Capitol Hill after all. Then again, I'm going to take a guess that they will very vocally and aggressively oppose this action and play the separation of powers card to shield themselves from this new effort.