New incentive to buy rigid cases. Time to go buy Otterbox stock!

Not really. Less than 20% Texans are polled to be in support of secession. That falls in line with the national average of all US citizens who want their states to cede, from New Englanders wanting to join Canada to Silicon Valley types fantasizing about their own libertarian utopia.

The challenge isn't registering for the course but actually passing the course. My undergrad used an equivalent Computer Science intro course as a weed out course for the entire college of engineering. Did a pretty effective job of it too.

While it is a bit complex on the surface, the USPTO's metrics are pretty straight forward: an X level patent examiner should be able to examine Y number of patents in a given quarter. Some patent applications take longer than others, but it all averages out in a year. Meet the minimum requirements, and you get paid. Exceed those requirements, and you get a bonus. In my opinion, its probably one of the most meritocratic agencies in the entire Federal government. All the time tracking issues revolves around the second time card they keep to try and fine tune what Y should be for X, but I didn't get a feel that the situation was so bad that it would significantly impact the numbers.

All politics is domestic, and Cuba is the same. As long as there is a very vocal community of Cuban expats that have an axe to grind with the Castro-created regime, the United States will not be lifting sanctions. I think as that generation gets older and fades away, we'll see an easing, but while they're still alive and politically active, change will not happen. Cubans Americans after all make up a large and politically active faction in a crucial swing state (Florida).

Ask the Iranians who continue to be under tight US sanctions. Oil hasn't helped them escape thirty years of US economic embargo.

The Chinese love to call hypocrisy, about "Well, the US does blah blah blah..." However, look at the Gulf of Mexico, a good comparative example to the South China Sea situation. See, in the Gulf of Mexico, the United States may actually have a strong position than the Chinese, with greater amount of shoreline touching the water and greater military superiority over its neighbors. There's oil in those water, rich fisheries, and its a critical body of water for American security interests. Yet unlike the Chinese, the Americans didn't scoop up the entire region like a hollowed out grapefruit and tell its neighbors FU. Instead, they sat down, from a position of power no less, and negotiated equitable maritime boundaries, not just with friendly nations like Mexico, but with hostile states like the Cubans. However, the Chinese are different, proving quite greedy and trying to essentially annex other nations' EEZ from Malaysia and Brunei up to Korea and Japan. It's a sad state of affairs, and it only serves to unite China's neighbors against it. With actions like that, they really shouldn't question why their neighbors fear them.

Unfortunately, that paradigm for large manufacturing employment doesn't work anymore. Even if you could convince every executive in the United States to follow it, the costs would be so high that they would no longer be competitive globally. They would be driven out of business by more nimble and cheaper foreign competitors that either use advanced automation or dirt cheap third world labor. What an automated factory like Tesla is doing is salvaging what it can, keeping what few jobs are left in the United States.

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.