I was quite shocked to see that on my last trip to the US. The UK is pretty backwards in this respect, and even we effectively abolished signatures some years ago. How many store clerks are actually qualified to validate a signature? Now, if you accept a card payment without it going through the chip-and-pin terminal then you are liable for any fraud. Big supermarkets still allow it sometimes on the basis that it's better to lose £50 on fraudulent card transaction than it is to alienate a customer and lose whatever their profit margin is on £50/week for however many years that person can hold a grudge. I actually had to show my passport when buying chocolate on my last trip (like American beer, American chocolate from smaller producers is often very nice, but for some reason most of the population eats tile grout instead). No idea why they thought this was a good idea - I doubt that the guys behind the counter were qualified to check an EU passport for forgery either...

I don't think I've ever seen that. The purchaser has to count the cash, then the merchant has to, then they (or their till) has to calculate change, then they have to get the change. Meanwhile, someone paying with a card just pops it in, enters their PIN, and waits for the receipt to be printed. Or, for low-value transactions (under £15 in the UK, not sure about elsewhere), just waves the card over the machine and does the contactless payment thing.

They do. The amount of cash kept on the premises is factored into the cost of insurance. The cost of transporting it to the bank also increases when there is more cash, as does the cost of storing it, and banks often charge transaction fees when dealing with large amounts of cash. These costs are all passed on to the customers, including the ones who pay with credit cards, but apparently it's fine for card-payers to subsidise cash-payers, but not the other way around.

In your examples, you may well be right, but in my undergraduate course one of the modules had an average mark of a high 2:1 (about 3.6ish in the US system). It wasn't an easy course, but everyone knew this and so the only people who took it were ones who were likely to get a first (4.0 in the US system) overall. Everyone else dropped out in the first couple of weeks and transferred to easier courses.

Most people who did well in their degree regard their subject as easy, and often as easier than other subjects. Which, of course, makes perfect sense: they wouldn't have got the top grades if they found it hard, and if they found another subject easier then they'd probably have taken that instead...

The law was specifically changed to prevent patent trolls using submarine patents. Not very effectively, but still... With a patent, you may not (in the USA) claim any damages that happened between the time when you first became aware of the infringement and the time when you notified the infringing party. This means that you can't do the old trick of seeing someone shipping 100 things a year, wait a few years until they are shipping 10,000,000, and then sue them for all of the backdated instances of infringement. Unfortunately, you can still get an injunction to stop them shipping any more, which is likely to be almost as bad (think how much it would cost Apple to have to stop shipping iPads until a court case is resolved, for example), and you can still claim damages on things after you've filed your complaint (which adds up quickly when a company is shipping millions of units per month).

For copyright, a similar rule applies. For trademarks, it's much stronger: if you don't do anything when you notice the infringement, you are implicitly licensing the trademark, and if you don't do anything for multiple instances of infringement then you lose the trademark entirely.

Read the actual complaint. The US is simply banning gambling companies that operate in Antigua. The original sanction was that the US had to either pay the fine or provide a regulatory framework that allowed foreign companies to pay the relevant taxes. They chose to do neither.

A more accurate analogy would be if Google offered to obey the law in China, but instead China decided to block it entirely and only permit Baidu to operate, the WTO then required China to either permit Google to operate if they obeyed the law, and China kept the block.

You're assuming that the exams are of equal difficulty. I saw this same assumption from US students who spent an erasmus year in my university. Our grade boundary for a first (the highest grade) was 70%, their equivalent was somewhere around 90-95%. They'd think that meant it must be easy and have quite a shock when they got 40-50% in their exam. Their exams included a lot of questions that, basically, everyone who had been awake in lectures got right. Ours mainly contained questions that you really needed to understand the material well to answer. If you went to all of the lectures and understood everything, you'd get 60-70% right. If you read other material on the subject, you'd get a bit more.

Having a lot of spare space at the top means that students are encouraged more to specialise, because really excelling in one module means that they can afford to slip a bit in another. If you need 95% to get the top grade, then there's no real incentive to do better in the subjects that you're good at, because if you're good you'll get 95-100% anyway then making it 100% instead of 97% won't make any difference to your overall mark.

That assumes that getting 75% in the exam implies understanding 75% of the material. In much of the rest of the world writing an exam where someone (or, at the very least, more than one person) gets 100% is considered bad because it means that you can't differentiate the best people. In your example, where a D is anything less than 82%, that means that you only have 18% to contain the entire spread of non-failing abilities. In contrast, exams which aim for a bell curve centred on 50% make it much easier to differentiate student abilities.

Why? It never made much sense that you could still maintain communication with a ship but not beam to it, as the canonical explanation of beaming was that it translated you into information, sent it as a signal and reassembled it. It's not like a displace, where you'd have to keep a wormhole end stable in a different (and changing) frame of reference, all you need to do is send the signal (the mechanism for the reassembly was never explained, presumably it involved magic). Beaming to a moving target is just a bandwidth and synchronisation problem. Next Gen episodes beamed at warp several times, although only by matching speeds.

There's absolutely no way you could fit even one of those books into a single film, without cutting most of the material that made it interesting.

No. The US is perfectly free to ban gambling. What they are not free to do, is permit gambling when run by companies in the US, but ban it when run by companies outside the US. That is no different from imposing a ban or levy on any other commodity when not produced domestically and places the US in violation of free trade treaties (which have, for the most part, been of significant net benefit to the USA). If another WTO member imposed an import tariff on some US commodity, then the US would complain to the WTO and expect a fine. Antigua complained to the WTO and a $21m/year fine was imposed on the USA unless they either ban gambling internally, or permit other companies from other countries to compete on an equal footing. They refused to pay, so the WTO authorised collection by other means.

They were too busy watching Fox News to vote.

That certainly isn't the case on any of the projects I've worked on with Google contributors. They tend to think a nest of #ifdefs is the correct way of writing cross-platform code, and fall into the trap of thinking that the solution to any problem - especially the problem that the current codebase is overcomplicated - is to add more code.

Not really. The difference between a cheap and an expensive laser printer is often just the cost of an extra CPU and control logic. The mechanical parts are identical (and you can use spares from the cheaper ones in the more expensive ones. Or vice versa if you are a bit crazy). PostScript is quite CPU-intensive. You need at least a 100MHz MIPS CPU to keep up with the print speed of a modern printer, and ideally at least a 250MHz core. You also need a PostScript interpreter. Something simpler can be handled with just a frame buffer the size of a printed page. The extra cost is likely $10-20 for the PostScript parts, but once you get there you're into differentiation territory and so the premium is significantly more.

Well, except for the fact that they cost 2-3 times more than ones that don't...

Your Cisco 7970 may look like a landline phone, but given its current list of known security holes it may act more like a bug or PA system, depending on the goals of the attacker...