For some schools, including all schools in the UC system, CS majors have to take EE classes as part of their requirements. I remember having to setup and program gates and the sort on FPGA boards.
Right. You used to have to see the ads during the actual game, but now they show the ads that will be shown during the game during the "news" in a "you have to watch these ads" segment.
In California, there is the "Shine the Light" law [0] that requires a company to release third-party information to a consumer if there is identifiable information given to third-parties along with the data collected. So in this case, Vizio would be required (at least to California natives) to release those third-parties' names and associated data collected from you.
[0] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
I just looked into why that is the case and if you hover over the little dropdown carrot for the "3.8 out of 5" you see this:
Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases.
So a product would just need a small percentage of 5 star reviews in the beginning of the review period.
scorecardresearch is the endpoint for comScore which is used to do exactly what you mentioned. Imgur buys the data from comScore as a sort of "online Nielsen rating" in order to sell the value of the site to ad vendors.
I almost bought a Prius for this exact reason a couple of years ago. Unfortunately(?) the emissions requirements is now limited to electric or plug-in hybrid models now.
Some locks do have alert features [0] so you should at least know it was opened. It won't stop a thief, but at least it lets you know when someone was looking. That is, if it makes it to your destination :-)
I think the difference is that you're only funding the company if it reaches the point where it won't fail due to lack of funding. They're supposed to have all costs associated with deliverables factored into the amount they request to be funded.