The under-30 set are usually the ones who protest the hardest (see: the 60s), but as a 29-year-old, the world I grew up in was one with cameras in every hallway at school, self-censoring in case a teacher or administrator got the idea that I might shoot up the school, and to top it off, 9/11 happened when I was a high school Junior. The Patriot Act has been in place since before I got the right to vote. We've been conditioned to go along with security theater and surveillance our whole lives.

Is it any wonder that the under-30s don't see any reason to protest?

The downside is that without herding cows in space we won't have Firefly in real life.

As a CS major* at the U of U, 35% sounds about right. I'm no rockstar, but there is a definite divide between those who Get It, and those who don't. The professors are great, so if someone fails out of Engineering then I'd guess they don't belong there in the first place and just somehow managed to bluff their way through the pre-major courses.

*Blah blah blah, CS isn't Engineering, etc.. At the U, it's in the School of Engineering, and from talking to other Engineering students, the difficulty is comparable to other programs in the SoE.

As someone who "didn't like anime", I loved Fullmetal Alchemist. It's what got me to give other anime a chance (still don't like 95% of it, but the 5% that is good is really superb).