I was actually thinking I could probably use this to overcome the region restrictions on my blu-ray player. This seems like the type of hack that is used by the owner of the device to do things Sony didn't want the player to do, not so much the make-this-device-a-bot type.

Clearly one undergrad course can bring you up to date on what Intel, AMD, and ARM have had teams of researchers working on for decades. I did a basic architecture course in second year, it is an introduction only, it does not qualify you to say that you understand modern computer architecture.

I doubt any one person has full knowledge of how a computer works. I have a reasonably good grasp of most of the software layers, and a fairly good idea of how the hardware abstraction works, but reading about the pentium division bug makes it clear that an undergraduate math degree is not enough to understand the inner workings of the CPU. I understand the performance difference between wifi B and N, but I don't know the protocol details. SSD drives are magic to me. I would guess that full knowledge of how a computer works would require advanced degrees in CS, a couple different maths, and electrical engineering, at the very least.

Governments and corporations have different motivations (assuming competence on both sides). As you point out, private industry has a profit motive, but that isn't necessarily their only or highest motivation. Government isn't usually looking to profit, but they usually require higher levels of accountability and consultation with the general public, which takes a long time and isn't always cheap.

I think car companies will embrace people printing their own dials and widgets eventually. It allows them to use cheaper parts up front since they can be easily replaced, and keeps them from having to produce every single part for 10 years after they sell the car. Car makers are in the market of selling cars, while they may make some money off replacement parts it ain't their core business.

Because your system runs on Linux, and fixing a bug solves a problem in your system? Once you have the fix contributing it back saves you the hassle of maintaining it as a patch as new kernel work is done. Also hardware companies want their equipment to work on Linux for everyone. Also what nblender said.

One of my RFID-enabled cards came with a blocking sleeve for it. We've had these for years in Canada.

I've done a little kernel work, it's very different from user space. In user space I don't need to know the difference between soft and hard interrupts, and if I keep a mutex locked for a few extra instructions the performance implications aren't as bad as keeping a spinlock too long. That's not to say people shouldn't learn these things, but it makes kernel code look pretty foreign, even for a C developer.

Most of the Internet also runs on C and C++. Networking firmware, web servers, browsers, hell node.js is written in C++. I don't see any shortage of demand for people who work in a language that doesn't need a VM to run.

Most deadbolts can be picked in seconds with the right equipment. He doesn't need your key, he just wants you to keep using shitty locks.

I read the article. Don't bother, the slashdot conversation will probably be more informative. The guy has a paragraph on nuclear arms which is totally wrong, thinks the industrial revolution didn't kill off a lot of jobs, and totally underestimates the human ability to find shit to do when bored.

I used to work at a company that made WAN equipment. One of our interview questions asked people to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on their networking knowledge, where 10 is an expert. The idea was that we could skip the simple networking questions for higher numbers. The reality was people only picked a few numbers, but it turned out to be really reliable which ones. Experts were 4, average was 6, very little knowledge was 8, and totally clueless was 10.

Streaming just refers to the fact that the content is downloaded faster than it plays, allowing a video to start immediately without buffering. Of course the file has to go through my computer for me to see it, but if I can watch it as it downloads then we call that streaming.

You can take precautions against lightning, other than getting immunized there's really fuck all you can do against measles. It has an infection rate around 90% for unimmunized people, can live in the air for hours, and something like a 0.1% fatality rate. It is incredibly hard to stop and outbreak once it starts. Anyone doing risk assessment would take the vaccine, why take any risk you don't need to?