This variation is otherwise known as the "forever game" of Monopoly. Without the money sink of the fines, the game is virtually guaranteed to drag on for hours and hours, thoroughly and completely boring everybody.

Netflix is better for me on v6 than it is on v4 because my ISP (Fios) does not support v6 so I have to tunnel it out, and the tunnel avoids the congested uplink that Verizon has to Netflix.

In some ways getting a job is like dating. If you are beautiful you can skip a lot of the bullshit.

Basically, Step 0: Be an expert at an in-demand technology. Step 1: Don't not be an expert at an in-demand technology.

I have a Iconia Tab with a Tegra 2, and am pretty pissed at how fast nVidia dropped driver support for the chip. I'm stuck on an ancient version of Android because of it.

Matte screens and touchscreens are not a great combo. They're too hard to clean fingerprints off of.

You had mainframe access in school?!? I don't count embedded "OS"es like Cisco's iOS--you are just running an application for configuring the device. It's semantics and I can see the arguments for and against it. When you learn those, you're not really learning the OS so much as just learning the device, it's not especially portable knowledge.

I guess it varies. Unless someone's cell phone is out of service they always get my messages. It's more reliable than SMS for me.

Man I wish. iMessage is the only form of pure IP communication that works reliably with the people I know, but only if they have Apple devices. Skype requires so much effort to set up that its pretty much for special occasions only.

It's hard to find that many OSes these days. Once you get beyond Windows/Linux (Unix)/MacOS you start talking about a lot of stuff that's basically "Linux but...". I guess if you were particularly generous you could count BSD as a fourth OS, but that's stretching it. It really depends about what you mean when you say you've "learned" an OS. Have you learned how to manage it? How it handles devices and memory under the hood? The interface between the OS and the applications it runs? Or is it just "I know how to log in and do the 'ls' and 'cd' equivalents."?

In my classes we tended to learn 1 of each "type" of programming language. So some MIPS assembler (low level), a bunch of C (imperative), some C++ (Object Oriented), some Scheme (Functional), some Prolog (Logical), some SQL (Logical, but data driven). The idea was that the individual details of each language are less important than learning the thought processes behind them.

That's something I would have gone to the Dean of the IS school and talk about, because it's a totally stupid policy and learning SQL is an enormously valuable life skill for any programmer. Either that or go to the Dean of the CS department and convince him that they should have their own "Databases for CS students" class instead. This may he harder as some CS department top brass are displaced mathematicians and have no interest in supporting courses that are "boring tradecraft stuff" and would rather get another theoretical math via computers type course instead.

There are two "optional" CS type courses that every student should take IMHO: Databases and Networks. That's what the world is going to be made of in the future, and we're already making a lot of progress in that area.

Not with the protocol itself (because you couldn't trust it anyway), but you could implement crypto on top of the bus to avoid that problem. Everybody signs the messages and only accepts messages from approved sources who have signed their messages correctly.

You don't have to pre-place keys everywhere in the car. You just need all of the asymmetric key exchange to happen when you turn the key. If it takes 50 ms then so be it. Hopefully nobody gets in a high speed collision 45ms after starting their car. After that each component will have negotiated a symmetric key that they can use for the rest of the communication. You can decode a 256bit AES key in a couple of microseconds on even cheap microcontrollers these days.

I have to imagine that things have changed at least a little bit in 17 years.

I appreciate the theft deterrence aspect of this, but I wonder what it does to the third party parts market. For the key and immobilizer that's fine, but when every single part on the car needs a specific code that is baked into the ECU then repairs start to get tricky.

Somehow I doubt that Ford and GM have a way to copy music out of the system. That's just not what those things are designed to do.