I came to mention Khan Academy, and AC beat me to it. Tragedy. But here's the donate link:
http://www.khanacademy.org/donate

I can give you an answer, but it'll have to take less than three minutes to explain. More than three minutes gets rounded to six minutes, a billable tenth of an hour.

There are only millions (and not even tens of millions) of patents, so a 1000X exaggeration.

Given he's not interested in security but uniqueness, a Rabin Fingerprint would be both faster and better for this purpose than any of the security hashes.

May as well compare the first 8 bytes, you can do that in a single instruction, and the cost to read 8 should be the same as 4. If you're clever enough you can probably do a 32 byte comparison in a single op.

$19.95 for a beta of something you can whip up in an hour of shell scripting.
If the poster were you, they wouldn't have had to 'ask slashdot'.

I find it odd that in your discussion of programming tests your examples are all DBA oriented.

Programming tests are most useful for weeding out the large numbers of incompetent candidates. The incompetent candidate can't finish in the time allowed, and their code is often an obvious mess. A competent candidate breezes through it, their code is well organized and readable. A rockstar finishes the 45 minute interview problem after 10 minutes, and his solution covers all the edge cases it took you a year of familiarity with the problem to discover.

The problem of course is that it takes a rockstar manager to tell the two apart BEFORE the project falls apart during the maintenance years. And rockstar managers are rarer than rockstar programmers.

Yeah, my point was only that traditional client server typically didn't have failover, particularly not geographically dispersed failover in case of local things like earthquake or hurricane (client server failover would have meant 'within the building'), whereas I think that's an essential part of what cloud is really supposed to mean.

If you want to have a yacht, that takes a certain amount of mass for the boat, and a certain volume of ocean to sail it on. There isn't enough mass on earth to provide that lifestyle to the majority. And that's just for that aspect of being wealthy. The list of things not everyone can have goes on and on.

If you're talking what most people would consider 'true' cloud computing, it's client server with transparent failover redundancy with backup nodes in geographically dispersed regions.

Cloud computing is most definitely affected by the weather. Rain, lightning, and hurricanes can all easily cause outages.

I'd definitely agree it's not for everyone or every team, or every project. It's really a technique that should be used only where a low bug rate / high quality is near the top of the list of requirements. If you aren't getting the long-term maintenance cost reduction, there's no point in paying the upfront price.

Double-woosh!

That's exactly my point.