Others such as Eli Lily or the UK Gov Dept of Pensions really don't need so many addresses

Someone in the UK government pointed that out recently - it turns out that "Dept of Pensions" allocation is actually used across most of the government as some sort of VPN extranet with various external contractors. Apparently, since they all use different RFC1918 blocks internally, they can't all be VPNed into any single RFC1918 block: they needed a globally-unique block for that purpose.

British Telecom uses the 30.0.0.0/8 block for managing all their customer modems - that block is actually allocated to the US DoD, but they don't allow external access to it anyway, so there's nothing to stop you using that block internally yourself as long as you don't need to communicate with any other networks using the same trick. Better than wasting an entire /8 of global address space just for internal administrative systems - or a /9, like Comcast grabbed back in 2010.

My inner geek - who cares about efficiency - would love to see all the legacy blocks revoked. I'm sure the DoD could use 10/8 instead of 30/8 quite easily for their non-routed block; the universities could easily fit in a /16 instead of a /8, or smaller with a bit of NAT. Still, we should be moving to IPv6 instead now: give each university and ISP a /48, or /32 for big complex networks needing multiple layers. I just have a nasty feeling we're in for a long time of CGNAT spreading instead - where we currently have ISPs that don't offer static IP addresses, in a few years they'll be refusing to issue anything other than a NATted 100.64/16 address.

And yet we spend twice as much on entitlements as on defense.

Get a Mac.
And enjoy what you can do without computer headaches.

It was IE8. You start off with IE6, even after slipstreaming. I think. I didn't bother testing. I could try another day. I already killed the VM.

'Its brain required abundant oxygen, so it presumably did a fair amount of thinking.'

humans brains require abundant oxygen but most do not do a fair amount of thinking...

For example, anthropomorphizing ancient sea critters.

I am a lot of things, but Morrissey ambiguous is not one of them.

No.
Not to you.
Lucky bastard.

Caught me on a Tuesday.