I guess "secure" means more than "secret" in the context of TFA. As it is mentioned that regular radio can be triangulated, hence I am assuming that "secure radio" should be protected from that. Which might mean serious frequency hopping and probably bouncing signal from big birds flying above etc...

I used to think like, that there is a threshold, a stage of development, after which the machines would start developing so fast. It was going to modify Moore's Law as instead of "every two years" it would be "every two minutes".... Now I think there is a problem with that approach. The efficiency of computing resources are dropping. I am writing this message on a computer which has maybe ten times of storage and computing power, that my whole school had back in 1996, when I was graduated. I used to be responsible of such statistics there; 13 k undergrads, 4 k masters and above level students and maybe 300 full professors with lots of lower levels and assistants were both making scientific research and use those devices from Internet to games. At the moment, aside from writing to /. most serious thing I use this computer is reading mail, and some gaming.

In short we are producing and using serious amount of IT resources, but those are not being utilized as efficient as expected in the past....

As the system should have been able to gain self awareness in 29 August 1997, way behind. Typical software project management failure........

Who asked a permission to run any software on a device bought and paid for?
You might not have permission (especialy for Apple) to run a software you obtained a license to, on each hardware you wanted to do so. You cannot run iOS image you have lifted of your iPhone on a Nokia or God forbid, on a Samsung. However when you buy a hardware (and assuming it is not a Ferrari), you can run any software on it. You can use it as a door-stop if you like. Thus if like to do so and able to do so, you can run Android, or Linux on a Macbook.

I do not think the Author is a complete poseur, so asking him to leave the hall would not be 100% correct solution. He seemed to have some project management experience. However there is a problem with him that I cannot put my finger on (or an appropriate place). No programmer in his right (or left one for that matter) mind can believe that a "programming test" during an interview would provide any meaningful indicator about a coder's abilities. Maybe you can ask the difference between SET versus SELECT and INSERT, but the answer would show the philosophical position of candidate at best. He can say that SET is a three letter command and others are six letter (thus inefficient :) ) commands, that there is a need for a four letter command in between.... He would be right. He can talk about the differences between utilization of read and write pipes amongst those commands and he would be right again. If I were to answer I would talk about offloading some CPU tasks from application server to database server and I would be right too. However a programming test, to see if a programmer can code, especially if you are looking for a possible "cowboy" (which is more suitable to the case than "rock star" I assume) is absurd. It is like claiming that there are already people in staff who can evaluate the code from such people... It would be more likely a case of "You are not expected to understand this", if candidate is really a good programmer. My Assembly instructor used to tell us that "no good programmer can understand their code after a year"...

Just when I was thinking that I am really old. I always wondered that if it was a natural (!) odor of components, or if it is an intentional addition to the box. That smell was the smell of joy and despair, as in the anticipation of a new game, and suspicion of a problem happened during the (naturally illegal) copy process...

:) Producer of the unnamed toy OS, used to supply a toolkit free of charge (probably as an oversight) that provides UNIX utilities. I guess it was the part of their attempt to be POSIX compatible, back then. I fortunately am not with the company anymore, whose general manager believed that any UNIX jockey must be able to run M$ products as well, thus I lost track of the current status of tool box I mentioned....

You know, this is what I hate most about some tech support organisations. Some idiot in the support team managment with an engineering degree and a MBA on top of that, with no field experience, sets some aggressive KPIs for support jockeys. They try to meet their quota. For the first six-nine months he would have a very happy upper management. Then customer complaints reach upper managment via sales, in the form of customer threats for moving away the business. Upper magament fires support manager. KPI stays there, as they cannot believe a customer would prefer slower service, if it means quality -remembe those guys were the ones assigned MBA holder for support management at the first place-. Company would eventually fail.... Management by objectives my ass.....