OTOH we didn't run SLIP (PPP wasn't invented yet) over our 1200BPS/2400BPS modems, at least I don't know of anyone who did, except as a test. We ran terminal software to login to the university computers remotely. So address space wouldn't have impacted that much. In fact, where I was, TCP/IP didn't become a thing until we were connected to the internet proper. (1988), but of course YMMV.

That said, 16 bytes for an address would probably not have flown. But 6 I can sort of see.

99% is far too weak a standard here (and don't even get me started on "majority"). One in a thousand is also too much (due to the base rate fallacy, look it up). One in a hundred thousand is a safe conservative estimate.

So, you're about three orders of magnitude off...

Well, here in Sweden that has changed as well. Since the government wants more graduates in certain areas (engineering), for example, the number of seats have "exploded" in the last ten-twenty years. When I was an undergrad you had to be as near as dammit an A-student (well, 4.7-5.0 on a 1-5 scale normally distributed with a 3.0 average) to get in. Today you'll get in with a 'C' average (but you probably won't graduate!).

And if you didn't do too well in high school there are remedial classes available. If you chose the wrong "track" in high school and hence haven't studied prerequisites, then there's an extra year at university that lets you study that as a preparation.

But of course, it's in general, sort-of-kind-of a meritocracy. For the subjects with strong professional organisations, I'm looking at you in medicin, there hasn't been an increase in the number of spots, so you still need a perfect 'A' average to be admitted. (And with the increased focus on theory at the lower levels, girls now make up a majority overall, and are at 60% in medicin. Not engineering though...)

Yupp. Soft realtime is where it is. Even in telecoms we don't do any hard realtime if it can be avoided. It's specialised hardware (including co-processors) where that's required, but controlling it can be left to soft realtime systems. (I.e. Linux on a board).

The main thing in that case is instead reliability, but hard real time isn't required. As you say, that's for control systems, but even those tend to isolate into specific co-processors rather than rely on much in the way of an RTOS capabilities anyway. You're not going to run the weather radar software on spare cycles from your aileron control computer anyway. It's too important a task to be meddled with.

In short it's a trade off between your resources and the supposed resources of the attacker. Even though SO14 escorts "heads of state" they don't escort the US first lady, etc. they bring their own apparatus.

So, since SO14/Britain couldn't do what the US does, because it would be too disruptive and cost too much given the level of threat and resources, the US secret service can. They have both a higher threat to deal with, and the resource to do so.

It's the same as in the military. If you just want to know what's going on, sneaking a four man recon patrol in, using maximum stealth is the way to go. However, if you expect the enemy to be too thick on the ground for that (problem with small patrols is that they go missing all the time, and then what?), an armoured reconnaissance battalion is the way to go. So either go very small, or sufficiently large. If you can't cordon off the area and man the whole route, then go small and stealthy, trying not to give away anything. If you can, then you go whole hog, complete with barriers and "x" number of officers per yard of road travelled.

This of course also depends on your objective. If you check the SO14 film, it's a couple of cars. The presidential motorcade OTOH isn't that far off in size from an armoured reconnaissance battalion (well, company at least), so they have to behave like one. You couldn't bring that kind of mass of vehicles and people through on a contingency basis anyway, all traffic would grind to a halt, and the smallest fender bender ahead of you would make you a static target. So, you're basically forced to go the whole nine yards anyway, and hence you have to do it properly.

Of course it is. At lower levels you need to preserve the evidence that you were actually told to do something by the higher-ups. This to ensure that you have their support when the shit hits the fan, rather than being an expedient way of getting the problem to go away, by being lead out in front of the bus.

Said higher-ups OTOH are the ones that actually give said orders. It's not in their interests to leave traces of them left, right and center as possible ammunition for your peers, i.e. the ones at the same level as you, that are out to weaken you, so they can be strengthened.

Hence, to be able to attack the those above you, you have to ally yourself with their enemies. There's really no other way. No-one else has the power to have your back. (Which of course explains why Snowden is in Russia. Where else on earth could he be?) Which is why such organisations value loyalty above all else. They couldn't function if they didn't.

And that's basically everything that has ever happened that took something from esoteric parlour trick to technology we can't live without.

E.g. it wasn't Gutenberg that ushered in the era of the printed word, it was the steam printing press. That enabled a whole new medium where words could be printed cheaply enough to be thrown away after just one reading. Whole new ball game.

Space launch is pretty much the same. What's holding us back today is cost. With lower cost many interesting things will happen. Whether cost can ever be brought down to levels that will enable a paradigm shift, that's of course still undecided, but 50% here and 50% there, before you know it, launch could become cheap.

But if you're not willing to settle for anything less than Star Trek (reactionless drive is pretty much that), then of course Musk won't be able to hold a candle to that.

1. Inventor makes some new and non-obvious improvement to prior art. "I did A with B using C by way of D"

2. In patent application, the patent editor tries to widen the claim to. "A with B using C", "A using C by way of D" or even all the way to the silly and obvious "A".

3. Patent examiner rejects most claims. Some widened claims, beyond what the inventor considered to be his invention, are accepted by the examiner because they really are novel and non-obvious. The patent is now more valuable too inventor (or, more often, his employer) because it covers more things.

This process of trying to extend the claims by making them more general is quite mechanical. Patent editors do it almost automatically and without really trying to think too hard if the result makes much sense.

Sometimes overworked examiners accept silly over-generalized claims on an application and it makes it into a granted patent. It is a serious problem with the system (or a win, if you are the submitting company). Such claims may be overturned later in court, but most patent lawsuits are settled out of court, never challenging such claims because of the costs and risks involved. This makes such over generalized patents a weapon for bullies.

Sometimes, if you are a high-profile company that is under the public eye, people will pick such unexamined claims in a patent application and make them into a silly headline "company X tries to patent obvious thing Y!!!".

Yes, since I have several laying about I just looked up how much EpiPens cost here in Sweden. They're $100 for two (you can't buy them in singles). But medication for children is free (i.e. paid through the single payer health insurance system), and if you're an adult your maximum cost is capped at $250/year, with a 100% co-pay for your first purchases, which then gradually decreases until they reach zero at $250. (Cost of living is generally higher in Sweden than the US).

This is for the exact same drug, from the exact same manufacturer. And they seem to make money here as well. But since there's only one buyer that is free to import from the country where they can get the best price (and buy generics if they feel like it), they of course have some clout.

While that it a problem with other medication, it's not much with an "epipen" style device. They only come in two doses: Child and adult. So the doses are heavily standardized. And its not considered more dangerous than "if the first shot doesn't have the desired effect within 5-15 minutes, then administer another one." And that's from a body weight of 30kg and up.

So, in this case, the therapeutic range is rather large, and dosage isn't too critical. (In fact, the only time I had to give one in anger to a child, I had to use two, since the first didn't have the proper effect. No problem.)

No, misfiring, i.e. giving too low a dose is a problem of course. We've had one of the other ones prescribed that was withdrawn since it failed to give the correct (large) dose. However, if you've now managed to make them so expensive in the US that people go without, taking the chance of not getting enough is of course preferable to going completely without. Which is the certain result if you're completely without one.

That's a bit harsh IMHO. Impersonating a federal agent is a crime that has been on the books for a long time and with a substantial body of case law to support it. In this case, as a search was performed it's clearly illegal. (Interestingly it's not the impersonation as such that's a problem, otherwise it'd be difficult to make the X-files, but how you use it. Gaining anything of value, or performing a search are clearly out of bounds.)

Note that this rule is there (mainly) to protect the public from fraudsters, not to protect the government.

Journalists are, however, not a protected group in this sense. There are no laws on the books, and that's probably also for the best, lest every blogger in the land be hauled before the magistrate for "impersonating a journalist". So the lack of protection is arguably to the benefit of the freedom of the press.

Now, impersonating a journalist for law enforcement purposes may be ill advised, no argument there, but but clearly not illegal. It's also noteworthy that the rules have since changed to make this practice less available.

God?

Sorry, sorry. I'll see myself out... ;-)

Yes, there's that. The grading that is. I don't think its as difficult that we often make it out to be, but since engineering studies require a lot from the students, the notion that "we have to make sure that no-one can get away with coasting or cheating" seems quite spread (in the west at least, which is the only academic culture I can speak of).

So since collaboration invites questions about who did what, and that could lead to "cheating", we're institutionally weary of it.

Well, being a university professor I've hear the same things, and you know, the companies are absolutely right. I think you're a bit too cynical. The reason they say these things ("we need engineers who can write and present and work well i groups") is that they do feel a real need, and also feel current graduates lacking in these respects.

However, that's always been the case. It's a pretty stable criticism. So then you have to figure out why. And the answer is very simple and I always point it out when I meet industry representatives who lament the current state of teaching: "We could do that. We could turn out engineers who are much, much better at writing, speaking and what have you. But if we do, we have to cut something else. And we already have trouble cramming the vital subject matter into the education as it is. We've already, during my lifetime added a whole year to the master's engineering degree (from four to five), and you still have to spend too much effort to train them until they can become really productive. So do you really want us to spend more time on writing/presentation, at the cost of less time teaching programming and whatnot?"

The answer is always, "Well, not not really..." and "Well, when you put it that way..."

So, if you ask people what they want, its always always something else than what they would actually spend money on, and pay for. Schools as a general rule don't understand this (an affliction they share with many others in the public sector), the opt for asking and delivering that, instead of realising that wishing and actually putting your money where your mouth is, are two very different things.

Yes, but in a sense they're worse for employment than CNC are. With a turret lathe you'll get an even lower cost per item than with a CNC machine, if you have the steady, large scale, and stable-over-time, demand to keep them running.

The demand scale is still: If you need a couple, do them manually. If you need more, CNC. If you need even more than that, build (or adapt) a specialised solution (aka turret lathe).

I remember when I was at SKF, the production engineers could tell me to the cent how large a run of what part made the most sense to produce with what tools available. (Of course I was at the research laboratory where we had exactly one really skilled machinist, with two or three manual machines, as we only did one-offs and not enough of them to keep more than one guy busy.

Back in the day though, you didn't have CNC, so either you used manual, or a turret lathe. The majority of machinist were busy doing the production work "in the middle" that CNC now has dominated. That's where all the jobs went, and that's why CNC was the killer it was/is. Not that we still don't people of all skills. (Even though they're getting harder to find.)