For programming type classes (Udacity / Coursera) the assignments and tests are actual programming assignments, not multiple choice. The only Multiple choice questions are during the short lecture segments to try and help keep students engaged and reinforce (in a small way) the topic.

For other course types it is a bit more challenging. I know Coursera was using a peer review system for "Essay" type questions, but I don't have personal experience on how that worked out.

There were both types of people there...

The guys who had ski masks, gas cans, baseball bats, and hammers were clearly prepared to raise hell and break shit up are the ones the police are referring to.

In addition to those, were all the drunk, macho, (proverbial) lemming types who thought it must be a cool thing to do.

The perception is that if they don't keep up, they will lose market share. Maybe you or I don't want them, but all the people who make noise and write reviews and articles compare all these things and pan them if Feature X is not there.

You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't (add features) these days

No, he's John Nagle.

USB isochronous interfaces guarantee timely delivery. You can also reserve bandwidth so other traffic doesn't affect it. Latency is "bounded" but I don't have figures on what the actual bounds are. (USB 1.1 had 1msec frames and USB 2.0 has microframes at 1/8th of that... so you can get a feel) Now -- given a crappy device driver and all bets are off.

A shared data structure is considered "lock-free" if its operations don't require mutual exclusion. So if a process is interrupted in the middle of an operation, it will not prevent the other processes from operating on that object.

Technically, there are more formal definitions which state that it guarantees that some process in the system operating on the concurrent object, will make progress in a finite number of steps.

An object is termed "wait-free" if each process will make progress in a finite number of steps.