I would die for the day where I could get a chance to program 40 hours a week. I think I get about an hours worth of actual programming done during the week. The rest is spent dealing / haggling with process related overheads, testers, test managers, managers and meetings.

I'll have one of what this guy is smoking please.

tc basically allows you to activate netem (a network emulator in linux). I dont know about now, but when I had used it for a project a year ago, you had to compile your kernel with netem enabled. tc then allowed you to modify your link properties to emulate wan links. Had used this with tcpprobe to analyze the performance of an Inverse Increase Additive Decrease congestion control algorithm that we had written for academic purposes (adapted from http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/binomial-infocom01.pdf) and compare its performance with newreno. Fun stuff. This was a helpful reference: http://linuxgazette.net/135/pfeiffer.html

The researchers do address your points:
http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/

Internet Census Taking,
We believe we have taken the first census contacting each address of the visible Internet since 1982 (RFC-832). A census is an enumeration of all allocated addresses. We probed all 2.7 billion allocated addresses (compared to 315 in 1982). We are able to probe only the visible Internet: all addresses that use public addresses and choose to respond.
Accuracy,
No census of billions of addresses will be perfect; we underestimate occupancy for three reasons: A few percent of probes and replies are lost due to congestion. Addresses such as those behind firewalls choose not to receive or reply to our requests. Other computers use private addresses. We evaluate loss in our technical report; evaluation of the other cases, the invisible Internet, is future work.