There's one quote that I see people refer to quite often:
> William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
> Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
> William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
> Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Short patent lifetimes. Long enough for you to get out and establish yourself in the market, but short enough that it wouldn't kill a competitor to wait a bit. It would also dramatically reduce the cost of licensing a patent since the waiting time for it to expire would drop so much.
Perhaps a good amount of time would be one or two years?
I still think asm is essential to know. And I'm not even an old fart. Knowing assembly makes it far easier to rationalize about what my C programs are doing, how things will perform, what the machine actually does, and so on, even up into my Ocaml code (which is what I tend to work in for much of my code these days).
Even C doesn't teach you about cache behavior, register spilling, calling conventions, and so on.
Plus, it helps to know assembly massively when you're in the embedded domain, or whenever you're close to the metal.
I'm at mcmaster, which has a mcmaster.ca address. I don't think it's possible to match on email address to allow all schools, so just ask for the school that someone attends. If you let some non-students through, what does it matter?
Answer: It's far easier to talk to someone over a beer when you're in the same building as them. Or to pop up at their office unplanned with a question. Or to work on a project with team members.
School isn't all about lectures, and even for lectures, pre-recorded lectures don't let you ask questions.
