Yeah, the lack of status is exactly why no one uses SMS for messaging.
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Pattern unlock has 9 spots, and you need to select at least 4. So the possible number of patterns is:
9!/5! + 9!/4! + 9!/3! + 9!/2! + 9!/1! + 9!/0!
Which is just 985,824. And you could certainly search the more likely combinations first -- people almost always select adjacent spots consecutively.
It may be dumb, but it's not laugh-out-loud crazy. In fact, it's specifically one of the things that the DMCA does. Here's a whole ton of information about the law: http://chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi
And here's an article from the EFF with a few citations of cases where DMCA article 1201 has been used: https://www.eff.org/es/wp/unintended-consequences-under-dmca
Just to add to everyone's knowledge: this Street View wifi snooping was a) three years ago, b) accidental, and c) only known by the public because Google voluntarily revealed that it had been doing it (and immediately deleted all of the collected data).
Not necessarily (and actually that would be a terrible answer. The highest rent in Monopoly with a hotel is $2000, and I would hardly call that a "fortune".
The point of the question is to establish how well you gather additional information when the initial description is unsatisfactory. Anyone who's been an engineer knows you have to do this every single day.
(Not that it's a good interview question.)
Note to self: Do this to my brother for April Fool's Day next year
Minor correction: the Chaos Monkey was Netflix's innovation. It just happened to be implemented on Amazon's cloud. It would have been just as useful if they had their own colocated servers or used a different cloud computing provider.