I have heard that this point is actually on a sofa somewhere in Pasadena.

To be completely fair, the main reason you could tell their lines were dubbed over was that the original audio quality was complete and total shit. The dubbed audio was actually intelligible.

Sure, we could go to four quarks next, like the next universe over. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker gluon field and call it the Quark3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a fundamental force of the universe, that's why!

Such a missed opportunity for the word "hadron".

It can't be Australia. It's got no Vegemite on it.

In other news, Tasmania is now confirmed to not exist.

If you buy the OS at the same time as you buy the motherboard and CPU, you are supposed to be able to get "new PC" pricing for Windows. At least that's the way it works when you buy parts to build your own from Fry's.

Of course if you don't buy Windows right at that moment, then you're kind of fucked.

I'm not sure how you could possibly conflate the two. HP actually tries to make proper Slashdot articles. There's only been once or twice that I've thought an article of his really wasn't on-topic for Slashdot. And while I'm not too fond of theodp's articles, at least they're in the right ball park.

BH, on the other hand, is a rambling idiot who submits sub-par blog posts as articles. (Burning Man exodus ideas? Seriously? When even BM regulars don't care that much?) That wouldn't be a problem except that one of the "editors" actually posts them. Jon Katz is an Einstein in comparison. (Maybe if we put BH and MDC (from K5) together in the same room, they could annihilate each other like matter and antimatter, or at least lock up in an infinite feedback loop.)

The software may not wear out, but try to get new versions for it. IIRC, support for Windows 2000 was dropped after VS 2005, and support for XP was dropped after VS 2010. (or was that with VS 2008?) So in order to keep producing new versions of existing software for older versions of Windows, you have to use old, unsupported versions of VS that Microsoft will not do anything to help you find. Sure, you can find it on TPB, but good luck trying to find a shrinkwrapped copy for sale. Hooray for closed source!

But old versions of GCC for Linux? No problem. You can probably even use a modern GCC with an old Linux as long as you have a sufficiently new version of glibc installed.

Not only can you not guarantee an even distribution, you can't even claim there are 36 symbols being used, since most licence plate numbering will not use both letter I / digit 1 and letter O / digit 0, except maybe on vanity plates. And you have failed to account for vanity plates at all.

You are also assuming that the last character is always chosen from the entire alphanumeric sequence (often each digit in a sequence of plates is either specifically numeric OR alpha, but not both), and you are assuming that the last character is always the most rapidly changing position. Then there are skips in the sequence (like XXX or FUK), though those will probably have a relatively minimal effect.

I suppose you could put the whole plate number through a hash algorithm, but that would require everyone directing traffic to have a battery powered device to confirm hashes, and some not-inconvenient means of entering the plate number to check hashes. And that still fails to account for people willing to pay extra for a priority exit slot for whatever reason.