I am against cheating, and ideally, only the better candidates should get in. But at the same time, I find it interesting that, in the end, someone slightly less good than his/her neighbor can end up graduating from the university he/she should not have been able to get into in the first place — possibly without even cheating once he/she got in.

And yet, here is this 3-month-old game that in the end sells more than the first week it was launched.

It's VLIW (very long instruction word) [wikipedia.org] architecture in case anyone wants to look it up

No it's not. There is a VLIW-like processor made by Intel, and it's the Itanium processor (well, Itanium 2 nowadays). It is not a "pure" VLIW processor though, as it is both VLIW and superscalar. VLIW instructions have a fixed size (in the case of the Itanium, each bundle/long word can feature as much as three instructions, although two is the average). On the other hand, x86 processors have really two parts: one which I would call a "front-end", which receives the CISC instruction. Its only purpose is to decode them, and decompose them into micro-operations/micro-instructions. The latter are the "RISC-like" instructions which are really executed and fill the pipeline.

[Talking about doing "burger jobs" for a year] I quit reading the article at this point.
This is a shame, because the interview does address this issue through questions from the journalist.

Copyright was a legal construct the printers (not the writers!) lobbied for in order to increase their profits

I know how the "copyright" equivalent was created in the late 1700s in France. Beaumarchais was tired of printers and publishers ripping him off. He created the "author's right" (which is slightly different from the copyright US and UK countries use) to be protected against publishers and printers who would sell his work without giving him a cut of the profits. When it came to public execution of his plays however, he had no problem, because he felt a play should be... well, played, and that it somehow belongs to the public.

Later on, this right given to authors to control how they want their work to be distributed became more and more distorted.

Don't forget that many systems use a "first touch" allocation policy. It means even though you might actually allocate only at the beginning of your program, it could actually start to really allocate right in the middle of your program (take a look at how gnu sort is implemented, for example).