You have never been able to learn a programming language in a couple of hours.

You can learn Snobol (the original, not Snobol4) in a couple of hours. Unfortunately, you probably can't actually do anything useful with it, but that was not required by your original post!

No they aren't. Memristors are a trivial change in how you implement a low-level feature. Its like whether you use polythene or polycarbonate for your capacitors.

While I would be quite happy for Dell to burn in hell, taking i86 architecture with them, a new computer architecture is a completely different plot from new implementations of memory or a new software design. Memristors are not even content addressible memory - which have been done in silicon, and shown to make text searching and jump tables (case statements) thousands of times faster, but no one will buy. (NIH? risk averse management? Decisions taken by non-tech people, PHBs)

History tells us that writing a new OS for new hardware is pretty much the best way to ensure your project fails. Do one of the other, not both.

What is needed to process large amounts of data is a massively parallel data-flow architecture - something resembling a hardware implementation of SQL. The ICL DAP is an early example. The Cell processors in your Playstation 3 are a half baked attempt at the same thing. You would probably still want a conventional processor to supervise it, and probably to compile the programs.

It is not difficult to make one of these using conventional; silicon.

It is hard as hell to get funding and sell it. If you actually want to make one, drop me an email (and several billion dollars). Yes, I have worked on this stuff before.

once you get the NRE [non-recurring expense] out of the way

The entire cost of electronics is the NRE: look at your $800 iPhone - raw materials inside:

Three spoonfulls of oil to make the plastic bits.

Two spoonfulls of sand to make the silicon bits (includes the glass screen and fibreglass PCBs).

Not quite enough copper to make 2 inches of water pipe,

Not quite enough steel to make a table knife or fork.

Not much at all of quite a few other things

Way more than 2,000,000 man-hours of highly paid engineers' design time (if you include time to design every single component, including bought-in CPU, graphics, etc- remember to descend recurssively into the design of every single bit of logic, power disttribution, analog bits). Of course most has been amortized over the past 50 years, Apple only pays for the top layer.

If you start again from scratch, you might not need to go back to George Boole, or Aristotle, but you risk having to redevelop one hell of a lot.

Perhaps you shold meet a few engineers and talk to them.

"features" and "bugs" may be the same thing in Microsoft's world, but to the rest of us, they are completely different things.

Thanks to Unity, Linux now has the same problem. Please can I have xfce on my SGS3!

if the job is unfilled for a month, most likely you are not offering enough pay. There's no shortage of engineers, just a shortage of ones who want piss-poor pay. (Although treating them badly in the workplace probably does not help).

YOU cant install malware this way, but people who have machines which are already 99% malware can (but probably never will).

You are correct - this is utter and complete nonsense. No uninfected computer is going to consider what comes into the mic channel as potentially sensible to execute, or, indeed do anything other than save it as audio data.

If your computer is in the habit of executing WAV of MP3 files, or saving audio as .exe files, you are already more than truely and completely stuffed.

So its true ... you are a chatbot!

Surely a cop-out is a strong indicator of a human?

Perhaps that should be politician.

Maybe we should require politicians to pass a Turing test?

Do Android phones support Apple ][ floppies? Where is Woz when you need him!

I speak the Queen's standard English, and the result is very similar. I assume some specific American accent is required - but I perhaps it might need to be Korean.

Why would a Bluetooth audio system need a jack?

Because the Bluetooth stack is a piece of shit - you have evidently not tried using one of these!

but idiots that will not be able to do so safely won't understand that fact, because they're idiots

There is a substantial body of evidence that passengers are a bigger distraction than electronics. In particular, various studies reported children, teenagers, adults and old people as being sources of distraction.

Clearly we need to ban people from cars

its completely obvious once you think of it!

we need a popular meme to quote on the fact that you dont need government to employ contractors for things to go horribly wrong.

How about:

"All the evidence is that governments can make things go horribly wrong successfully without outside help - often for the same price or higher!"

Thanks, I will take the credit myself!