Here's a link to an informational website about the Government of Canada's new anti-spam legislation.

From the summary on their page it's quite apparent that they had to create special tools that gave C# direct access to pointers, CPU registers and even code written in straight assembly. All this business about "so there, a kernel CAN be written without C" is nothing more than flamebait; they've created a toolchain that allows them to break out of the pure managed environment and add low-level, C-like features to C#.

You realize that Windows NT was originally written for the Intel i860, a RISC chip, don't you?

It's also a private member's bill. They rarely get passed anyway.

You must be a Ferengi.

If you're using DEP (a.k.a. the NX bit), you need PAE turned on anyway. The NX bit lives in PAE page table entries.

Doesn't this just sound like the IEAK that was used for adding branding to IE by ISPs and OEMs?

now even teh internets is going to be saturated by Nickelback!

Not entirely true. If your CPU supports Physical Address Extensions, then 32-bit Windows can utilize more than 4GB of physical RAM. Since a video card's memory-mapped regions would cause 4 gigs of RAM to "spill over" past the 4GB mark, PAE allows the OS to still be able to access that memory. Processes of course are still limited to a 4GB address space that is carved into kernel space and user space.

What we are talking about here is the formalization of common design idioms. Design patterns are useful, but I shudder when I hear developers talking about their code as if they're just stringing together a bunch of design patterns to arrive at a solution. Design patterns are a tool. Use the tools to work the problem, but don't make the mistake of using the problem to work the tools.