... uhmmm... personal recreation. I'm not sure whether prohibiting something like that is remotely legally enforceable.

Talk to the Catholics.

Now that we have computers with fast processors and amounts of memory sometimes in excess of 128MB, automatically stitching together a canvas from several smaller ones is completely automatic and fast.

That's how it used to be.

And it's how it still is, except the memory manager handles it all transparently for you in the background, so you can simply mmap() in a file, which can even exceed your total physical RAM many times over, and the system takes care of reading / writing & mapping the pages to / from disk as necessary. All that's changed is transparent support for it in hardware and the amount of memory involved.

Base rate fallacy.

I have Morton's toe, which occurs in about 10% of the population

Now I know what to call that thing that I've got that you also have.

If you want to know why it's not really called the 'emergency brake', try using it at speed. Attempting to use the handbrake (parking brake, etc. etc.) to stop from speed will almost certainly make your situation a lot worse.

As for traction control, if you can't drive a vehicle safely WITHOUT it, you shouldn't be driving.

As soon as the engine is off and not producing torque, you won't be needing it anyway. Turning the engine off is kinda the ultimate traction control.

Normal people say "put your foot on the [clutch|brakes|gas|accelerator]" etc. with the expectation that the listener isn't so obtuse as to not thing we're talking about pedals.

I'm picking you actually both know what each other is talking about are just being disingenuous (yay nerds!). For the benefit of others:
Cars with manual transmissions have one clutch, which is actuated by the driver.
Traditional automatic transmissions use multiple clutches, but these are instead actuated automatically by the transmissions control system.
Anything that allows the engine to be disconnected/reconnected to the drive train in some way is by definition a clutch.

Power brakes would still work with the engine off and car in gear,

With a manual transmission, yes.

A serial communications link would fit 'binary context' in my opinion. However, on a serial comms link, a megabit is 1,000,000 bits. An 8 bit data bus clocked at 1 MHz can shift 1,000,000 bytes of data per second. Again, this is very much in 'binary context'.

I'm with you, happy to take a downmod that this is about as lame as a Slashdot story ever gets.

Dell just has to suggest a workaround "Recommend you plug in an external $5 speaker"

That's hardly a reasonable workaround for a laptop computer.

Obviously, that one man, is William, Shatner.

You must be fun at parties!