Good news, everyone! If you recognized this as Professor Farnsworth's voice, you're not a nerd!

Perhaps they even meant trademarked?

How do you distinguish between the gas pedal being down due to being stuck versus the gas pedal being down due to someone stepping on it? In either case the sensor is going to report that the gas pedal is down. All the software intelligence in the world is going to have a hard time distinguishing between the identical inputs of PEDAL_DOWN and PEDAL_DOWN.

You could have more intelligent sensors, perhaps, but then that's no longer a software problem.

You forgot about OS-9!

More precisely, AT&T tries to follow Unix order, not English order. Things in Unix (e.g., the ln command) consistently have the destination last.

Not to mention it's got 16 times as much memory as a Cray-1 bleeding supercomputer. I don't know which is sadder, the fact that it's surprising that something so much more powerful than a supercomputer needs a video demonstration to prove it can successfully view a webpage, or the fact that some people can't think of anything to do with a supercomputer beyond giving it to a 2 year-old.

And yet as horrific as that tidbit is, it somehow managed to raise my opinion of him. I'd consider the opinion of my cat to be more credible than that of Joel Splosky on anything programming related.

You should give your wife an operating system designed in the past 40 years. It will do exactly what she wants: idle background processes will be swapped out and use no memory and active idle processes will get access to RAM.

The 1984 commercial was about IBM, not Microsoft. Sorry, just being a pedant: your point still stands ;)

I can accept that many consumers don't care, or even like, being locked into the Apple store. I'm somewhat more sceptical that many consumers like that that "lock" is enforced by criminal law and that they'll be jailed if they ever try to leave the Apple store. I think John Sullivan brings up a valid concern. Also, you shouldn't conflate the issue with choice: the FSF and RMS, to my knowledge, have never advocated choice. Having the freedom to use your device the way you want is a separate concern from choosing which device to use.

That's not to say they can't use DHCPv6. From what I've heard, a lot of organizations have opted for DHCPv6 instead of stateless auto-configuration because the network admins get the warm fuzzies from having logs of everything. Who knows, there might even be legal ramifications (if the MPAA has anything to say about it?) for ISPs that don't keep logs about who's assigned what?

Two wrongs make a right?

There is a final solution: make sending spam more expensive. Spammers will only spam so long as it's mind-blowingly wealthy. If you can raise their operating costs and bump them down from "mind-blowingly wealthy" to only "obscenely wealthy", they might switch to other lucrative immoral industries like manufacturing printer ink.

What this does is increase the computational power required to generate a spam email. The method they described sounds like it's self-learning (just hook it up to a spambot "oracle" and it'll figure out the new template), so spammers will likely have to abandon the use of templates altogether. If you increase the amount of computational time required to generate spam, you decrease the amount of spam sent and really decrease the profitability of it.

We keep pushing the requirements for spam further and further up the computational totem pole (or Chomsky hierarchy, if you will) and you get closer and closer to a point where spammers are going to have to create strong AI to write spam. If they fail, we don't have spammers anymore and if they win, well we have spam, but we also have strong AI! Win-win, I say.

It's more like building a house, selling it to someone else, and then trying to dictate what the new owner can and can't do with their own house! The bits of artists controlling their works has the nice side-effect that it helps them get paid and no one's against artists getting paid, right? The problem is it gives them all sorts of bizarre rights that don't exist in any other domain in society. If a woodworker tried to keep control of his art after he'd sold it he'd be rightly told to go fuck himself; why is a writer given special permission to tell people what to do with the things they've bought just because they're creating something that's not physical?

The article even explicitly says:

Next up, the researchers want to evaluate 500 vets, alongside 500 civilians, to further validate their findings.

It sounds like a case of "well we didn't have enough grant money to do this study properly this time around, but our results still look promising! I'm sure some more grant money would give really conclusive results! *waggles eyebrows suggestively*"