I completely agree with you, it is a very real engineering problem that requires serious academic examination. This is a good candidate for something like that Software Engineering Institute. The issue is one of writing software and managing a code base. It is a logistics problem. Maybe it can only be solved by a new language or method of source control or verification. In that area, yes, it's open to computer science to explore. But in general, it's a code architecture, testing, development methodology problem, which is the concern of software engineering.

A Turing machine cannot solve the problem of software maintenance. You cannot model software maintenance as a finite state machine. There is no algorithmic solution. There is no space-time trade-off that you can make improve the situation.

It is not a problem to be solved by computing. It is outside the realm of Computer Science, and clearly in the lap of Software Engineering.

This research was done in Israel, a country that has (*gasp*) nationalized health care.

The poster was stating that OSX calls will be in Obj-C while other (non OSX-specific standard library calls) will be in C. I think your interpretation is a case British English versus American English.

FINALLY! Thank you for cataloging Jane's endless stupidity in this thread. How someone modded her up is beyond me.

You are mostly right.
Back in the day, layoffs used to mean "we can't pay you anymore, so we're putting you on unpaid leave. We are expecting put you back on the payroll once we can afford it." This used to be for unskilled and semi-skilled blue collar workers, often union guys, and very often included some benefits while laid-off (even partial salary).

Today, layoffs are a euphemism for mass firings. However, there is a significance to the term laid-off versus fired. Fired now implies fired-with-cause, which is to say you were fired for being a lousy employee or doing something wrong, whereas laid-off implies you were (generally) fired but not due to your job performance. So, today if you're laid off with no replacement, you're not "fired", but you're also not laid off in the past sense of the word. You are dismissed due to external factors.

Would you rather be downsized?

It was about 4 months old when it started showing problems. Within a month, it was totally dead.

Yes, smaller sizes are affected. Sorry, I don't have a link for you, but I remember reading it. All 7200.11 models are bad. Note that I've done the reading on this because the 500GB Seagate 7200.11 in my girlfriend's machine just failed a week ago.