Conflicts have been known to escalate beyond rationality in the past; World War I is a prime example.

Yes, for example, there were a number of anecdotes of MySQL databases using 100% CPU time, and the article mentions the similar Java/Cassandra problem. I suspect these two probably account for the majority of issues encountered.
http://blog.mozilla.org/it/2012/06/30/mysql-and-the-leap-second-high-cpu-and-the-fix/

The reason that the command line survives is that it is a model of the way that humans communicate abstract concepts - primarily using language, not using pictures. Yes, there are plenty of examples where a picture is worth a thousand words. For many applications (such as one-off editing of a photograph) a GUI makes a lot of sense. But there's no need to rip out the language facility from the user interface!

If you were going to criticize the command line interface, it would be to criticize the poor "grammatical constructions" (the inconsistent syntax and quoting methods), and the poor "semantics" (difficult to remember option codes, hard to access manuals). But these are arguments for improving the command line interface, not for discarding it. The prime reason that puts people off using the command line interface is that there are no hints as to what to type next, no feedback. It is a problem we should address.

A graphical interface is quite poor for some things, for example "do this a thousand times". The problem isn't the "thousand times"; easy enough to have a GUI element that handles it. The problem is the denotation "this", an abstraction that is hard to visualize. At best, you represent "this" as a macro sequence of GUI actions, but that is only a single level of abstraction with no parameterization. A command line interface can handle such abstractions with ease.

While ground turbulence is going to detract from peak performance, in level flight helicopters do benefit from translational lift, which increases the weight capacity. On take off, you cannot achieve forward motion until you are off the ground; ground effect helps to gain ground clearance in order to start moving forward under heavy loads. Thus the maximum load can potentially be higher than can be maintained in a hover (not that I'm saying this is necessarily a desirable scenario). In mountainous terrain, the pilot may make use of a descent to gain the forward speed rather than ground effect.

Reminds me of an interesting case in the 1970s in Australia. Edward Ward shot a fisherman on the Murray riverbank near Echuca, and the body ended up half in the water. He was found guilty of murder in Victoria. But because the boundary wasn't well defined (the river itself belonged to NSW), there was a drawn out legal battle that eventually ended up in the High Court having to define the boundary more precisely. Ward didn't get a reprieve though, because he was retried in NSW and still got life imprisonment.

The implementation of the state machine is of less interest because it is finite. The aim of the exercise is to reduce the the notion of computability to a machine-like process. The most simple conception is that only one part of the machine is infinite and variable. That is why Turing needed to show how to implement a Universal Machine as a single Turing Machine, so that the transition table could be made fixed in size (and after that point, uninteresting in implementation). It would have been sufficient to posit a human reading a pencil and paper transition table and methodically applying the transitions to the tape; the important part is that the process is "mechanical" meaning without the involvement of creativity, not "mechanical" meaning that it can be realized in a mechanical form.

Of course, if you want to build a model of a Turing Machine, then the implementation does become more interesting, so I agree with you that this Lego model is only half of the puzzle.

Obviously they hadn't heard of Georg Cantor. He would have had no trouble representing an infinite matrix using an infinite list.

The Fujitsu press release is light on detail too.

blessed are the cheesemakers...

Chomsky's theories date back to the 1950s, and while they have their flaws, his exposition of transformational grammar was a sea-change in the study of syntax. You can't both at the same time claim that (a) he "didn't invent" anything, and (b) that he "did ruin several generations of thought on language and communication" with that thing that he didn't event.

You are also confused about the particular replicability of his generative grammars on computers; Chomsky's particular version of the generative grammars have proven less easy to implement in computerized natural language processing than some of the other more deterministic phrase structure grammars, and for many languages with free word order, dependency grammars have been a easier choice.

And the reality now is that a lot of NLP projects have given up on defined grammars and resorted to stochastic models; because for many applications people don't care about defining syntax at all (which requires time-consuming language study), they just care about outcomes. Unfortunately this has meant that success rates have plateaued after the initial quantum improvement, because while stochastic models are "relatively easy to mimic in computers", they don't always add insight into how human language works. "Doing science" when it comes to syntax involves more than just evaluating the social statistics of language use, it also includes modeling the generative power of human language.

It isn't enough to criticize the Euro-centric nature of transformational grammar. It is a valid criticism, but it is only useful scientifically if one develops a new theory that has even better explanatory power, that encompasses the success of previous theories and adds to that success. Success means the ability to predict which sentences are well formed.

The more interesting debate is the origin of natural language grammar; whether it is conscious consensus, innate, or emergent. The "greco-roman grammatical tradition" clearly falls into the first category, which is in stark contrast to Chomsky's idea that human brains may have language specific structures, while the emergent hypothesis is more widely accepted these days. These debates are interesting, because it is possible that all of these ideas may have varying degrees of truth.

You have to be willing to think outside the box when discussing these big ideas in linguistics (indeed, in all science). Even if an idea might seem preposterous to you, it is useful to challenge your preconceptions of how the world works. An example is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the structure of language affects a person's conceptualization of the world. Though it now lacks general acceptance, it still serves as an interesting counter to the axiom that language structure has no affect at all on cognition, and there are interesting experimental examples of the effect of linguistic categories on cognition.

I'd have to agree with you that the fanboys don't do anybody a favour. I'm sorry to hear that your experience was such a frustrating one, and I certainly don't think that people should feel guilty for using closed source software, particularly where they can see no viable choice.

Stallman is not quite so black and white about the world as you are, and has consistently placed emphasis on the value of cooperation. You do not have to be totally independent and self-sufficient in order to experience freedom.

You will also find that the FSF over the years have had to make a number of compromises, because sticking to principles at all costs is not the most effective way to bring about change. You will see compromises in the use of licences such as the LGPL, the wording of the patent sections in the GPLv3, and so on. Only those who live in your black and white world would see compromise as the same as hypocrisy.

When you buy food from someone else, you are free to do with it pretty much whatever you want. You can eat it, you can share it with your family, you can cook it anyway you like. Can't you come up with a better example than that?

And if you really think free software is no big deal, then why spend so much time with ad-hominem attacks? What is your motive?

Stallman writes "If we don't want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others. I hope that the free software movement will contribute to this: at least in one area, we will replace the jungle with a more efficient system which encourages and runs on voluntary cooperation."

Doesn't seem too fixated to me, just keeping his actions as a change agent to a manageable subset of all the things in society that need improvement.

maybe; but those people already have concussion from their previous accident

And don't forget the prior art of this one:
http://gagravaar.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/appleii-right.jpg

Oh, wait...