Not really if you think about it. Let's say that you did move to a more modern system sooner. The logical choice would have been to go to the MicroVax which is also dead. The reason why that would have been the logical choice is that it also used the QBus system. The downside is that the software would have to be ported from the PDP 11.
You could have gone with X86 but you would have been stuck deciding if the hardware should be ISA, EISA, or MicroChannel!. Then you would have to decide what RTOS to use or would you just go bare metal? Then you would have to validate every motherboard, chip set, and CPU that you would use not to mention re-writing the software for the X86.
This is part of the problem with going with COTS hardware in industrial settings. Today there are critical systems running on 486 systems and ISA based hardware running under DOS. If you think about it they are in fact no less outdated than PDP-11 based systems from the same time period. The last PDP-11s were introduced in 1990. There does seem to be a cottage industry building new PDP-11 based computers. They are much smaller, faster, and use modern hard drives and ram but still PDP-11s. Some probably use FPGAs for the CPUs, some use X-86 and are emulated in software, and some may even use ASCs. Just as you can still find people that can rebuild an R-2800 radial engine and by parts for old DC-3s it is possible to keep PDPs plugging along.

http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/platform.html

So you haven't actually used both of them. Got it. I used and advocated SVN for a long time - to the point that my Git-using friends were teasing me about "legacy systems" and all that. I finally caved in one weekend and tried Git, and after about an hour started converting all my personal repos over to use it. It was so much faster (and so much better at merging) that I never looked back after that day.

Git is faster than SVN. Also, steel is stronger than bubblegum and the Space Shuttle is faster than a Cessna. I don't feel the need to run benchmarks or quote figures to "prove" any of those statements.

Any references for that? Even if true how the hell is that relevant, Assange is wanted for questioning on a set of charges that are pretty serious and merit extradition to Sweden. The UK has a strong history of extradition to the US, including of UK citizens so lets not think Assange was 'safe' in the UK. Isn't the reality that Assange is a bit of a douche and just wants to avoid questioning on this topic and is throwing about FUD and pretending to be a martyr to deflect attention away from the allegations.

For a man who preaches openness about the world he sure likes to hide behind things.

There people sell new PDP-11 Systems. http://www.logical-co.com/dec-replacement-systems/

Really which micro? You have the advantage of 20/20 hindsight.
Maybe go with an IBM PC based system? What RTOS would you use? What hardware interface would you use ISA? EISA? MicroChannel?
Then you have the problem of revalidating the software when a new CPU comes out. Remember the Pentium Bug?
Or you could have gone with VAX.... Dead.... Alpha? Dead, 68k? Still kicking around but mostly dead, 88000, PowerPC, MIPS, Spark?
And yes you can get new PDP-11 hardware. http://www.logical-co.com/dec-replacement-systems/

Getting into a limo would be possible. What would he do after that? If they see him go in, and he leaves the embasy, the Brittish can pull over the limo. Even if they don't he has to leave the country somehow, and they control all the exits

..unless MBAs get involved.

Find some CS grads, offer them PDP-11 training and assembler training and a job paying slightly-above-average wages & bennies and tell them the job is guaranteed for the next 30 years.

Right now that sounds pretty good to me --- guaranteed employment on a well-understood platform for 30 more years (although I really only need about 20-25 more years..)

Sure, some guys would rather slave away 80 hours a week to develop iPhone apps, Metro tiles or Web X.0 apps because that's what all the cool guys are doing and it's "the future" (until those jobs are shipped off to the next up-and-coming third world country).

Of course, MBAs would manage to fuck this up by deciding that because it's an "obsolete" technology, you don't need to pay anything.
 

Microsoft supposedly surveyed Visual Foxpro devs prior to the .NET rollout. They preferred not changing the language to make it .NET compatible. That signed its death warrant. We aggressively migrated away from it at that point.

Yeah, this ^. Slashdot would be much better off, if it had a better moderation system. I know the original operators tried hard to strike the right balance, but they did not come to the realization that Martin did. Slashdot would have been much better, if they had.

Look at these images of Ada Lovelace

Is she wearing jeans and a t-shirt? No.

I hope you feel properly ashamed and will stop kicking women out of STEM who might have otherwise had a happy life there but didn't fit your tiny mental model of who should be in STEM.

Women already in Engineering are ... wait for it ... the kind of woman that would be interested in Engineering.

They are only one kind. You are excluding people you THINK would not be interested out of hand; why?

There are programmers who like good clothes. Why can't the same be true of women? Here's an amazing thought; perhaps a person can have multiple interests!

The point is, women who are highly interested in being fashion consumers are unlikely, IMO, to be interested in getting involved in the nitty-gritty details of technology

But my point is this line of thinking is at best barbaric, and totally wrong! It's exactly that kind of thinking that is keeping so many women out of engineering because everyone is constantly saying "oh you are interested in X, therefore you cannot possibly be a good programmer of electrical engineer".

I know good male programmers who have good fashion sense and also like good clothes. So why the hell should that not the be the case for some women too?

For whatever reason women are simply less inclined to even try STEM areas of work. So lets not go around building fucking walls to keep even more out than naturally already discard the thought out of hand even though they would enjoy it.

Again, you CANNOT get the size of a group to increase be being highly selective and exclusionary!

If you want to make STEM careers attractive to a larger set of the population, the answer is simple: increase the pay

WHAT THE FUCK. The pay (and job stability) is *already* extremely compelling and just about any STEM field. That's OBVIOUSLY not any kind of solution.

But now people on Slashdot, for some odd reason, want to bring more uninterested people into this career field?

NO you idiot. We want to bring people into STEM that have a natural love of it (and those are the only people that would stay anyway, you cannot force anyone into STEM which is why programs to herd women into STEM en-masse are stupid). But utter morons like yourself are driving them off before they can find out they do in fact like STEM sorts of work, and that means many females are in fact doing something they like far less than they would like working in STEM related fields.

Finally, if this is such a great idea, why don't we use a variation of it to bring more men into STEM careers?

We do, there are tons of things everywhere that make STEM seem interesting to boys. In fact that is a problem in itself though, in that there probably are a significant number of men that also would be happy in STEM that do not pursue it.

Why do you want to keep you plan? Grandfathered unlimited data? The "discounted" phone is supposed to be the carrot that keeps you on a two year contract, not the contract being the carrot for the phone purchase.