Is it intelligent--or is it a program running on a future-stealing amount of energy, running the fastest video cards--and our memory!

Vogon or Klingon? Asking for a friend.

Requiring students to appear on-campus or requiring them to fill out a sworn affidavit in front of a notary public who will check their ID will deter money mules.

Exceptions for students unable to access a notary public (think people living in very rural areas) would need to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

"the world's limited supply of DRAM"

The world's constrained supply of DRAM should ease in 2-5 years, at which point his argument, such as it is, will be much weaker.

That said, from an economy-of-scale and efficient-use-of-resources perspective, centralization makes sense. But form a privacy, autonomy, actual-ownership, and personal freedom perspective, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

doesn't have a Wikipedia article either.

Tivo came after the analog VCR. Affordable VCRs made time-shifting a thing.

But with a sufficient number of fiber-seeking backhoes* censorship will always be possible.

*"fiber-seeking backhoes" being a stand-in for whatever disrupts the physical layer of the network stack. Substitute radio jammers, power disruptions, etc. as appropriate for your target's network.

The technical person would say it's a collection of protocols and the hardware and software that implement them. The information that happens to be hosted there, other than of course the information necessary to keep the internet functioning (routing tables, DNS records, etc.), is not "the internet."

There is no need for the internet as defined above to die, unless something better has displaced it and almost nobody is using it anymore (BITNET anyone?).

...and if it's Intel, it will be running Minix, anyway.

For the amount of code on a UEFI motherboard, you could have an entire operating system.

Ignore network traffic until security self-defenses are in place.

Yeah, you can have a buffer overflow anytime, and they can be bad, but the situation explicitly pointed out an "invaders not recognized as evil before armed guards are posted" situation.

If this had been a bad buffer overflow that occurred AFTER the defenses were in place, maybe it would've resulted in a compromise, or maybe the defenses would've rendered it ineffective.

... the machine can be affected by outside input before it's security/self-defense system is ready?

Oops.

"Of every 2 million sold, less than 1 million are affected!"