Seriously, why won't this 2+ decade old argument die? It's sophomoric and picked apart in second year cognitive systems classes by 19 year old children. It glaringly misunderstands and misrepresents. If people are genuinely interested in AI they should take a basic course in it at university or pick up a real book on the subject.
it won't "die" for the same reason that it's still used at university - both because it raise some interesting issues and because it played an important part in the historical debate over ai. also, if you actually read the link you'll see that it's placed in context, with the "systems reply" explained in detail.
To a software person who's given AI some thought, the holes in Searle's argument are glaring. I had a very awkward conversation in college with a philosophy student who had just been taught it and was taking it very seriously; I guess they have a lot of reverence for Great Thinkers who hand down Deep Insights, whereas to me this guy Searle sounded like an imbecile.
Despite my initial horror at someone's taking the Chinese Room argument at face value, I realize it raises interesting questions about the chasm between AI's starting point (e.g. playing chess with S-expressions) and real human-like intelligence. I think we have more perspective on the problem these days for countless reasons -- work on understanding how subsystems in the brain work, being able to build or simulate neuron-like systems, applying powerful computers to a wide variety of problems.
The big questions that remain are ones like whether a human brain can be simulated; how brain-like a machine would have to be to "understand" things -- self-aware? neural-network-like? embodied? -- and to what extent constructs like language reflect deep structure of the mind (i.e. human firmware we have to reverse engineer and duplicate) rather than universal logical constructs.