You are wrong about the lack of grammatical gender in Germanic languages. Most Germanic languages actually maintain a system of grammatical gender, though in many it has been somewhat reduced from the Proto-Germanic model. English is one of the few Germanic languages that has largely lost grammatical gender, retaining it only in the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’. Scots and Afrikaans are similar in this regard. Dutch still has grammatical gender although it is no longer correlated to biological sexes, being divided into ‘common’ (merged from masculine and feminine) and ‘neuter’ depending on the article (de, het) and adjective ending (-e, nothing). West Frisian, Swedish and Danish are similarly structured. German retains a strong tripartite grammatical gender system, as do Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese.

Yeah, even the early Lisp Machines had such bad GC that people would instead dump out the contents of memory (save the world) and then reboot. This was a simpler and more efficient stop-and-copy GC technique. I think actually that GC wasn’t implemented for quite a while because there was enough memory and algorithms were carefully hand-tuned to not generate much garbage.

So I guess what I'm getting at is that cryptographers and other code-breaking enthusiasts can have fun with Rongorongo because linguists aren't terribly concerned with it.

Every Polynesianist that I've talked to has said that Rongorongo is interesting but probably most likely to be some sort of mnemonic device rather than actual written language. And I've talked to quite a few Polynesianists for the average linguist, since I did my master's degree at the University of Hawai'i. It's unlikely that the Rongorongo carvings will ever be deciphered. I think Polynesianists are more concerned with documenting and conserving the Rapa Nui language itself, which is rapidly dying due to shift to Spanish.

There is probably a battle between lawyers and engineers going on within the walls about whether to release the sources or not. Give the engineers some time before you start bashing them, and instead give them more reasons to use as ammunition against the lawyers.

It’s a little bay on Kluane Lake. It’s named that because they lost so much equipment there while building the Alcan (Alaskan) Highway. There’s not much there. The nearby village of Burwash has a gas station, restaurant, and hotel, and that’s about it. There are a number of Athabaskans (Northern Tutchone I think, or maybe the northernmost Southern Tutchone) living around there, as well as a few white folks. It’s a beautiful place in the summer, but it’s ferociously cold and windy in the winter. Good hunting in the area, and I guess that’s why the Athabaskans stuck around.

This happens elsewhere too. In Alaska various juncos, chickadees, pine siskins, and other small songbirds will get drunk off of mountain ash berries that freeze and ferment on the tree during the late fall and early winter. This has happened since "time immemorial" according to various Athabaskan and Tlingit elders I've talked to, and they have always enjoyed watching the drunken antics.

Moose will get drunk from eating crabapples frozen and fermented on the tree. I think they browse the mountain ash berries too. There was one moose a few years ago in downtown Anchorage that was stumbling around drunk and managed to get a string of Christmas lights in his antlers.

Nonsense. There have been far worse consoles in history. What of the Philips CD-i? Or the Apple Pippin? Or the Nintendo Virtual Boy? Or reaching back a bit, how about the Atari 5200? Or the WoW Action Max? Or the RCA Studio II?

I know you’re just trolling –and rather poorly too – but you really ought to know a bit more about console history. There are plenty of really awful consoles out there, and to really pick on something you’d do well to be able to compare to them.

They basically look exactly the same. CT, MRI, none of them have any resolution to show you anything interesting in that context.

My solution to the problem was to look for the person’s name and address in the billing information being sent to me. Obviously writing them an email is impossible. So I wrote one person a nice letter warning them about the issues of fraud and identity theft, asked them to fix their email address records with various companies, and encouraged them to be more careful with their personal information. It worked, all the stuff from one lady no longer appears in my inbox. Unfortunately *someone else* has started to do the same thing, so I’ll need to dust off that letter soon.

You don’t need plates and charts during takeoff and landing. During those periods you should already know exactly where you are and what you’re doing, and tower will provide any extra advice you need. Paper would be stowed at the same time to keep it from bouncing around the cockpit, so stowing the iPad isn’t really any different. Also since it’s a class 1 electronic device it will be turned off during those two critical periods as well. It’s already legal for IFR general aviation to use things like iPads for navigation reference, it’s just that Alaska Airlines is the first commercial airline to do so.

Navigation charts are bigger and more detailed than what could fit on a single screen, so scrolling is necessary anyway. The navigation plates (terminal procedures, approach, departure, etc.) can fit all on a screen and for the US all of them are already available as PDFs. Here’s an example iPad app that Googling produced: http://www.ipadappsdude.com/plates-chart-viewer-navigation/

> Then the interfaces to library catalogs tend to be crap too.

This is mostly because the world of university-level library management systems (a.k.a. integrated library systems) is heavily dominated by Voyager which was from Endeavor Information Systems and now is in the hands of the Ex Libris Group. There are a number of open source alternatives, but you can't seriously expect a big institution to use anything that doesn't require a huge contract for installation and support.

The "Bridge to Nowhere" to Gravina Island wasn't a bridge to nowhere, it was a bridge to the airport. Ketchikan's airport is on a different island than the city because there are very few places with flat land in Southeast Alaska; compare Sitka where the airport is on Japonski Island. Currently there is a ferry from the airport on Gravina Island to the city on Revillagigedo Island, but when the seas are heavy or there are storms then the ferry won't run. That can leave hundreds of people stranded on Gravina Island where there are no services other than the airport -- no hotels, no restaurants, no houses, no nothing. Building the bridge would have a side effect of opening up Pennock Island and Gravina Island to more development, which is important because Ketchikan has basically run out of developable land but continues to grow because of the booming tourism industry. The real reason that there was political kerfluffle about this bridge was because Hurricane Katrina had just hit and politicians saw this as a suitable scapegoat.

The "Bridge to Nowhere" across the Knik Arm from Anchorage was more of a boondoggle. There are basically no residents across the water at Point Mackenzie, and there's no demand to develop the area. But most of Alaska's major politicians own large tracts around the Point Mackenzie area because that bridge has been rumoured for the last thirty years. So those politicians would make out like bandits from development in the area, and that development is contingent on the bridge. Currently there's supposed to be a ferry in the works but it's stalled: the ferry is finished and one port is finished, but the other isn't and it's not being built.

And xterm is any better?