Yes, your choices back then were TAMU, Yggdrasil, and SLS, and maybe one more. You had to buy Yggdrasil, and TAMU and SLS were pretty hard to get working. So when Slackware came along, it quickly became the distro of choice. It was a bit easier than SLS (which it was based on), and was kept up to date. There were also ‘distros’ that consisted of a handful of primitive tools and a boot floppy. Like the later Linux From Scratch, those took a *real* nerd to get working.

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.