I didn't see anything about how other programming languages fared in the study. I also didn't see anything very detailed about their methodology. It is, of course, a very interesting question on both a purely intellectual and a practical level, and a lot of studies have been done concerning the topic.

In ancient civilizations that had complex writing systems, whenever a newer, easier to learn writing system was introduced, the old guard would resist it because then they wouldn't be able to demand high compensation for their rare, valuable skills. Programmers, in some cases, can adopt a similar attitude, and I say that as a programmer myself. I've sometimes felt a certain anxiety about programming becoming 'easy', rendering my valuable skills obsolete, while at the same time realizing that if I were a businessman having to hire programmers, that's exactly what I'd want to happen.

When trying to look at this objectively, I still think the quality of code depends significantly on what I'll call the human programmer's talent more than the actual language involved (though some languages are certainly more fun to use than others), and it'll probably be that way until the singularity happens.

I remember a sort of zoo, a cheap little place in Florida in the days before Disneyworld, where a chimpanzee liked to squirt water from his mouth on tourists who got too close.

I also read or saw in a documentary about an octopus in an aquarium that would squirt water on unsuspecting visitors, and then do a color change that at least one of the keepers thought was associated with laughing. (I think the aquarium was at some university or research facility, but I don't remember for sure.)

These are only anecdotes and the interpretation could be 'projecting' or 'anthropomorphizing', but, how does one know that other species don't have a sense of humor? Absence of proof is not proof of absence after all.

I remember the old days of Usenet, and the sometimes interesting challenge of filtering the content. I like slashdot because it has a built in filtering mechanism. One learns to skip down through the early stuff of people scrambling for first post and the ones who immediately think of fart jokes and feel like they've got to rush in to demonstrate that they were able to think of something so clever before somebody else. But Slashdot seems to be getting weighed down more and more by this stuff.

There must be some principle of Internet entropy involved. The wikipedia has to struggle with it. Usenet struggled with it and has largely succumbed to it I would say.

Maybe it's just one of the ways the young destroy the old to make way for new things.

I honestly don't know if SmallFurryCreature is being sarcastic or serious. Does everyone in fact want VLC ported from Linux to mobile devices to finally get a decent player?

I don't have a mobile device, nor do I feel a need for one. But then, I don't even like telephones (and I haven't like them since I had a job in the Navy many many years ago when I had to be on the phone all the time.)

I do like being able to get on the internet from the convenience of home with a nice big LCD screen. I use Linux and haven't used Microsoft since the Windows 3.1 days, but then I was programming in a Unix (mostly BSD 4.2) environment in the 1980s. I realize everybody is not like me and I'm not saying everybody should be like me; but, is SmallFurryCreature being sarcastic or not?

You hear stories about carelessness in maintaining passwords: they're easily guessable, or they're written on a piece of paper stuck to the back of the monitor, that kind of thing. One has to do a cost-benefit analysis on how secure/paranoid one wants to be, the more secure, the more inconvenient and expensive. However, it sounds like, in this particular situation, the passwords could be written on something that looks like something else, a bunch of telephone numbers or laundry list or other 'back of the envelope' kind of document and kept in a semi secure place like a locked drawer of a desk. You could tell your siblings about it verbally, but they wouldn't easily break in to get to the paper while you're alive and healthy. Some posters have mentioned subpoenas. The original question didn't mention concern on that point, but I suppose if everybody was closed mouth about it, the law wouldn't know enough to issue a subpoena until the relatives actually started using those passwords, in which case there's nothing to be done about it anyway.

I confess that we Americans can be pretty illogical with our language. (We say somebody's "in jail" or "in school" but "in the hospital", that last one sounds really weird to you other English speakers doesn't it?) However, this American never uses the expression "begs the question." It's just too darn unclear. And I've very seldom heard it used by anyone else, certainly not in a day to day conversation. I'll say "raises the question" or I'll say "I don't agree with your implied assumptions", or maybe, if I've been watching too much Perry Mason, I'll say "You're assuming facts not in evidence." (Actually, I think they may have used the expression "begs the question" once or twice on Perry Mason, but I don't know if they used it correctly.)

I realize your role as Marc in the movie "Incubus" is pretty obscure, but I've been particularly intrigued by the movie ever since I managed to see it. I'd be able to ask several questions about it, but the most obviously unusual thing about it is that it was done in Esperanto. (I actually thought it was a pretty good little low budget movie and that you did a fine job in it.) I read somewhere that originally you and the other cast members were supposed to speak Volupuk but objected. But, to make this a question, I'll just ask what stays in your mind the most about making that movie?

The first pascaline up for auction?
The first difference engine?
The first Jacquard loom?
The first Hollerith tabulator?

Actually, I probably go with Konrad Zuse's Z1 if any of these still existed. As it is, I think it would have to be the Smithsonian auctioning off ENIAC.

Note that up above there are linux analogies.

I'm not an anstronomer either, but the article summary did specifically say small star. The wikipedia article on red dwarfs mentions that as of 2009 there is a 'mystery' as to the absence of red dwarfs with no metals, and the preferred explanation is that without metals only large stars can form. So that theory allows for the bigger stars forming, creating heavier elements, and then exploding, spewing those elements out into the universe. Even if red dwarfs had been created at the beginning, they are so long lived they would not have exploded and released heavier elements into the rest of the universe yet anyway.

My sig is:

Praeterea censeo Micromolle non esse utendum. Hint: '-molle non esse utendum' means '-soft is not to be used'.

It's a paraphrase of a famous Latin quotation from Cato the Elder:
"Praeterea censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" meaning
"Furthermore, I declare Carthage is to be destroyed."

Cato supposedly ended all of his speeches in the Roman Senate with it. The idea being, I suppose, to show that whatever other business Rome had, they had to get rid of their rival, Carthage.

Sometimes the quote uses 'Ceterum' instead of 'Praeterea'. In this context they both mean pretty much the same thing.