Apple already has a few configured by default in Mac OS X: time.apple.com, time.asia.apple.com, time.euro.apple.com

$ ntpdate -q time.apple.com
server 17.151.16.23, stratum 2, offset -0.002298, delay 0.04951
server 17.171.4.13, stratum 2, offset -0.003922, delay 0.09973
server 17.171.4.14, stratum 2, offset -0.003779, delay 0.09933
server 17.171.4.15, stratum 2, offset -0.004068, delay 0.09940
server 17.171.4.21, stratum 0, offset 0.000000, delay 0.00000
server 17.171.4.22, stratum 2, offset -0.010687, delay 0.11308
server 17.171.4.23, stratum 2, offset -0.006814, delay 0.10687
server 17.171.4.24, stratum 0, offset 0.000000, delay 0.00000
server 17.151.16.12, stratum 2, offset -0.002686, delay 0.04926
server 17.151.16.14, stratum 2, offset -0.002507, delay 0.04927
server 17.151.16.20, stratum 2, offset -0.002333, delay 0.04941
server 17.151.16.21, stratum 2, offset -0.002317, delay 0.04892
server 17.151.16.22, stratum 2, offset -0.002512, delay 0.04955
server 17.151.16.38, stratum 2, offset -0.002454, delay 0.04890

$ ntpdate -q time.asia.apple.com
server 17.82.253.7, stratum 2, offset 0.003790, delay 0.25430
server 17.83.253.7, stratum 2, offset -0.000764, delay 0.15932

$ ntpdate -q time.euro.apple.com
server 17.72.255.12, stratum 2, offset -0.006641, delay 0.20169
server 17.72.255.11, stratum 2, offset -0.006988, delay 0.20267

So it looks like they’ve got a reasonable handful in the pool. Dunno about Google or Amazon because googling didn’t turn up anything immediately obvious.

Here’s TECO EMACS version 170 from MIT, circa the mid 1980s I think: http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/index.html To use it you need a working PDP-10 (or an emulator), with an appropriate OS (ITS, TOPS-10, or Twenex), and a working TECO. Emacs was originally a bunch of Editing MACroS implemented in TECO, the world’s most difficult text editor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)

I don’t know if you could get TECO EMACS working in other versions of TECO, but TECO is still lovingly ported to modern systems like Mac OS X and Windows. Learning to use it will make your brain hurt.

Multics Emacs was the first port away from TECO, thoroughly described by its author Bernie Greenberg: http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html There’s a link to the source in that paper, dating to the early 1980s.

Other flavours of Emacs were ZWEI (ZWEI was EINE Initiailly; EINE Is Not Emacs) for the MIT CADR Lisp Machine (http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/mit/mit_cadr_lmss.html) and its descendants like ZMACS on the LMI Lambda and on Symbolics Genera systems.

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.

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/