Wouldn't it be simpler to have normal chairs and move the head and the tail of the queue, as in a circular buffer, rather than moving all the chairs? Of course, that would require the queue to be somewhere else than leading to the thing people are queueing for...

Considering the sheer amount of statistics being thrown around in what passes for Science, it might be more accurate to say that Science is the way we find things are likely to be true and likely to be untrue.

That said, I'm having trouble defining a representative sample of Science...

That's almost certainly a translation error. The University of Tampere press release states that "these studies clearly show that members of the group B coxsackieviruses are associated with the risk of type 1 diabetes", and the offending sentence in the Yle article would be the same in Finnish irrespective of whether the virus found is the only one or not (e.g. "löytänyt viruksen" would be "discovered a/the virus"). Finnish grammar doesn't have the concept of definiteness, meaning that a translator working from a Finnish source text would in many cases have to guess the intended meaning or look it up elsewhere. For similar reasons, many Finns have problems figuring out whether to use a definite or indefinite article when writing in English.

See Google Apps Status Dashboard for more details (hover over red outage dots for times).

I like your idea, but I find your vowel mapping very confusing. I think diphthongs should be spelt as their component vowels. Using the IPA for English summary on Wikipedia to enumerate the necessary combinations and noting that many vowels in English only come in short or long versions (and blatantly recycling the apostrophe), I'd suggest:

"a" as in "trap", "aa" as in "palm" or "start", "ai" as in "price", "au" as in "mouth"
"e" as in "dress" or "error", "ei" as in "face"
"i" as in "kit", "ii" as in "fleece"
"o" as in "lot", "oi" as in choice, "oo" as in "thought", "ou" as in "goat"
"u" as in "foot", "uu" as in "goose"
"'" as in "a" or "comma", "''" as in "strut", "nurse" or "hurry"

Consonants are mostly straightforward. "b", "d", "f", "h", "k", "l", "m", "n", "p", "r", "s", "t", "v", "w" and "z" all have obvious values. "g" is needed for "guy", so we use "j" as in "pleasure" (hence "dj" for "jam"). "y" is as in "yes". This allows us to reuse "c" for "th" as in "father", "q" for "th" as in "thigh", "x" for "sh" (and hence "tx" for "ch"). I'm not quite happy about having to use a digraph for "ng", but that should not be much of a problem for English.

Nau, yuu mei fiil cis luks sili, and aim x''r meni wud 'grii. Cat sed, geting juusd tu taiping laik cis is not ool cat haard. Sam mait aargjuu cat cis iz not inglix eni mo'r, b't ai qingk piipl xud 'dj''st priti kwikli.

Being able to type symbols like []/\;= with single key presses is a distinct advantage of the US layout over many European layouts when programming. I actually spent a few years programming with a US layout (switching back to Finnish when typing something in e.g. Finnish), but the difference is small enough that I felt that switching back and forth is not worth the trouble. Besides, the Finnish multilingual layout works for pretty much any European language with a Latin-based alphabet.

Many people don't seem to realise that the labels on PC keyboards' key tops are purely cosmetic; in most operating systems you can switch between layouts quite easily. As long as you don't need to look at the keyboard to know which key is which, you can easily use a different layout. In other words, switching a keyboard to a more familiar layout than the one it is labelled in works quite well.

If you work with several different languages with different alphabets, you are more or less forced to switch layouts as required by the current task. For example, a Greek programmer will almost certainly spend much of their time typing program code, commands or suchlike with a US layout (or similar) and switch to their local layout to type in their own language.

Actually, Windows 3.1 runs fine on EGA; the installation disks come with EGA drivers (640x350, 16 colours). In fact, CGA works at 640x200 with 2 colours (with the Windows 3.0 driver, which is not included in Windows 3.1). Windows 3.11 seems to have dropped EGA support and requires VGA.

OpenJDK is pretty much GPL 2 (with exceptions to allow applications to have other licenses), so Java should be OK as long as you don't use any Oracle-specific stuff. The blog clarifies that open source OpenGL implementations exist and may be used. Lots of game programming libraries can be found in most Linux distributions (e.g. SDL, ClanLib, PyGame); as far as I can tell they should all be OK.

VLC is mostly run from France, where computer programs explicitly cannot be patented. Since the VLC developers apparently have no presence in the United States, US software patents are irrelevant for them. Hence, they can distribute H.264 decoders. Mozilla Foundation is based in California, making it hard for them to ignore US patents.

The problem with using only passwords to log in is that you then have to prevent users from having the same password. This can lead to serious security implications as discussed in this article.

Actually, you could, as long as the Pirate Bay download is a link to the data or rules to recreate it and not just a binary blob that contains all of TPB including itself. For example, quines can contain the information necessary to reconstruct themselves.

I'd say you lose nerd points not just for not bothering to look it up, but for failing to recognise that the "English" term you mention is, essentially, Latin, and therefore very likely to occur in languages related to Latin.

Getting slightly more on-topic, I've found that being multi-lingual means you end up thinking about things in the language you normally use to communicate about them in. So, for example, I end up thinking about university administration in Finnish, the upcoming presidential election in Swedish and computer science in English. In part, this is simply to avoid making the effort to translate (for example, the admin staff at our university is predominantly Finnish-speaking), but also because some of the terminology may be unfamiliar in some languages (the more esoteric a subject is, the more likely it is that everything I read about it is in English) or simply not standardised.

DNA has always been a competitor to Elisa with its own network. However, DNA recently acquired Welho.