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You clearly didn't read the summary. It skipped over the fig leaf and jumped almost directly into all of the ways that you and your roads are killing the planet.

No, I went one better and went and found the actual paper the article is based on.

The summary didn't make any judgement of you or anyone else either. It listed a variety of problems caused by roads -- and that's it. If you feel personally slighted by the list, that's your problem.

Again -- nobody said anything about tearing up roads, or that we shouldn't use them. Roads cause some problems, and help with others. Adults can discuss the cons of something without it implicitly becoming about trying to ban or tear that item out of existence. Indeed, instead of going insane and assuming they are being judged by a scientific paper, rational adults would instead have a discussion on how we might be able to mitigate the problems, while continuing to enjoy the benefits.

Instead, we seem to have too many babies around here who read a list acknowledging problems with roads and assume "They hate roads! I use roads! Therefore they hate me/civilization/everything I stand for!", when no such things were stated or implied.

Now if you're interested in putting on your adult pants and discussing like an rational human being, a more interesting discussion would be on the relative benefits of mitigation strategies, such as wildlife overpasses/underpasses. Parks Canada is considered one of the major world experts on practical wildlife crossing research, and has some interesting materials online discussing the problems and solutions.

See how that works? Someone identifies a problem. Someone else identifies possible solutions. The solutions are evaluated. Nobody goes berserk and simply tears everything apart, nobody calls anyone names, nobody assumes anyone is a bad person. Like an adult. Try it for yourself.

Yaz

How many permanent American non-native towns were there in 1492?

L'Anse aux Meadows?

This was established by the Vikings, coming from Scandinavia by way of Greenland and Iceland.

Still, this is the exception that proves the rule you are trying to imply here.

And as it happens, the government, or at least parts of it, still use WordPerfect extensively.

Actually I don't know any Canadian federal department that still uses WordPerfect, heck I don't even know if the last version works under Windows XP. That's not to say some underfunded group like Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Parks Canada, or Canadian Wildlife Service doesn't.

Treasury Board and nearly everyone in Ottawa (nation's capital) uses MS Office as a corporate standard.

The department I've associated with uses MS Office nationally, but my small group uses OpenOffice internally. I don't even run MS-Window on my desktop or laptop.

Environment Canada, Department of National Defence, Communications Security Establishment, and I believe the Coast Guard have groups or divisions that use Linux or *BSD (OpenBSD for certain), and tools like KDE, GNOME, Apache, Tomcat, Perl, PHP, GCC, netfilter, pf, OpenSSH, Squid, bind, and plenty of other common open source / Free Software for desktops (think engineering workstatons, not too many office PCs), and servers.

One night, my mother walked into a møøse in Terra Nova National Park.

Oh yeah, they found it alright.

Now that Blackboard has acquired WebCT, it's getting worse, inconceivable as that might seem. The licensing was getting out of hand even pre-acquisition, and my Spidey-Sense tells me we're just about to take it on the chops from Blackboard. This patent, which stakes out the ground for role-based rights as a Blackboard invention, will kill all innovation as well as open source implementations such as Moodle and Sakai, etc. Everyone is going to be afraid for the future of these alternative LMS's, and will be driven to consolidating on a Blackboard platform, which turns out to be rewarding Blackboard for being monopolistic pricks!.

When Murray Goldberg was hacking Perl scripts at UBC (or whoever he got to do it for him, if) in the early days of what became WebCT, it was motivated out of a genuine desire to extend the reach of education by someone who I believe had a longtime love for teaching. To look at it now, the product would seem quite silly, I'm sure, but it represented the Golden Age of Learning Management Systems.

I don't know the development internals of WebCT, but it always seemed to me to be a Good Little Idea, but a Bad Bigger Idea. It just didn't scale. It was like there was no architecture, no coherency.

Near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory, Canada, there is a four story mining dredge that has been designated a historic site. These dredges were incredible Rube Goldberg machines; they were built ad-hoc, with shit hanging all over the place and the next thought-of feature literally bolted on the side of them. They worked, I guess, but they sure weren't pretty.

WebCT always reminded me of those dredges, a weird world where the next idea is welded on the side of the implementation in the first way someone thought of how to do it. It ends up being this ugly-but-nearly-functional Frankenstein. Maybe I'm being unfair to mining dredges and Frankensteins.

The biggest barrier to change is, in my experience, faculty who are trained up and comfortable using Blackboard, and who already have their curriculum good to go in Blackboard.

Students - unite!. Tell your prof that Blackboard sucks, and give them specific reasons why you believe this to be the case. Pressure profs to get whatever the Teaching and Technology/Learning Committee (or whatever it is called at your University) to get a pilot of an alternative LMS underway. Get that prof to pilot some of their courses on the alternative.

Let's break this monopoly and keep a competitive and innovative LMS landscape, or we'll all be stuck with something that is, emphatically, worse that WebCT. And fsck the USPTO for enabling this horse-shit, even if they are overworked and underpaid. If you don't have the answer, don't pretend you do. Go and find someone to help with evaluation. And, no, someone who is affiliated with the company behind the application doesn't count.

See L'Anse aux Meadows, the remains of an 11th century Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada. Lots of Norse technology found there, including a Viking-style forge.

• The first transatlantic wireless signal was sent in 1901 from Signal Hill (St. John's) by Marconi to England. (Wikipedia, Nobel Prize Bio)
• The oldest known establishment in North America was a viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows around 1000 AD. It is now a UNESCO world heritage site.
• Canada Day, July 1st is also Memorial Day locally, as it was the day with the heaviest losses among the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. This was at Beaumont Hamel, during the Battle of the Somme. Every Newfoundlander who advanced was either wounded or killed.
• We are home to the most Easterly point of North America, Cape Spear. That is, if you don't count Greenland.

• The Oldest City, by Paul O'Neill
• A History of Newfoundland, by P.W. Prowse

The telephone was invented in Boston, and the patent specification was written in Brantford.

I live one hour away from Brantford and would love to support that claim to fame, but according to the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, NS (a Canadian National "Park" which I have also visited), the telephone was not invented in Canada.

Government of Canada's version