Notes from a Medium-Sized Island

This language log post confuses me, because I'm not confused by it. I mean, because I'm not confused by the example in it. The phrase "get to know" sounds like an unbreakable unit to my ear already, and it's no surprise (although I don't have any particularly theoretical-sounding reason I can articulate to explain it, which maybe is what Pullum is looking for) that you can't strand the "get to" at the end of the sentence.

The thing that would make it strandable, I think, is if "get to V" were generally applicable as a construction meaning "come into the state of Ving" (is this "inchoative"? It seems a little too gradual to deserve that name, but maybe it is) but in point of fact it's not --- at least not the way I talk. In isolation I would expect "to get to" means "to have permission to"/"to be able to", and such a thing makes no sense in the imperative.

After many months of attempts, platypuslord finally stole my hat successfully again, by some very clever misdirection involving a photocopied titlepage of someone else's PhD dissertation. Him stealing my (more generally, people's) hat (or shoes or whatever) is a long-standing running joke. I thought I had learned to keep on my toes enough to keep him from succeeding, but he has proven a worthy opponent. Good work, dan!

AAAAAAaaaa.

Laptop not working. Beginning to panic. Running the built-in rescue software it seems that all my data is there, so I am not panicking too much, but the entire Windows directory seems to be wholly absent. I have no idea why. The computer just froze up while I was doing ordinary stuff, I rebooted it, and now instead of starting up it complains that
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE
and then reboots. This error message appears in microsoft support pages like this one, but it says not to follow its instructions if I have an OEM-installed version of windows (which I believe I do) and anyhow I don't have any windows CDs to stick in the drive.

Also I can't seem to get any of my data off. Anyone have a windows network share I can write to?

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Edited to add: Entire windows directory does not seem to be missing after all --- it's just that some of IBM's utilities seem blind to it, while others aren't. So catastrophic hard drive failure has moved down a couple of notches in the plausibility hierarchy, and mere registry fuckedupedness has taken the lead. Nonetheless, it looks like I will need some kind of boot CD or somethin' to fix the problem. I really hope I can find someone around here who knows what they're doing with Windows...