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I'm sorry, I have a cold.

Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY! ...

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah." --Monty Python: Four Yorkshiremen

Been waiting all of 2 years and change for your precious bug fix, 'ave you? You almost had my eyes tearing up there I tell ya: 25 Year Old BSD Bug.

It's been done, you ignorant tit.

http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-arguement.html

Groklaw: I'll tell you what's wrong with you, my lad. YOU's dead, that's what's wrong with you!

SCO: No, no, we's uh,...we's resting.

With grateful apologies to Monty Python / http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-parrot.html

pliCAAWW! (He's Right. It is Monty Python.)
qu'kcuUH! (They found me out. I'm NOT dead!)
chthkqWA! (I'm a Avian Ventriloquist!)

http://orangecow.org/pythonet/pet-shop.html
http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-parrot.html
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm

English is an incredibly adaptable, flexible, evolving, absorbing language, so there should never be a lack of words to describe any concept one comes upon.

Who said that it would be English that would win? How many more Chinese speakers are there?

In fact, according to this site, there were more first-language speakers of both Mandarin and Spanish than of English. (The data appears to be a decade out of date, so English may be second now - but it won't be beating Mandarin)

What makes you assume that it would be English that would win?

Interesting article.

'We aren't talking about living into your 80s," Caspari says. Human life span in those days was pretty brief, under the best of circumstances, so even living into your 30s was quite an achievement.'

The necessity of age 50/60+ people to a tribe has been in part counteracted by the institutional memory functions of both papyrus and religion. The other thing is that with something like cancer that is in most cases a probability rather than a certainty, not everyone is going to die. The article compares the memory of the elderly to a hard drive or tape backup. Redundancy is good... but you only need so many backups before it's overkill. As long as there are one or two lucid old people around, the tribe will do fine.

At least your own elderly don't have much of an incentive to lie about the important things, only how tough they had it. Unlike much of the media.
http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-fo ur-yorkshiremen.html

It's also a very difficult task to keep cells dividing that many times without errors. Extend it far enough and there will inevitably be some compromises made, unintended consequences, etc.

For every extra old person eating food, that's food that could otherwise be eaten by someone able to reproduce, is about to reproduce, can remember the stories his parents told him, can defend the tribe, and can harvest more food. Obviously it's not an age set in stone, it's a gradation that will correspond with general age related deaths (heart disease, cancer, etc).

To be talking about the "end of (tens of thousands of years of) history" just because of a couple of decades of plenty (and mostly just in the US, because of the dollar denominated oil empire) reflects more than just a little hubris. Kind of like the '2. ??? 3. Profit!' dot com business models.

Well, in my day, we had to walk uphill in the snow just to use the phone.

Of course we also had to live in a lake.

http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/help/top-100-language s-by-population.html http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=S WA

Only about 5 million first language speakers, 30 million bilinguals, so its not even in the top 100.

That's what I was referring to in terms of the popular media. Instead of discussing issues and possible alternatives, usually the conversation devolves into mindless confrontation about the facts.

Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch wherein Eric Idle looks for an argument, but only gets contradiction instead...

I'm not prepared to pursue my line of inquiry any longer as I think this is getting too silly!

Terrible place to start out but at least you can tell your friends on Slashdot.