Yeah, I've always thought that a people capable of time travel would also develop what I see as final evolution of the cell phone: C.A.C.T.U.S. (Colonic Audio Conduction Technology, Ultimately Sadomasochistic), an inter-chronologic audio communication device, in convenient suppository form. It vibrates your colon such a manner that sound waves travel up your spine, resonating the inner ear. It is, unfortunately, quite uncomfortable to wear.
We all know from the Terminator movies that inorganic materials aren't compatible with the time-matrix anomaly--unless they're wrapped in flesh. So, there you go. Billions of future humans are destined to ram CACTUSs up their asses.
To be fair, it's more like replacing the already tiny engine in a Ford Fiesta with a much smaller 50cc scooter engine. Externally, it looks a lot like a Ford Fiesta, but it's arguably not.
You might want to specify the modern Browning semi-auto hunting rifle, versus the M1918, also known as Browning Automatic Rifle--or as it was commonly called by infantrymen: BAR. 'Cause it shared the same feature which gives the A in AK-47:D
That sounds an awful lot like something a giant racist would say.
Thanks the the ad hominem, it really shows the strength of your argument. I'd feel hurt, it it weren't from some random twit on the internet, because I'm about as strongly anti-racist as one can be. But, no... It's really something an empiricist would say. That is, something an observer would say.
In my metropolitan, there's exactly three classes of hispanic drivers:
Drives a pickup generally capable of some work related activity, often in the process of being converted into a lowrider
Drives a barely road-worthy asian-made beater, usually having a subwoofer and fart-can fighting to shake the rattle-box apart
Drives a shiny, expensive, gas guzzling late model of what you might call a 'sport pickup' (i.e. something of limited utility), like a Caddy SXT, Lincoln Navigator, GMC Denali, H2, etc. Also usually includes giant subwoofer, fart cans, a chrome trim kit, and expensive, ugly wheels. The more expensive the truck, the louder the stereo, the gaudier the accessories--the higher his social status.
My neighbor is a Ethiopian convenience store owner, and immigrant. What a stereotype! His English isn't the best, but he speaks six other languages, and he tries damn hard. My other neighbor is an Mexican national. Also a nice guy. He works concrete, or at least he did until the credit crunch brought construction to a dead stop. They both have similar mastery of our language. This isn't the sort of person I have a problem with-I like them both.
That said, one came to the US legally as a refugee, demonstrated a level of social proficiency and successfully immigrated. The other did not, but he chose to learn English and be an upstanding member of the community. Many of his peers do not so choose. I'm not as fond of them. It's as simple as that.
Yeah, I understand that there are quite a lot of countries with territorial languages, like the Basque you mentioned, Welsh, Scot, Gaelic, the various Uralic languages spoken along the tundra, to name a few, etc. etc.
But these languages are regional, and usually don't apply at at federal or national level, and all of them have one (maybe two) language which applies nationally. There are relatively few countries with a multiple 'official' languages, even if the government chooses to do business in the extraneous languages.
However, I can't think of a country remotely comparable to the size of the US (population or geographically) that is even officially bilingual. It's a significant logistical challenge. China, India? I don't know.
Of course, you're right. There's no need for an anchor baby. They're already effectively homesteaded here, kids or not. They got a sweet 125% loan-to-value mortgage when the banks were handing out money like so much Halloween candy. They bought up fancy trucks and Cadillacs, and drive them with their illegitimate credentials, often without insurance. And while there's a non-zero chance that law enforcement will nab the parents and send them back, the probability is incredibly small--unless they do something to draw attention to themselves.
The reason I call them anchor babies is this: over the last few decades, Immigration has demonstrated a certain reluctance to send back the illegal parents of a US citizen. Whether or not you agree with that idea, it's documented, even if it's less common today. Also, consider this: the baby (and the parents, by proxy) may be eligible for welfare and a myriad of other social services.
The one case that I can see non-English voting being valid: anchor-babies, born to illegal parents, but whom are citizens of the US because of very generous law--and who happen to have remained so culturally isolated that they don't know English. In some localities, it's entirely possible for one to live his life without learning an ounce of English.
Unlike prior immigrants, some (many?) have no desire to assimilate. Even our public schools bend over backwards to facilitate this bilingual culture, due in part to federal and state law, the most recent being the No Child Left Behind Act, which provides up to three consecutive years of bilingual education--and like prior efforts it tends to fail. We make it far too easy.
Surely this subset of people is so much of a minority, that it doesn't justify the costs. We didn't do it for the Germans, the Dutch, the Italians, Chinese, Poles or anyone else, who came here legally. Yet every damn government publication is produced in English and Spanish. What other country on this Earth would let that happen? Switzerland? They're small enough to get away with it.
Maybe the Doc originally planned his first mission as a short trip into the future (not 30 years into the past)--and so wouldn't require a return trip--and that dumb bastard McFly screwed it up like he does everything else?
3rd/4th/5th gen Hiluxes (called Toyota Pickup in some markets) and the Nissan Patrol utility pickups they don't seem to sell in the US are also excellent, affordable offroad vehicles.
I hear that. I had a heck of an experience in the middle of BFE South America, in a Toyota 4/AWD van... Which, remarkably had better ground clearance in stock configuration than the Jeep we're talking about. That little bugger did a lot better than I could have expected. It went up steep, rain-forest mud caked hills till it high centered at the top--and even then it still kept going without a second thought.
It's a copy of the Jeep Wrangler Mountain edition. A modern Chrysler SUV in the style of a Jeep. It's hardly built for "rock crawling". At best, it's moderately capable of general off-roading, and going over slightly bumpy things. i.e. running down gentle off-highway trails--presumably to get to campgrounds, other outdoorsy sporting activities etc. More precisely, however, it's built to give other people the impression you might like to do these sort of fun things, when in reality most Jeep owners are hardly that interesting.
Because Mozilla and the other small time browsers don't have enough money to be useful to their needs; if they decided it would be fun to go after Microsoft in court--they would their bones into a fine powder to make lawyer-bread or something. I'd be surprised if Google 'licensed' this *cough* technology (if the claim is indeed legit), for any other reason than to shrug them off. Ponying up $80 grand is undeniably the cheaper and easier route for a big corporation.
On the other hand, Abercrombie and Fitch, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dell, Gamestop, E*Trade, Neiman Marcus, etc. have the unique combination of monies to extort, and as an added feature, they're simply not companies that deal with tech as part of their core business model.
Except that even proponents of string theories admit that there's no evidence for it currently, and that it will be some time before we can even create the technology to indirectly test for these theories.
And so it was with many of the important advances in chemical theory in the 18th century onward, and with nuclear physics in the late 19th - early 20th century. Some of the ideas were later proven patently wrong, some as close but no cigar, and others contribute to the views we now hold as correct. Heck, look at Gravity Probe B--it was almost a hundred years after the conception of the ideas, that it was at all realistic to even attempt to measure the real world effect against the predictions.
It's a good thing to have these sort of theories, even if there's no way to test them right now.
Why waste bullets? You ever seen what a high velocity chunk of lead does to a watermelon? Bingo. We can give the lesser-sentenced criminals a good show. Still equally painless--but you have to admit, a hell of a lot more entertaining... Though it does complicate the harvesting of some organs. I guess we can take their corneas, etc. whilst they're still alive.
Bullets are pretty cheap and we have billions of 'em--and we even have plenty of general-purpose bullet delivery devices. So, no need to invest in some fancy and all too hygienic cattle-killer.
Also, what it with you Germans and your megalomania? It wasn't bad enough that you tried to conquer Europe not once but twice, you now have to conquer the internets as well? Pish.
Well I was merely making jest, but since you asked, that's just the beginning of my problems with the German language--and this is not merely a failing limited to Deutsch, but in fact to most Germanic languages...thankfully, despite the relation, modern English mostly escapes this terrible behavior, compound words usually being limited to a combination of two separate words.
Besides the fact that one can apparently stream together an arbitrary number adjectives and nouns (the order of which often seems to be immaterial), German has the grammatical gender of Latin based languages, but without the normally sensible, almost always predictable rules for applying gender; however, unlike most modernized Latin based languages, German retains three genders, again complicating issues.
In modern German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. you have the rational idea of gender agreement. Nouns have a gender class, and through the sound principal of inflection any other words referring to that noun inherit its gender. The Latin based languages are strongly fusional, and most nouns have are marked strongly as to which sex it is. i.e. Abuela vs Abuelo. Pretty tidy. English, being a much less gendered language only deals with gender infliction on pronouns, or some special case items like ships, countries etc. and gender agreement is usually no big deal. In any case, it's pretty easy because the genitive is linked to the actual sex of the pronoun in question.
German on the other hand? Yeah, you need the gender agreement, but there's no rhyme or reason to the gender of any given noun, and there are NO clues built into the language itself. You must memorize the gender case of each. and. every. word. For example: Schulerin (schoolgirl) is feminine, Weib (wife) is neuter. This is purely senseless and is a mark of poor language design. After only a month of studying Spanish I was confident enough to tackle El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha with only a few lexicon problems, easily corrected by looking the word up. I'm still not sure I could get through a chapter of my VW's user manual writ in its original language.
Then, you have writers who have the unfortunate habit of including far too much information into a single sentence. Similar to poor English writers who have a tendency to include entire descriptive paragraphs into (parentheses), except those helpful punctuation, like the hyphen, are also omitted.
I can't think of a direct parallel of the next phenomenon though: Once you wade through a virtual sea of adjective on adjective on noun grabassery, you finally get to the heart of the whole structure, the verb. It's invariably at the end of the sentence, on yonder page. As far as I can discern, it must be a mechanism to keep the reader in suspense... A sort of linguistic cliffhanger if you will. Of course, these last peeves of mine are not an issue in spoken German, where it would simply be frivolous use of language. All of this is indicative of a language designed to be spoken, and not written--which makes sense, because so precious few were literate whilst it was being created.
Speaking of bloody sauerkraut, I think there was some sort of hyphen-depression when the inventors of the German language decided it would be fun to glue adjectives and nouns together. i.e. when I see something like: unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen, I have an nigh-irresistible urge to shout Gesundheit!
I'm still not sure why the nazis went to all of the trouble of building cipher-machines. The language looks sufficiently jumbled from the start.
Very much more helium goes to waste every second from natural gas production, because it's simply uneconomical to collect it all. There's only five or so gas processing plants in the US capable of distilling it out of natural gas--and I understand that even those few plants don't run at full production capacity because the market price of the stuff is so low.
Well, on one count, you're wrong. Except for some state laws which ban machine guns, there's no federal law which blatantly outlaws them.
Sure enough, the items which are on the market are more tightly controlled than your standard firearm, and they're taxed at a rate of $200 per transfer--and even though the intent of the original law (1934 NFA) was tantamount to prohibition (by taxing it out of the means of the average person of the time), that isn't the case today--$200 isn't a major obstacle in itself, never mind the fact the item of your choosing often exceeds $5000 for the very most basic and least desirable firearm; the most popular go for 20-30K+ and on up.
Even then, these items were only taxed instead of being banned, because the legislature rightly thought such a law would be struck down by the supreme court. The one paragraph of law (1986 FOPA) which makes obtaining machine guns (financially) difficult, being a 11th hour amendment by a slimy NJ representative, to an otherwise just law, might well be struck down itself should it ever be brought before the supreme court.
As to the ones which can't own any guns at all: I don't have much pity for them, they should have kept their noses clean. But interestingly enough, the creators of the 1792 Militia Act thought so strongly of the right to arms, that they protected them from collection for judgments made in civil courts, and they were even untouchable by the tax man himself: "and every citizen so enrolled, and providing himself with the arms, ammunition and accoutrements, required as aforesaid, shall hold the same exempted from all suits, distresses, executions or sales, for debt or for the payment of taxes"
The fact is, in a direct way, current law does in fact require males of the 17-45 age bracket to own at least a basic weapon applicable to modern military service. In other words: Evil. Scary. Black rifles. Preferably Automatic.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I've always thought that a people capable of time travel would also develop what I see as final evolution of the cell phone: C.A.C.T.U.S. (Colonic Audio Conduction Technology, Ultimately Sadomasochistic), an inter-chronologic audio communication device, in convenient suppository form. It vibrates your colon such a manner that sound waves travel up your spine, resonating the inner ear. It is, unfortunately, quite uncomfortable to wear.
We all know from the Terminator movies that inorganic materials aren't compatible with the time-matrix anomaly--unless they're wrapped in flesh. So, there you go. Billions of future humans are destined to ram CACTUSs up their asses.
That's a great way to make the rifle fire out of battery, and blow your face off.
To be fair, it's more like replacing the already tiny engine in a Ford Fiesta with a much smaller 50cc scooter engine. Externally, it looks a lot like a Ford Fiesta, but it's arguably not.
Oh, I couldn't pass up a car analogy.
much like the Browning BAR, Remington 74x
You might want to specify the modern Browning semi-auto hunting rifle, versus the M1918, also known as Browning Automatic Rifle--or as it was commonly called by infantrymen: BAR. 'Cause it shared the same feature which gives the A in AK-47 :D
So, being critical makes somebody racist. I think that says something more about you than it says about me.
That sounds an awful lot like something a giant racist would say.
Thanks the the ad hominem, it really shows the strength of your argument. I'd feel hurt, it it weren't from some random twit on the internet, because I'm about as strongly anti-racist as one can be. But, no... It's really something an empiricist would say. That is, something an observer would say.
In my metropolitan, there's exactly three classes of hispanic drivers:
My neighbor is a Ethiopian convenience store owner, and immigrant. What a stereotype! His English isn't the best, but he speaks six other languages, and he tries damn hard. My other neighbor is an Mexican national. Also a nice guy. He works concrete, or at least he did until the credit crunch brought construction to a dead stop. They both have similar mastery of our language. This isn't the sort of person I have a problem with-I like them both.
That said, one came to the US legally as a refugee, demonstrated a level of social proficiency and successfully immigrated. The other did not, but he chose to learn English and be an upstanding member of the community. Many of his peers do not so choose. I'm not as fond of them. It's as simple as that.
Yeah, I understand that there are quite a lot of countries with territorial languages, like the Basque you mentioned, Welsh, Scot, Gaelic, the various Uralic languages spoken along the tundra, to name a few, etc. etc.
But these languages are regional, and usually don't apply at at federal or national level, and all of them have one (maybe two) language which applies nationally. There are relatively few countries with a multiple 'official' languages, even if the government chooses to do business in the extraneous languages.
However, I can't think of a country remotely comparable to the size of the US (population or geographically) that is even officially bilingual. It's a significant logistical challenge. China, India? I don't know.
Of course, you're right. There's no need for an anchor baby. They're already effectively homesteaded here, kids or not. They got a sweet 125% loan-to-value mortgage when the banks were handing out money like so much Halloween candy. They bought up fancy trucks and Cadillacs, and drive them with their illegitimate credentials, often without insurance. And while there's a non-zero chance that law enforcement will nab the parents and send them back, the probability is incredibly small--unless they do something to draw attention to themselves.
The reason I call them anchor babies is this: over the last few decades, Immigration has demonstrated a certain reluctance to send back the illegal parents of a US citizen. Whether or not you agree with that idea, it's documented, even if it's less common today. Also, consider this: the baby (and the parents, by proxy) may be eligible for welfare and a myriad of other social services.
Something must change.
The one case that I can see non-English voting being valid: anchor-babies, born to illegal parents, but whom are citizens of the US because of very generous law--and who happen to have remained so culturally isolated that they don't know English. In some localities, it's entirely possible for one to live his life without learning an ounce of English.
Unlike prior immigrants, some (many?) have no desire to assimilate. Even our public schools bend over backwards to facilitate this bilingual culture, due in part to federal and state law, the most recent being the No Child Left Behind Act, which provides up to three consecutive years of bilingual education--and like prior efforts it tends to fail. We make it far too easy.
Surely this subset of people is so much of a minority, that it doesn't justify the costs. We didn't do it for the Germans, the Dutch, the Italians, Chinese, Poles or anyone else, who came here legally. Yet every damn government publication is produced in English and Spanish. What other country on this Earth would let that happen? Switzerland? They're small enough to get away with it.
Clearly a result of concussion.
Maybe the Doc originally planned his first mission as a short trip into the future (not 30 years into the past)--and so wouldn't require a return trip--and that dumb bastard McFly screwed it up like he does everything else?
3rd/4th/5th gen Hiluxes (called Toyota Pickup in some markets) and the Nissan Patrol utility pickups they don't seem to sell in the US are also excellent, affordable offroad vehicles.
I hear that. I had a heck of an experience in the middle of BFE South America, in a Toyota 4/AWD van... Which, remarkably had better ground clearance in stock configuration than the Jeep we're talking about. That little bugger did a lot better than I could have expected. It went up steep, rain-forest mud caked hills till it high centered at the top--and even then it still kept going without a second thought.
It's a copy of the Jeep Wrangler Mountain edition. A modern Chrysler SUV in the style of a Jeep. It's hardly built for "rock crawling". At best, it's moderately capable of general off-roading, and going over slightly bumpy things. i.e. running down gentle off-highway trails--presumably to get to campgrounds, other outdoorsy sporting activities etc. More precisely, however, it's built to give other people the impression you might like to do these sort of fun things, when in reality most Jeep owners are hardly that interesting.
Because Mozilla and the other small time browsers don't have enough money to be useful to their needs; if they decided it would be fun to go after Microsoft in court--they would their bones into a fine powder to make lawyer-bread or something. I'd be surprised if Google 'licensed' this *cough* technology (if the claim is indeed legit), for any other reason than to shrug them off. Ponying up $80 grand is undeniably the cheaper and easier route for a big corporation.
On the other hand, Abercrombie and Fitch, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dell, Gamestop, E*Trade, Neiman Marcus, etc. have the unique combination of monies to extort, and as an added feature, they're simply not companies that deal with tech as part of their core business model.
Except that even proponents of string theories admit that there's no evidence for it currently, and that it will be some time before we can even create the technology to indirectly test for these theories.
And so it was with many of the important advances in chemical theory in the 18th century onward, and with nuclear physics in the late 19th - early 20th century. Some of the ideas were later proven patently wrong, some as close but no cigar, and others contribute to the views we now hold as correct. Heck, look at Gravity Probe B--it was almost a hundred years after the conception of the ideas, that it was at all realistic to even attempt to measure the real world effect against the predictions.
It's a good thing to have these sort of theories, even if there's no way to test them right now.
You're sure it's not just suicidal? Sounds like time for an intervention.
Ha ha. Someone's an anchor baby.
So, you're saying it's actually a kind of invasion?
Why waste bullets? You ever seen what a high velocity chunk of lead does to a watermelon? Bingo. We can give the lesser-sentenced criminals a good show. Still equally painless--but you have to admit, a hell of a lot more entertaining... Though it does complicate the harvesting of some organs. I guess we can take their corneas, etc. whilst they're still alive.
Bullets are pretty cheap and we have billions of 'em--and we even have plenty of general-purpose bullet delivery devices. So, no need to invest in some fancy and all too hygienic cattle-killer.
and stop trolling my forum - twat
Also, what it with you Germans and your megalomania? It wasn't bad enough that you tried to conquer Europe not once but twice, you now have to conquer the internets as well? Pish.
Well I was merely making jest, but since you asked, that's just the beginning of my problems with the German language--and this is not merely a failing limited to Deutsch, but in fact to most Germanic languages...thankfully, despite the relation, modern English mostly escapes this terrible behavior, compound words usually being limited to a combination of two separate words.
Besides the fact that one can apparently stream together an arbitrary number adjectives and nouns (the order of which often seems to be immaterial), German has the grammatical gender of Latin based languages, but without the normally sensible, almost always predictable rules for applying gender; however, unlike most modernized Latin based languages, German retains three genders, again complicating issues.
In modern German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. you have the rational idea of gender agreement. Nouns have a gender class, and through the sound principal of inflection any other words referring to that noun inherit its gender. The Latin based languages are strongly fusional, and most nouns have are marked strongly as to which sex it is. i.e. Abuela vs Abuelo. Pretty tidy. English, being a much less gendered language only deals with gender infliction on pronouns, or some special case items like ships, countries etc. and gender agreement is usually no big deal. In any case, it's pretty easy because the genitive is linked to the actual sex of the pronoun in question.
German on the other hand? Yeah, you need the gender agreement, but there's no rhyme or reason to the gender of any given noun, and there are NO clues built into the language itself. You must memorize the gender case of each. and. every. word. For example: Schulerin (schoolgirl) is feminine, Weib (wife) is neuter. This is purely senseless and is a mark of poor language design. After only a month of studying Spanish I was confident enough to tackle El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha with only a few lexicon problems, easily corrected by looking the word up. I'm still not sure I could get through a chapter of my VW's user manual writ in its original language.
Then, you have writers who have the unfortunate habit of including far too much information into a single sentence. Similar to poor English writers who have a tendency to include entire descriptive paragraphs into (parentheses), except those helpful punctuation, like the hyphen, are also omitted.
I can't think of a direct parallel of the next phenomenon though: Once you wade through a virtual sea of adjective on adjective on noun grabassery, you finally get to the heart of the whole structure, the verb. It's invariably at the end of the sentence, on yonder page. As far as I can discern, it must be a mechanism to keep the reader in suspense... A sort of linguistic cliffhanger if you will. Of course, these last peeves of mine are not an issue in spoken German, where it would simply be frivolous use of language. All of this is indicative of a language designed to be spoken, and not written--which makes sense, because so precious few were literate whilst it was being created.
Speaking of bloody sauerkraut, I think there was some sort of hyphen-depression when the inventors of the German language decided it would be fun to glue adjectives and nouns together. i.e. when I see something like: unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen, I have an nigh-irresistible urge to shout Gesundheit!
I'm still not sure why the nazis went to all of the trouble of building cipher-machines. The language looks sufficiently jumbled from the start.
Very much more helium goes to waste every second from natural gas production, because it's simply uneconomical to collect it all. There's only five or so gas processing plants in the US capable of distilling it out of natural gas--and I understand that even those few plants don't run at full production capacity because the market price of the stuff is so low.
Well, on one count, you're wrong. Except for some state laws which ban machine guns, there's no federal law which blatantly outlaws them.
Sure enough, the items which are on the market are more tightly controlled than your standard firearm, and they're taxed at a rate of $200 per transfer--and even though the intent of the original law (1934 NFA) was tantamount to prohibition (by taxing it out of the means of the average person of the time), that isn't the case today--$200 isn't a major obstacle in itself, never mind the fact the item of your choosing often exceeds $5000 for the very most basic and least desirable firearm; the most popular go for 20-30K+ and on up.
Even then, these items were only taxed instead of being banned, because the legislature rightly thought such a law would be struck down by the supreme court. The one paragraph of law (1986 FOPA) which makes obtaining machine guns (financially) difficult, being a 11th hour amendment by a slimy NJ representative, to an otherwise just law, might well be struck down itself should it ever be brought before the supreme court.
As to the ones which can't own any guns at all: I don't have much pity for them, they should have kept their noses clean. But interestingly enough, the creators of the 1792 Militia Act thought so strongly of the right to arms, that they protected them from collection for judgments made in civil courts, and they were even untouchable by the tax man himself: "and every citizen so enrolled, and providing himself with the arms, ammunition and accoutrements, required as aforesaid, shall hold the same exempted from all suits, distresses, executions or sales, for debt or for the payment of taxes"
Hate to reply to myself... But I had to add this:
The fact is, in a direct way, current law does in fact require males of the 17-45 age bracket to own at least a basic weapon applicable to modern military service. In other words: Evil. Scary. Black rifles. Preferably Automatic.