You need to get your asian references correct for anyone to take you seriously. The GP was speaking of the PRC (People's Republic of China-aka China) not the ROC (Republic of China-aka Taiwan). The Yen is Japanese, and you're insight of how business works is lacking. Proper industry controls indicates the things you mentioned as well as many other factors, all of which will get more expensive, just as the GP indicated. The difference is it will happen faster than it did here in the US because the world wasn't pushing us to make those implementations and it is pushing China.
You're right that everyone should start learning Mandarin, but not because we're all screwed. China is the next dominant superpower and as such will cause a shift in the way business is done in the next 50 years. Just like England did in the 19th century and the US did in the 20th century. That's just how it works...
It's actually irrelevant what tech China uses, when the crates were shipped to Taiwan. China's tech may be just as good as our (the USA) current stuff, but it's very unlikely Taiwan's is, since there are significantly smaller than their mainland cousin and spend far less on military funding. Having a "big step up" in technology through "accidentally" released fuse designs could play a significant role in their status against China in the future.
Whatever you say... The risk is real, but the likelihood is small and therefore not worth considering in the larger scheme of things.
I'm not trying to bolster my position with anything, FUD or otherwise. I was mostly making fun of someone saying that a car could kill you if dropped from the sky. No one was denying that, but to compare the two is ludicrous.
My position, as I've posted elsewhere, I believe, is that these are bad for reasons other than safety. The constant push for more and more surveillance is bad for personal liberties everywhere. The system, especially in tactical forms like this little beast, is rife with potential for abuse and is often used specifically because of that capability. These will do no actual work in crime prevention, but will be used instead for (great word by the way) scaremongering of people specifically to control populations within a particular geographic area.
Of course you're probably right about what the poster really meant. I'm not convinced either way that he/she is actually correct though. Just because we haven't found a definitive connection, doesn't mean there isn't one at all. I think it's ridiculous to go through life worried about what might happen so I tend to think people who freak out about cell phones and other wireless signals are just nuts. The ones who have gotten ill, I believe, are most likely having a placebo effect, or are attributing things to the wrong source, but there's no convincing some people that these things won't kill them.
Microwaves heat water, sugars, and fats, because those materials all absorb the energy of the wave. To say that the heat can't cause an affect is incorrect, though as I (and others as well) said, it would require much more power than any of these devices use to actually cause any molecular damage (ie cooking) so it's not worth worrying about.
I never said anything about cancer, just that "affect us" means many different things and saying that there is no affect is completely false. Saying no "harmful affect" may or may not be completely accurate, but it's still not the same thing.
As far as your "less than lethal" laser weapons, they supposedly cause intense pain, which is really all the woman in the article was complaining about (headaches, nausea and dizziness) so I don't see much difference. Is she a nut job? Quite possibly.
As for people being informed that sunscreen is a good idea, that was my point. People know more about the damaging affects of UV radiation than they did 25 years ago, so people protect themselves better. I never once made a comparison that other radiation types were as harmful or dangerous as UV. I said that I think the GP does see "EM sensitive people complain about the sun" because, as you suggest, everyone complains about the sun. There is also a big difference between people complaining about something they can control (having ubiquitous wifi) and something they can't (the presence of the sun). As for someone specific, why would I bother since you already believe the premise that more people use sunscreen now than they used to use.
Exactly why I said "Is it likely to cause major damage at the power levels generated for wifi or cellphone use? Not likely, but that doesn't mean it won't have any affect."
I wasn't implying that cell phones or wifi are bad, but rather, denying that the frequencies could affect us (as the GP did) was false.
Read for comprehension, AC. What I said was that the work in the same frequency range, so the GP claiming that it would take a frequency 1 million times higher to have any affect on people was false. I never said anything regarding the safety of microwave ovens. The comparison of the two was completely valid, though you have to know a bit more about the difference in power versus frequency to understand the true comparison and differences.
Cars very rarely, if ever, fall out of the sky because their datalink went dead, or they got a command sent to the wrong vehicle by accident. Several different species of UAV have crashed specifically for this reason, some by completely separate command vehicles and others by the same command vehicle doing training and missions simultaneously.
I'm not saying we should fear this because of safety concerns, but there are plenty of other reasons to keep this thing from flying.
I dare say, for that price you got 100 discs burned not printed. Actual printing generally costs on the order of $1000 or more for quantities as low as 100. Burned CDs don't last as long as printed ones, seem to scratch easier (from my anecdotal experience) and generally are considered "lower quality".
So if I'm going 200 because I've just gotten onto the road, and there's no car beside me, I can change lanes, right? How does that affect the car 40 feet behind me (in the lane I'm going to change into) doing 250 mph? Your rules, while excellent, are still lacking somewhat by the realities of road travel.
As I was saying "You're aware that microwave ovens work in the 2.4-3 GHz range right? If that doesn't "affect us" I'm not sure how you define affect. That's far less than "one million times higher in frequency than cellphones and wifi". It's barely twice the frequency, than the lowest cell phone band and not even twice the frequency of the highest cell phone band, and the same as wifi frequency lower band and less than the wifi upper band frequency."
You're aware that microwave ovens work in the 2.4-3 GHz range right? If that doesn't "affect us" I'm not sure how you define affect. That's far less than "one million times higher in frequency than cellphones and wifi". It's barely twice the frequency, than the lowest cell phone band and not even twice the frequency of the highest cell phone band, and the same as . Is it likely to cause major damage at the power levels generated for wifi or cellphone use? Not likely, but that doesn't mean it won't have any affect.
I dare say you do see "EM-sensitive people complain about the sun" every time you go to the beach, pool, or just out doing yard work. People all over the world are wearing more sunscreen now than ever before.
I'm sure you did it deliberately but, just in case you didn't, I'll be a dick and point out that nuclear is the correct spelling even if a lot of people mispronounce the word.
Of course it matters! No matter what the supply source is, less consumption means less production requirement, which means less pollution (no matter nuclear or coal) in the final numbers. Do we need a better standard for measurement? Sure, but that doesn't mean that this isn't a valid improvement.
I can't think of a particular anecdote that gave me the insight to see the situation from the perspective I came at it with, more of a whole life of experience. I'm in my mid 30s and working on my third career, so I've seen a lot of different things. I had the benefit, when working on my engineering degree, to be working full time and have a family so my perspective in school was never about grades but about learning what I needed at my job and balancing school with my family life. As a result I had barely over a 2.0 (sometimes lower) GPA but I still make more money and enjoy my job more than most of my colleagues from school who had 3.8-4.0 GPAs.
More important than your GPA is work experience you can get during breaks. Co-ops and internships are worth far more than your GPA in getting you a job. That said, play the game a little and bring up your GPA because the GPA won't get you jobs but it will get you interviews. It's not selling out if you keep your sense of self and your doing it so you can open doors and opportunities for your future. The GPA is more important for grad school, so if you're serious about going on (immediately) to grad school, bring it up. If you think you'd rather work for a bit then go back to grad school (my general recommendation for most people--what you want for life and a career often changes drastically from your late teens to your mid 20s) then it's still helpful to bring it up but less important.
There's no such thing as "too smart" for a particular GPA, so I think you need to have a frank discussion with your advisor about why your grades are where they are and how you can fix that. I suspect he can recommend some classes you will feel like you've gained something from that will also allow you to bring the GPA up a bit. My school always allowed "personal projects" for credit that were coordinated with a professor so you got to work on some aspect of engineering that interests you and helps a professor while not having a standard workload. See if there are any courses like that at your school.
My last bit of advice is to not get sucked into the habit of comparing your situation to that of people around you. It's a definite path toward self destruction, financially and emotionally. Live your own life to the best you can, set goals for yourself, based on personal reward not on envy or comparison to what others do/have, and you'll find you're happier than most of the people around you. You'll also have a whole lot more confidence that you can do whatever it is you want to do. In my case, it's also brought me an awful lot of good friends that I wouldn't have met otherwise (due to less obvious similar interests) and more women than I ever had any right to expect in my life so there's that side effect too.
I'm starting to get really sick of constantly having three or four projects on my plate at any given moment Welcome to the reality of the working world. It's very rare that anyone gets one project at a time to work on, and has the time they actually need to finish it properly. Especially for software types.
I'd say the assignment you got to pick your language for taught you a valuable lesson. There are time constraints to learning something new. Sometimes it's the right thing to do, and other times it's better to go with tools you already have to get the job done. You still learned something, you just didn't realize exactly what you learned.
Education, and life in general, is all about perspective. Sometimes it just takes viewing something from a different angle to realize its potential.
My issue is "more difficult for whom"? You can't define a class by "difficulty" of the class except to rank it as a higher level course. I happen to be an engineer, and I also have a language degree (foriegn language) as well as being the author of several novels (unpublished novels at this point) and I never found any of my engineering courses to be any more difficult than any of my language courses. They required the same amount of effort from me, which is to say, if I wanted to do well I put effort into the class. If I didn't want to do well, I didn't put effort into the class and got by with C level work or occasionally repeated a course.
Some of my engineering friends can't speak another language to save their lives, despite having studied them, and others can't write a coherent sentence in English. They find engineering to be "easy" by comparison. Some of my more "artsy" friends could easily write thousands of pages of prose, fiction, non-fiction, philosophical logic arguments and more. They find those subjects to be easy but still did well in their science and math curriculum (not watered down courses but "pre-engineering" type courses.) Others did very poorly on the more "hard" science and math courses.
Difficulty is a matter of perspective, so weighting a class by 200% more difficult is a really ridiculous way to try and figure GPAs, which in the end don't matter a damn bit (unless your scholarship rides on it or something). That's the reason colleges are split into separate schools. The real world (and even academia) recognizes that a Math degree, an Electrical Engineering degree, and a Physiology (gym) degree are not the same thing. It's not a competition.
I never said I couldn't see how they could be above average intelligence, I said expecting them all to be above average is futile. And there's a reason Gaussian distributions are called "normal" distributions. They do fit "real life populations".
You're right, learning what you "need" to learn isn't about intelligence. However, what each engineer is going to "need" in his or her career is going to vary drastically. Understanding the concepts is obviously important, but most engineering tests don't actually test that, they test a subset of concepts as applied to a very specific problem. Those two are not the same thing at all, especially when many students do poorly due to simple math mistakes that are double-checked in real life by other people, and using other tools.
That's the biggest problem with most engineering textbooks; a lack of practical application for people to understand the theoretical concepts through. Doing transforms never made any sense to me until my professor scoped a signal and I saw it and could relate it to visuals that I understood.
No respectable engineering professor grades on a curve.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've read on slashdot in a long time. There are good engineering professors at every respectable university grading on a curve. Proving people can fail accomplishes nothing, while teaching them something accomplishes the task; training them to double check their work, learn from their mistakes, and pay attention to what they're doing.
No one remembers everything, and expecting the majority of the population (hate to say it but not all engineering students can be above average intelligence) to be above average is futile.
You were being a dick. You deserved to be punched. If you honestly think that engineering students can write as well, or for that matter communicate in any medium, as well as students within those disciplines, you are in a very small school or the engineers you know are exceptions to the rule. Most engineers (and engineering students) write horribly and have nearly no creative ability that doesn't involve technology. Hell, that can be said about most of society in general, not just engineering students.
Just because you're "smart" for being an engineer doesn't make you smarter than anyone else and certainly not "better" than anyone else. And I'll mention now that I know plenty of stupid engineers who got decent grades but could figure their way out of a paper bag with one end open, because they a)cheated, b)took all the "easy" courses and/or c)were good at short term memorization.
Engineering courses aren't that difficult if you put effort into them. Sure, they may take a bit more effort for some people than an english course, or a film history course, but those courses are plenty difficult for lots of good engineering students.
School isn't about "brain power", it's about knowing what to study, when to study it and how to move to the next task. Engineers aren't smarter than everyone else, they just think they are.
Clearly the author also shouldn't be a writer since waltz is spelled with a t and "supportive friends to or more time to study" is also poorly written for various reasons.
It is apparent that our education system has failed in more ways than one.
You're talking about the difference of understanding at particular level of fluency for everyday conversation, while I was responding to the fact that a particular person could "learn" a language in a weekend well enough to "decode" it. There's a big difference between those two levels of understanding. Especially when "decoding" doesn't happen in real time and references can be used to fill in the missing pieces of understanding.
You are, of course, right about your assertion that you can't truly "learn" (hence my quotes in my original post) a language in 2 hours.
I've studied 5 languages, counting my native English, and not counting the languages I've just dabbled in, and I'll admittedly say that I'll probably never be what I consider truly fluent in any of them except English. I can get by in several of them, but I'll never be fluent.
Slashdot Mirror
Some would call it humor. Obviously you wouldn't.
You need to get your asian references correct for anyone to take you seriously. The GP was speaking of the PRC (People's Republic of China-aka China) not the ROC (Republic of China-aka Taiwan). The Yen is Japanese, and you're insight of how business works is lacking. Proper industry controls indicates the things you mentioned as well as many other factors, all of which will get more expensive, just as the GP indicated. The difference is it will happen faster than it did here in the US because the world wasn't pushing us to make those implementations and it is pushing China.
You're right that everyone should start learning Mandarin, but not because we're all screwed. China is the next dominant superpower and as such will cause a shift in the way business is done in the next 50 years. Just like England did in the 19th century and the US did in the 20th century. That's just how it works...
It's actually irrelevant what tech China uses, when the crates were shipped to Taiwan. China's tech may be just as good as our (the USA) current stuff, but it's very unlikely Taiwan's is, since there are significantly smaller than their mainland cousin and spend far less on military funding. Having a "big step up" in technology through "accidentally" released fuse designs could play a significant role in their status against China in the future.
Whatever you say... The risk is real, but the likelihood is small and therefore not worth considering in the larger scheme of things.
I'm not trying to bolster my position with anything, FUD or otherwise. I was mostly making fun of someone saying that a car could kill you if dropped from the sky. No one was denying that, but to compare the two is ludicrous.
My position, as I've posted elsewhere, I believe, is that these are bad for reasons other than safety. The constant push for more and more surveillance is bad for personal liberties everywhere. The system, especially in tactical forms like this little beast, is rife with potential for abuse and is often used specifically because of that capability. These will do no actual work in crime prevention, but will be used instead for (great word by the way) scaremongering of people specifically to control populations within a particular geographic area.
Of course you're probably right about what the poster really meant. I'm not convinced either way that he/she is actually correct though. Just because we haven't found a definitive connection, doesn't mean there isn't one at all. I think it's ridiculous to go through life worried about what might happen so I tend to think people who freak out about cell phones and other wireless signals are just nuts. The ones who have gotten ill, I believe, are most likely having a placebo effect, or are attributing things to the wrong source, but there's no convincing some people that these things won't kill them.
Microwaves heat water, sugars, and fats, because those materials all absorb the energy of the wave. To say that the heat can't cause an affect is incorrect, though as I (and others as well) said, it would require much more power than any of these devices use to actually cause any molecular damage (ie cooking) so it's not worth worrying about.
I never said anything about cancer, just that "affect us" means many different things and saying that there is no affect is completely false. Saying no "harmful affect" may or may not be completely accurate, but it's still not the same thing.
As far as your "less than lethal" laser weapons, they supposedly cause intense pain, which is really all the woman in the article was complaining about (headaches, nausea and dizziness) so I don't see much difference. Is she a nut job? Quite possibly.
As for people being informed that sunscreen is a good idea, that was my point. People know more about the damaging affects of UV radiation than they did 25 years ago, so people protect themselves better. I never once made a comparison that other radiation types were as harmful or dangerous as UV. I said that I think the GP does see "EM sensitive people complain about the sun" because, as you suggest, everyone complains about the sun. There is also a big difference between people complaining about something they can control (having ubiquitous wifi) and something they can't (the presence of the sun). As for someone specific, why would I bother since you already believe the premise that more people use sunscreen now than they used to use.
Exactly why I said "Is it likely to cause major damage at the power levels generated for wifi or cellphone use? Not likely, but that doesn't mean it won't have any affect."
I wasn't implying that cell phones or wifi are bad, but rather, denying that the frequencies could affect us (as the GP did) was false.
Read for comprehension, AC. What I said was that the work in the same frequency range, so the GP claiming that it would take a frequency 1 million times higher to have any affect on people was false. I never said anything regarding the safety of microwave ovens. The comparison of the two was completely valid, though you have to know a bit more about the difference in power versus frequency to understand the true comparison and differences.
Cars very rarely, if ever, fall out of the sky because their datalink went dead, or they got a command sent to the wrong vehicle by accident. Several different species of UAV have crashed specifically for this reason, some by completely separate command vehicles and others by the same command vehicle doing training and missions simultaneously.
I'm not saying we should fear this because of safety concerns, but there are plenty of other reasons to keep this thing from flying.
I dare say, for that price you got 100 discs burned not printed. Actual printing generally costs on the order of $1000 or more for quantities as low as 100. Burned CDs don't last as long as printed ones, seem to scratch easier (from my anecdotal experience) and generally are considered "lower quality".
So if I'm going 200 because I've just gotten onto the road, and there's no car beside me, I can change lanes, right? How does that affect the car 40 feet behind me (in the lane I'm going to change into) doing 250 mph? Your rules, while excellent, are still lacking somewhat by the realities of road travel.
Damnit, I meant to click preview!
As I was saying "You're aware that microwave ovens work in the 2.4-3 GHz range right? If that doesn't "affect us" I'm not sure how you define affect. That's far less than "one million times higher in frequency than cellphones and wifi". It's barely twice the frequency, than the lowest cell phone band and not even twice the frequency of the highest cell phone band, and the same as wifi frequency lower band and less than the wifi upper band frequency."
You're aware that microwave ovens work in the 2.4-3 GHz range right? If that doesn't "affect us" I'm not sure how you define affect. That's far less than "one million times higher in frequency than cellphones and wifi". It's barely twice the frequency, than the lowest cell phone band and not even twice the frequency of the highest cell phone band, and the same as . Is it likely to cause major damage at the power levels generated for wifi or cellphone use? Not likely, but that doesn't mean it won't have any affect.
I dare say you do see "EM-sensitive people complain about the sun" every time you go to the beach, pool, or just out doing yard work. People all over the world are wearing more sunscreen now than ever before.
I'm sure you did it deliberately but, just in case you didn't, I'll be a dick and point out that nuclear is the correct spelling even if a lot of people mispronounce the word.
Of course it matters! No matter what the supply source is, less consumption means less production requirement, which means less pollution (no matter nuclear or coal) in the final numbers. Do we need a better standard for measurement? Sure, but that doesn't mean that this isn't a valid improvement.
I can't think of a particular anecdote that gave me the insight to see the situation from the perspective I came at it with, more of a whole life of experience. I'm in my mid 30s and working on my third career, so I've seen a lot of different things. I had the benefit, when working on my engineering degree, to be working full time and have a family so my perspective in school was never about grades but about learning what I needed at my job and balancing school with my family life. As a result I had barely over a 2.0 (sometimes lower) GPA but I still make more money and enjoy my job more than most of my colleagues from school who had 3.8-4.0 GPAs.
More important than your GPA is work experience you can get during breaks. Co-ops and internships are worth far more than your GPA in getting you a job. That said, play the game a little and bring up your GPA because the GPA won't get you jobs but it will get you interviews. It's not selling out if you keep your sense of self and your doing it so you can open doors and opportunities for your future. The GPA is more important for grad school, so if you're serious about going on (immediately) to grad school, bring it up. If you think you'd rather work for a bit then go back to grad school (my general recommendation for most people--what you want for life and a career often changes drastically from your late teens to your mid 20s) then it's still helpful to bring it up but less important.
There's no such thing as "too smart" for a particular GPA, so I think you need to have a frank discussion with your advisor about why your grades are where they are and how you can fix that. I suspect he can recommend some classes you will feel like you've gained something from that will also allow you to bring the GPA up a bit. My school always allowed "personal projects" for credit that were coordinated with a professor so you got to work on some aspect of engineering that interests you and helps a professor while not having a standard workload. See if there are any courses like that at your school.
My last bit of advice is to not get sucked into the habit of comparing your situation to that of people around you. It's a definite path toward self destruction, financially and emotionally. Live your own life to the best you can, set goals for yourself, based on personal reward not on envy or comparison to what others do/have, and you'll find you're happier than most of the people around you. You'll also have a whole lot more confidence that you can do whatever it is you want to do. In my case, it's also brought me an awful lot of good friends that I wouldn't have met otherwise (due to less obvious similar interests) and more women than I ever had any right to expect in my life so there's that side effect too.
I'm starting to get really sick of constantly having three or four projects on my plate at any given moment
Welcome to the reality of the working world. It's very rare that anyone gets one project at a time to work on, and has the time they actually need to finish it properly. Especially for software types.
I'd say the assignment you got to pick your language for taught you a valuable lesson. There are time constraints to learning something new. Sometimes it's the right thing to do, and other times it's better to go with tools you already have to get the job done. You still learned something, you just didn't realize exactly what you learned.
Education, and life in general, is all about perspective. Sometimes it just takes viewing something from a different angle to realize its potential.
My issue is "more difficult for whom"? You can't define a class by "difficulty" of the class except to rank it as a higher level course. I happen to be an engineer, and I also have a language degree (foriegn language) as well as being the author of several novels (unpublished novels at this point) and I never found any of my engineering courses to be any more difficult than any of my language courses. They required the same amount of effort from me, which is to say, if I wanted to do well I put effort into the class. If I didn't want to do well, I didn't put effort into the class and got by with C level work or occasionally repeated a course.
Some of my engineering friends can't speak another language to save their lives, despite having studied them, and others can't write a coherent sentence in English. They find engineering to be "easy" by comparison. Some of my more "artsy" friends could easily write thousands of pages of prose, fiction, non-fiction, philosophical logic arguments and more. They find those subjects to be easy but still did well in their science and math curriculum (not watered down courses but "pre-engineering" type courses.) Others did very poorly on the more "hard" science and math courses.
Difficulty is a matter of perspective, so weighting a class by 200% more difficult is a really ridiculous way to try and figure GPAs, which in the end don't matter a damn bit (unless your scholarship rides on it or something). That's the reason colleges are split into separate schools. The real world (and even academia) recognizes that a Math degree, an Electrical Engineering degree, and a Physiology (gym) degree are not the same thing. It's not a competition.
I never said I couldn't see how they could be above average intelligence, I said expecting them all to be above average is futile. And there's a reason Gaussian distributions are called "normal" distributions. They do fit "real life populations".
You're right, learning what you "need" to learn isn't about intelligence. However, what each engineer is going to "need" in his or her career is going to vary drastically. Understanding the concepts is obviously important, but most engineering tests don't actually test that, they test a subset of concepts as applied to a very specific problem. Those two are not the same thing at all, especially when many students do poorly due to simple math mistakes that are double-checked in real life by other people, and using other tools.
And you'll find people not going into engineering schools. 130 is far above "average" intelligence, by the way.
That's the biggest problem with most engineering textbooks; a lack of practical application for people to understand the theoretical concepts through. Doing transforms never made any sense to me until my professor scoped a signal and I saw it and could relate it to visuals that I understood.
No respectable engineering professor grades on a curve.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've read on slashdot in a long time. There are good engineering professors at every respectable university grading on a curve. Proving people can fail accomplishes nothing, while teaching them something accomplishes the task; training them to double check their work, learn from their mistakes, and pay attention to what they're doing.
No one remembers everything, and expecting the majority of the population (hate to say it but not all engineering students can be above average intelligence) to be above average is futile.
You were being a dick. You deserved to be punched. If you honestly think that engineering students can write as well, or for that matter communicate in any medium, as well as students within those disciplines, you are in a very small school or the engineers you know are exceptions to the rule. Most engineers (and engineering students) write horribly and have nearly no creative ability that doesn't involve technology. Hell, that can be said about most of society in general, not just engineering students.
Just because you're "smart" for being an engineer doesn't make you smarter than anyone else and certainly not "better" than anyone else. And I'll mention now that I know plenty of stupid engineers who got decent grades but could figure their way out of a paper bag with one end open, because they a)cheated, b)took all the "easy" courses and/or c)were good at short term memorization.
Engineering courses aren't that difficult if you put effort into them. Sure, they may take a bit more effort for some people than an english course, or a film history course, but those courses are plenty difficult for lots of good engineering students.
School isn't about "brain power", it's about knowing what to study, when to study it and how to move to the next task. Engineers aren't smarter than everyone else, they just think they are.
Clearly the author also shouldn't be a writer since waltz is spelled with a t and "supportive friends to or more time to study" is also poorly written for various reasons.
It is apparent that our education system has failed in more ways than one.
You're talking about the difference of understanding at particular level of fluency for everyday conversation, while I was responding to the fact that a particular person could "learn" a language in a weekend well enough to "decode" it. There's a big difference between those two levels of understanding. Especially when "decoding" doesn't happen in real time and references can be used to fill in the missing pieces of understanding.
You are, of course, right about your assertion that you can't truly "learn" (hence my quotes in my original post) a language in 2 hours.
I've studied 5 languages, counting my native English, and not counting the languages I've just dabbled in, and I'll admittedly say that I'll probably never be what I consider truly fluent in any of them except English. I can get by in several of them, but I'll never be fluent.
That would be ridiculously heavy, and very unwieldy.