"Any armchair anthropologists want to toss up ideas as to whether or not spoken language (a necessary precursor to the recent anomoly known as civilization) was alive & kicking 70,000 years ago?"
70,000 years ago? What about whether or not it's alive and kicking today?
I've noticed a trend lately. More and more places are banning things that they've wanted to ban in the past, but were worried about the backlash from under the guise of "increasing security." Banning non-vendor bags and laptops in no way increases security, but the first does increase the visibility of vendor advertising. The second improves traffic flow by minimizing those cumbersome laptop bags and by keeping people from whipping them out at a vendor table
Similarly, my college's stadium is now banning bags along with a whole slew of other items that could be used for sneaking food and drinks in, which has been their primary irritation in the past. Now, under the guise of improved security, they can ban items that would've angered fans too much in the past.
Basically, the COMDEX people are taking advantage of the current political environment to sweep some minor annoyances under the rug. It's a disturbing trend right now.
Re:Absolut Horse Shite
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
To a college age budding intellectual, it must surely seem that starving and being shot at is hugely preferrable to a Microsloth McWorld. Thing is, you're already there in your McDorm fomenting acts of McDissent curtesy of the hard-earned McDollars of your McParents. Those who really are starving and/or being shot at might relish the idea of a chance at that which you are so eager to dismiss.
No one is suggesting that starving or being shot at is preferable to corporate abuse of customers and workers. In fact, the suggestion that that is the only alternative to giving globalization a thumbs up is rather ridiculous.
Anti-globalization protests are about labor abuses, environmental abuses, cultural domination, consolidation of markets, and the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the rich. The alternative that protesters are asking for is not anarchy and starvation; it's dignity.
Granted, some of the idiots involved do engage in a little rioting, which Big Media pounces on to ridicule the message. *sigh* It's a shame how some of the protestors act, but their message is no less true.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
No, it's like saying the French supported the United States in the Revolutionary War because they funded a bunch of colonists. It's a nitpick, but not a "glaring historical mistake." The people we funded became both the Taliban and the previous Afghani government they toppled over, and Osama bin Ladin was very much a part of the anti-Soviet forces when he was a young man.
The new rules, expected to take effect early next year, are designed to get more use out of ".us." Country code suffixes such as ".fr" for France have been sources of national pride worldwide, but in the United States it is the forgotten stepchild compared with ".com."
Try the actual developer's website:
http://moo3.quicksilver.com/main2.html
Off of there, you can find a link to the forums where the design of the game is still being discussed. It's the only game that I'm slavering for that's nearly half a year from release.
Personally, my favorite is the one where the funeral home calls him to sell him a cemetary plot and burial services. He pretends to be suicidal and that the caller is the sign from God that he should kill himself and that he's interested in what the man's selling. The best part is when the salesman gives up trying to console him after a few feeble efforts and then goes into his sales pitch to the guy thinking of killing himself, going so far as to ask him to wait until this afternoon for them to send the paperwork to his house.
Personally, having had all of those toys as a kid (with the unfortunate exception of the Erector set), I'd rank Legos above Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs.
I made a lot more interesting and creative things with Legos than I ever did with the other two toys. I mean, there's only so many buildings and fortesses you can make with Lincoln Logs, and I ran into limitations with Tinker Toys really quick thanks to the limited supply of sticks in the sizes I needed.
However, I made an endless array of neat things with Legos. When I was five, I made a robot with moving arms and legs using just basic Legos and the wheel-and-axle Lego bricks which had pegs at the center of each wheel. They made perfect articulation points. I was also fond of space ships and castles long before I ever saw the specialized sets come on the market. (Plus, a space ship with ramparts and stone edifice gave me a lot of amusement after I got those sets.)
Personally, I'd rate it as:
Erector Set > Capsula > Legos > Tinker Toys > Lincoln Logs
Agreed. I think it would be far, far better for us to have pulled out already. I'd like to think that if Gore had won that our energy policy would've already made pulling our interests away from oil a priority. Use of oil is just bad all around for the nation.
However, I don't think that pulling out of oil would improve our situation there. We would pull out of all the friendly Arab nations, but we'd still be involved with Israel. None of our oil policy is a factor in favor of our involvement there, so pulling out of oil would only make us more clearly on the Israel side of Israel vs. Islam. That's the key factor in Arab hatred of us. If we stop giving them reasons to like us, though, we might be in for trouble.
Most of the nations that we are friendly with in the Middle East are friendly with us because we purchase large amounts of oil from them. Cutting off money to oil producing nations because of the actions of a few nuts would declare our enimity for those nations. If we led an international push to move technologically away from their major source of export revenue over this issue instead of others, we'd be more likely to anger them.
2) Doesn't effect Osama bin Ladin
There are many, many more places where Osama bin Ladin can invest his money other than oil. In fact, his money mostly comes from his inheritance from his father who was a construction mogul, not an oil baron. Furthermore, it won't effect the country he's in. Afghanistan is so poor because it has nothing to export except opium, which the Taliban government has been working to stop.
There another good reason it won't happen.
Bush and Cheney are oil executives. They have too much invested in fossil fuels. Have we already forgotten their self-serving Energy Plan? There's no way the administration would back initiatives to downplay the importance of oil acquisition in our foreign policy.
Getting hydrogen from natural gas produces far, far less pollutants than the current emissions from cars or the burning of coal from power plants. It also opens the door, economically speaking, for eventually developing even more environmentally friendly systems.
Also, most natural gas is just burned off when drilling for oil. At least this way, we'd be putting it to use instead of just letting it pollute the atmosphere for no good reason.
You may be forgetting that both Bush and Cheney were oil executives. There's no way they'd advocate any solution that would hurt the finances of oil companies. That's where he comes from, that's where his dad's money comes from, and that's where most of his friends' money comes from.
While weaning us from oil would be good for the American people, it would be bad for people like Bush and Cheney, so it'll never happen while he's in power.
It seems that this newbus bit may add a level of nice abstraction like that of the Linux kernel. It's good to see steps being taken in this direction. Hopefully, there will be more open-minded people willing to assist interested parties learn this interface.
What bothered me was the usual snobbery about it not being their "place" to help newbies learn how to write drivers. The whole API being in flux issue is mostly a red herring since they could simply request that the person submit their drivers against a frozen architecture, such as the FreeBSD 4.X branches -- unless these too are in a "constant state of flux." I mean, big deal -- the Linux driver models were quite different between 1.2 & 2.0 and between 2.0 and 2.2. That doesn't mean that people were turned away from submitting new drivers under the older stable tree during the 1.3 & 2.1 development cycles.
If they have a good interface, then they should really have documentation to help people add system support for the stable branches. I mean, really, the main "expert" developers shouldn't be bothering themselves with device driver writing. For one thing, it requires them to take time away from their usual projects to learn the interface for a new piece of hardware -- which should be the hardest part of writing a driver under a good architecture. Device driver writing is exactly what newbies should be doing. The kernel interfaces should be a trivial matter -- let the newbies worry about learning the actual hardware while the main developers work on more important core issues.
As for the kernel API being in a constant state of flux, I believe that the poster didn't mean it that litterally. Sure, some things do change over time, but I find most of the stuff to be very clear and well documented (note, I'm not a FreeBSD kernel hacker/developer).
What bothers me is that this guy is. You can see his name all over FreeBSD mailing lists and code fixes. A quick search turns up that he's been a committer to the FreeBSD source tree since June 1999. This guy is in on things, and he's displaying this level of snobbery towards new developers. What a great way to gain mindshare! They're squandering a great resource.
It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do. Writing drivers involves intimate familiarity with the system, especially with a system where the kernel API has been in a constant state of flux in the long-running development branch.
Quite frankly, that sounds like a very poor design. If you are changing your internal APIs so often and don't have a good abstraction layer in place for basic driver work, then you're shooting yourself in the foot. The internal APIs being in a "constant state of flux" shows that you need to get your heads out of the implementation detail, step back, and do some actual design work first.
A good OS should have clean interfaces for writing drivers that anyone can support. You should be ashamed that it requires an "expert" in the system to write one of the most commmonly needed contributions to the system.
I've written Linux device drivers as part of a class, including block and character devices with full/dev support and/proc filesystem support for configuring the devices. The Linux device driver model is so simple and easy to use that you can teach a class with a new, more complex driver as a biweekly assignment. It was basically a trivial task once you read through a little documentation. What is so wrong with FreeBSD that you can't simply do that?
That said, intelligent questions about an arbitrary topic with non-obvious answers are USUALLY responded to politely. You can't just say, though, "I'd like to write some drivers. Can you tell me how?" or anything even moderately like that.
Funny, if it wasn't an elite "boys club" on the list and if the kernel APIs were well designed, then you should be able to politely point someone to a HOWTO, FAQ, or book. Instead, snobbery and insults fly when it's really your own shoddy workmanship that is at fault.
Drivers are import to system adoption. Driver writing should be the low-level entry to kernel hacking for your OS. It's a good way to see who can code well and to enhance your system. Of course, if neither of these are your goal, then don't be whine when the supposedly "inferior" Linux kernel leads them to a higher mindshare in the developer community.
I was talking about the Red Flag Linux distribution which they use. I'm well aware that if you make private modifications that you don't have to redistribute them unless you distribute the binaries, which the Red Flag distribution does in fact do.
Exactly. It's the same reason that they were all also heterosexual, healthy, and nonsmokers -- less variables in the equation.
My point was that he seemed to be inferring a bias that heterosexuality was required for being a "healthy" subject for the experiment. The truth is that it was just another way of minimizing changes in the way people would react. What if homosexuals do react different to pheromones than heterosexuals? That would throw off the data, just like left-handedness could.
(Now, though, as a left-handed person, I'm interested to know whether or not left-handed people do react differently...)
It admit that it could add a new dimension to the nature vs. nuture argument about sexual preference, but it probably wouldn't settle anything. If the reacted to their own gender and not the opposite, then it would definitely swing things in favor of a biological explanation though it could still be a learned preference. If they reacted the same as a heterosexual, then it would say something very powerful about pheromones not actually having much effect on human sexuality. I'd also be interested to see how bisexuals react to the chemicals if there is a switch in gender reaction among homosexuals.
I just worry about the social reprecussions of using artificial pheromones. It seems just a step more sophisticated than hypnosis or drugging your victim's drink. If this does pan out, then I hope that there is a ban on their recreational use. You could hurt a lot of people by using them.
Don't read too much into that. They were all right-handed, too. It's just a way of picking from a large draw of subjects with minimal differences to throw off data.
Remember, many Christians had zero problem with slavery cause it was in the Bible. Wasn't right. But then again, neither is massacring people and raping their children. Which according to the OT is just fine and dandy because God delivers these people into your hands. Ethics, sure I can buy that. Making sure that religious issues are covered, ennnnhhhhhh, no.
I spent an hour today writing up an essay on the true lack of difference between ethics and morality to attempt to convince you that theologians are just as important, but then the futility of it struck me when I reread the above quoted paragraph. You wouldn't care no matter what I said, so why bother?
I've been through this way too many times. I get tired of dealing with bigots who attempt to paint the philosophy of my family and friends as one of hatred, murder, and everything else that it in truth stands against. It's a waste of energy. Religion is evil in your eyes, and nothing I say can change that. All I am left with is this request:
Quit trolling. You're adding nothing productive to this discussion or any other with this blatant bigotry.
If you actually understood religions and thought hard about human nature, you might actually see the seperation between the philosophy and the deeds to people professing to be its practitioners. The actions you describe are functionally no different from how modern politicians do harmful things to a cause while claiming to act in its name, such as GWB on the environment.
That is all I have to say. You may now have the last word if it makes you feel better.
By the same logic, why are bioethicists being allowed to participate?
The theologians are there to have an input into the social and ethical impacts of stem cell research. They provide a balancing factor to the "rah-rah!" mindset of many of the people performing the research, who seem not to care about the social impact of their research. Worse, they may actively encourage some of the uses that others see as problems, such as the creation of clinics to create clones or other fetuses for the explicit purpose of killing them for tissues.
Furthermore, on your comment about science not dictating religion, I'd have to disagree. Atheists regularly attempt to use "scientific proof" to argue away the religious beliefs of others. While religion has no place in dictating scientific facts, the philosophical and moral beliefs of religion have a strong role in determining what a society will see as acceptable, especially when dealing with issues of the value of human life. That is why they are there.
Yes and no. The most common formal way to ask someone in Japanese if they can speak it is, "Nihongo ga dekimasu ka?"
Yes, this is a slightly shorted version of "Nihongo o hanasu koto ga dekimasu ka?" but one would never say, "Nihongo o hanashimasu ka?" or, "Nihongo o hanashimasen," because the context is somewhat ambiguous. In more informal speech, "Nihongo o hanasu?" isn't too bad since it's a colloqualism, but "Nihongo hanasimasen" is just broken grammar.
Also, "ga" is used to refer to the objects of verbs such as "dekiru" and "aru" not too infrequently. "Ano hito ha, mondai ga arimasu ne.." (That guy has problems.)
It's probably broken Japanese for "I don't speak Japanese."
You don't use "hanasu" (to speak) to describe familiarity with a language. You use "dekiru" (to be able). You should say, "Nihongo ga dekimasen," or, "I am not capable in Japanese." (lit. "[In] Japanese, [I] am not-able.")
If they'd actually used the proper particle, "Nihongo de hanashimasen," would mean, "I am not speaking Japanese (right now)."
Slashdot Mirror
What a surprise! An Apple end user product that SPECIFICALLY doesn't work with Linux! I never thought I'd see the day.
Oh, grow up. It's Linux's fault for not properly supporting a well-documented file system that's been deployed for over 3 years now.
\/\/47(|-|00 741|<!|\|' 4|30u7, \/\/!11!5?
I've noticed a trend lately. More and more places are banning things that they've wanted to ban in the past, but were worried about the backlash from under the guise of "increasing security." Banning non-vendor bags and laptops in no way increases security, but the first does increase the visibility of vendor advertising. The second improves traffic flow by minimizing those cumbersome laptop bags and by keeping people from whipping them out at a vendor table
Similarly, my college's stadium is now banning bags along with a whole slew of other items that could be used for sneaking food and drinks in, which has been their primary irritation in the past. Now, under the guise of improved security, they can ban items that would've angered fans too much in the past.
Basically, the COMDEX people are taking advantage of the current political environment to sweep some minor annoyances under the rug. It's a disturbing trend right now.
Straw man.
No one is suggesting that starving or being shot at is preferable to corporate abuse of customers and workers. In fact, the suggestion that that is the only alternative to giving globalization a thumbs up is rather ridiculous.
Anti-globalization protests are about labor abuses, environmental abuses, cultural domination, consolidation of markets, and the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the rich. The alternative that protesters are asking for is not anarchy and starvation; it's dignity.
Granted, some of the idiots involved do engage in a little rioting, which Big Media pounces on to ridicule the message. *sigh* It's a shame how some of the protestors act, but their message is no less true.
No, it's like saying the French supported the United States in the Revolutionary War because they funded a bunch of colonists. It's a nitpick, but not a "glaring historical mistake." The people we funded became both the Taliban and the previous Afghani government they toppled over, and Osama bin Ladin was very much a part of the anti-Soviet forces when he was a young man.
I think this says it all:
Try the actual developer's website:
http://moo3.quicksilver.com/main2.html
Off of there, you can find a link to the forums where the design of the game is still being discussed. It's the only game that I'm slavering for that's nearly half a year from release.
Personally, my favorite is the one where the funeral home calls him to sell him a cemetary plot and burial services. He pretends to be suicidal and that the caller is the sign from God that he should kill himself and that he's interested in what the man's selling. The best part is when the salesman gives up trying to console him after a few feeble efforts and then goes into his sales pitch to the guy thinking of killing himself, going so far as to ask him to wait until this afternoon for them to send the paperwork to his house.
Personally, having had all of those toys as a kid (with the unfortunate exception of the Erector set), I'd rank Legos above Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs.
I made a lot more interesting and creative things with Legos than I ever did with the other two toys. I mean, there's only so many buildings and fortesses you can make with Lincoln Logs, and I ran into limitations with Tinker Toys really quick thanks to the limited supply of sticks in the sizes I needed.
However, I made an endless array of neat things with Legos. When I was five, I made a robot with moving arms and legs using just basic Legos and the wheel-and-axle Lego bricks which had pegs at the center of each wheel. They made perfect articulation points. I was also fond of space ships and castles long before I ever saw the specialized sets come on the market. (Plus, a space ship with ramparts and stone edifice gave me a lot of amusement after I got those sets.)
Personally, I'd rate it as:
Erector Set > Capsula > Legos > Tinker Toys > Lincoln Logs
Agreed. I think it would be far, far better for us to have pulled out already. I'd like to think that if Gore had won that our energy policy would've already made pulling our interests away from oil a priority. Use of oil is just bad all around for the nation.
However, I don't think that pulling out of oil would improve our situation there. We would pull out of all the friendly Arab nations, but we'd still be involved with Israel. None of our oil policy is a factor in favor of our involvement there, so pulling out of oil would only make us more clearly on the Israel side of Israel vs. Islam. That's the key factor in Arab hatred of us. If we stop giving them reasons to like us, though, we might be in for trouble.
There are a few good reasons why this won't work.
1) US investment in the Middle East
Most of the nations that we are friendly with in the Middle East are friendly with us because we purchase large amounts of oil from them. Cutting off money to oil producing nations because of the actions of a few nuts would declare our enimity for those nations. If we led an international push to move technologically away from their major source of export revenue over this issue instead of others, we'd be more likely to anger them.
2) Doesn't effect Osama bin Ladin
There are many, many more places where Osama bin Ladin can invest his money other than oil. In fact, his money mostly comes from his inheritance from his father who was a construction mogul, not an oil baron. Furthermore, it won't effect the country he's in. Afghanistan is so poor because it has nothing to export except opium, which the Taliban government has been working to stop.
There another good reason it won't happen.
Bush and Cheney are oil executives. They have too much invested in fossil fuels. Have we already forgotten their self-serving Energy Plan? There's no way the administration would back initiatives to downplay the importance of oil acquisition in our foreign policy.
Getting hydrogen from natural gas produces far, far less pollutants than the current emissions from cars or the burning of coal from power plants. It also opens the door, economically speaking, for eventually developing even more environmentally friendly systems.
Also, most natural gas is just burned off when drilling for oil. At least this way, we'd be putting it to use instead of just letting it pollute the atmosphere for no good reason.
You may be forgetting that both Bush and Cheney were oil executives. There's no way they'd advocate any solution that would hurt the finances of oil companies. That's where he comes from, that's where his dad's money comes from, and that's where most of his friends' money comes from.
While weaning us from oil would be good for the American people, it would be bad for people like Bush and Cheney, so it'll never happen while he's in power.
It seems that this newbus bit may add a level of nice abstraction like that of the Linux kernel. It's good to see steps being taken in this direction. Hopefully, there will be more open-minded people willing to assist interested parties learn this interface.
What bothered me was the usual snobbery about it not being their "place" to help newbies learn how to write drivers. The whole API being in flux issue is mostly a red herring since they could simply request that the person submit their drivers against a frozen architecture, such as the FreeBSD 4.X branches -- unless these too are in a "constant state of flux." I mean, big deal -- the Linux driver models were quite different between 1.2 & 2.0 and between 2.0 and 2.2. That doesn't mean that people were turned away from submitting new drivers under the older stable tree during the 1.3 & 2.1 development cycles.
If they have a good interface, then they should really have documentation to help people add system support for the stable branches. I mean, really, the main "expert" developers shouldn't be bothering themselves with device driver writing. For one thing, it requires them to take time away from their usual projects to learn the interface for a new piece of hardware -- which should be the hardest part of writing a driver under a good architecture. Device driver writing is exactly what newbies should be doing. The kernel interfaces should be a trivial matter -- let the newbies worry about learning the actual hardware while the main developers work on more important core issues.
What bothers me is that this guy is. You can see his name all over FreeBSD mailing lists and code fixes. A quick search turns up that he's been a committer to the FreeBSD source tree since June 1999. This guy is in on things, and he's displaying this level of snobbery towards new developers. What a great way to gain mindshare! They're squandering a great resource.
Quite frankly, that sounds like a very poor design. If you are changing your internal APIs so often and don't have a good abstraction layer in place for basic driver work, then you're shooting yourself in the foot. The internal APIs being in a "constant state of flux" shows that you need to get your heads out of the implementation detail, step back, and do some actual design work first.
A good OS should have clean interfaces for writing drivers that anyone can support. You should be ashamed that it requires an "expert" in the system to write one of the most commmonly needed contributions to the system.
I've written Linux device drivers as part of a class, including block and character devices with full /dev support and /proc filesystem support for configuring the devices. The Linux device driver model is so simple and easy to use that you can teach a class with a new, more complex driver as a biweekly assignment. It was basically a trivial task once you read through a little documentation. What is so wrong with FreeBSD that you can't simply do that?
Funny, if it wasn't an elite "boys club" on the list and if the kernel APIs were well designed, then you should be able to politely point someone to a HOWTO, FAQ, or book. Instead, snobbery and insults fly when it's really your own shoddy workmanship that is at fault.
Drivers are import to system adoption. Driver writing should be the low-level entry to kernel hacking for your OS. It's a good way to see who can code well and to enhance your system. Of course, if neither of these are your goal, then don't be whine when the supposedly "inferior" Linux kernel leads them to a higher mindshare in the developer community.
I was talking about the Red Flag Linux distribution which they use. I'm well aware that if you make private modifications that you don't have to redistribute them unless you distribute the binaries, which the Red Flag distribution does in fact do.
Exactly. It's the same reason that they were all also heterosexual, healthy, and nonsmokers -- less variables in the equation.
My point was that he seemed to be inferring a bias that heterosexuality was required for being a "healthy" subject for the experiment. The truth is that it was just another way of minimizing changes in the way people would react. What if homosexuals do react different to pheromones than heterosexuals? That would throw off the data, just like left-handedness could.
(Now, though, as a left-handed person, I'm interested to know whether or not left-handed people do react differently...)
Ya' know. If you've got hexylamine coating your car, then you've got bigger problems than the changing aesthetics of your car.
It's also worth noting that they aren't playing by our rules and releasing their modifications under the GPL. Basically, they're "pirating" Linux.
It admit that it could add a new dimension to the nature vs. nuture argument about sexual preference, but it probably wouldn't settle anything. If the reacted to their own gender and not the opposite, then it would definitely swing things in favor of a biological explanation though it could still be a learned preference. If they reacted the same as a heterosexual, then it would say something very powerful about pheromones not actually having much effect on human sexuality. I'd also be interested to see how bisexuals react to the chemicals if there is a switch in gender reaction among homosexuals.
I just worry about the social reprecussions of using artificial pheromones. It seems just a step more sophisticated than hypnosis or drugging your victim's drink. If this does pan out, then I hope that there is a ban on their recreational use. You could hurt a lot of people by using them.
Don't read too much into that. They were all right-handed, too. It's just a way of picking from a large draw of subjects with minimal differences to throw off data.
Remember, many Christians had zero problem with slavery cause it was in the Bible. Wasn't right. But then again, neither is massacring people and raping their children. Which according to the OT is just fine and dandy because God delivers these people into your hands. Ethics, sure I can buy that. Making sure that religious issues are covered, ennnnhhhhhh, no.
I spent an hour today writing up an essay on the true lack of difference between ethics and morality to attempt to convince you that theologians are just as important, but then the futility of it struck me when I reread the above quoted paragraph. You wouldn't care no matter what I said, so why bother?
I've been through this way too many times. I get tired of dealing with bigots who attempt to paint the philosophy of my family and friends as one of hatred, murder, and everything else that it in truth stands against. It's a waste of energy. Religion is evil in your eyes, and nothing I say can change that. All I am left with is this request:
Quit trolling. You're adding nothing productive to this discussion or any other with this blatant bigotry.
If you actually understood religions and thought hard about human nature, you might actually see the seperation between the philosophy and the deeds to people professing to be its practitioners. The actions you describe are functionally no different from how modern politicians do harmful things to a cause while claiming to act in its name, such as GWB on the environment.
That is all I have to say. You may now have the last word if it makes you feel better.
By the same logic, why are bioethicists being allowed to participate?
The theologians are there to have an input into the social and ethical impacts of stem cell research. They provide a balancing factor to the "rah-rah!" mindset of many of the people performing the research, who seem not to care about the social impact of their research. Worse, they may actively encourage some of the uses that others see as problems, such as the creation of clinics to create clones or other fetuses for the explicit purpose of killing them for tissues.
Furthermore, on your comment about science not dictating religion, I'd have to disagree. Atheists regularly attempt to use "scientific proof" to argue away the religious beliefs of others. While religion has no place in dictating scientific facts, the philosophical and moral beliefs of religion have a strong role in determining what a society will see as acceptable, especially when dealing with issues of the value of human life. That is why they are there.
Yes and no. The most common formal way to ask someone in Japanese if they can speak it is, "Nihongo ga dekimasu ka?"
Yes, this is a slightly shorted version of "Nihongo o hanasu koto ga dekimasu ka?" but one would never say, "Nihongo o hanashimasu ka?" or, "Nihongo o hanashimasen," because the context is somewhat ambiguous. In more informal speech, "Nihongo o hanasu?" isn't too bad since it's a colloqualism, but "Nihongo hanasimasen" is just broken grammar.
Also, "ga" is used to refer to the objects of verbs such as "dekiru" and "aru" not too infrequently. "Ano hito ha, mondai ga arimasu ne.." (That guy has problems.)
It's probably broken Japanese for "I don't speak Japanese."
You don't use "hanasu" (to speak) to describe familiarity with a language. You use "dekiru" (to be able). You should say, "Nihongo ga dekimasen," or, "I am not capable in Japanese." (lit. "[In] Japanese, [I] am not-able.")
If they'd actually used the proper particle, "Nihongo de hanashimasen," would mean, "I am not speaking Japanese (right now)."