Gators/Crocs are famous for having not changed much since the time of the dinosaurs.
I wonder if since they have a very strong immune system that kills viruses etc so well, if they have not denied themselves the opportunity to incorporate useful viral dna and bacterial plasmids into their own dna. It would be interesting to see if they have a different amount of viral origin genes in their genomes than other animals.
If your system is infected with malware, then everything you do or type is available to that malicious software. The malicious software definately can log into your account using the password you just typed and take your money. Even with some funky card/chip/biometric thingamabob, the malicious software, because it controls your computer, is already in a position to bypass any security measure you could hope to put in place. Banks can't offer online banking unless customers are responsible for their own security. Which really means banks can't offer online banking. Someday a botnet of hundreds of thousands of machines will all suddenly empty the bank accounts of all those they infect into random or not so random places, losing people billions or trillions of dollars, and putting the kebosh once and for all on online banking.
Banks might safely offer an unmesswithable *device* that could connect to the internet securely. Like a handheld atm, it would be under complete control of the bank. Sure you could probably devise some read only interface to download your crap to your computer. But ideally, your bank should offer most of the software you need to do everything you want right there on the closed and sealed and secure device.
A galley slave doesn't give a damn whether the boat goes fast or slow. He just wants to look like he is working whilst working the least.
So since the lever moves the furthest distance near the center, the motion is greater, meaning more work. Also the effects of a slave pretending to row are felt most acutely when the slave is seated in the middle of the boat.
Also, the guy with the whip is closest to the slaves in the center, however having some distance between the whipper and the whippee may make the speed of the lash higher for slaves further away.
Another consideration is whether being near the hull of the boat conferred any advantages/disadvantages in terms of ventilation/warmth/being out of the rain/being in the rain/etc.
I've never typed on a hard flat non-keyboard, but just tapping my fingers on my desk for a few moments, I can see what you mean by painful. Maybe not having to depress a key might make me type more softly over time though, but then again maybe some pressure is neccessary for the finger gymnastics of typing. I am also not sure one could get used to having no tactile feedback.
I've been typing for twenty years, all day every day at work for the past eleven years, and only in the last three years or so have I learned to stop looking at the keyboard. I need all the help I can get!
Here's what I envision: Your cell phone is your computer. It can be placed on your desk and project against a wall or onto the desk, and it can project a keyboard to type on if you want it to. It can also see your fingers to tell what you are typing.
For ultra-convenient portability, all you need is the cell phone/computer device itself, but for serious long term use, you would typically have a projector screen for a higher quality image than could be obtained from just projecting on any old surface like a desk or a wall. For added resolution, a rubbery roll-up keyboard mat made of the same silicone as dildoes are made from is laid down on the desk, and the keyboard is no longer projected, giving you more screen real estate and a cushioned tactile surface. The phone/computer detects your finger's position to know what keys you are pressing as before, and it also reads a special dot on the dildo-material keyboard to know the position of the mat. But the keyboard mat is pure dongstuff. It has no electronics inside. They would be like mousepads. Dirt cheap and disposable if they got too dirty.
If it turns out electronic eyes can't effectively detect keystrokes, then some kind of more intelligent keyboard mat would have to be devised. There might be a tiny version that could be rolled out and stored in the same form factor as the phone device with larger versions optionally available. Dongstuff with imbedded wires still seems like a fairly good way of making one of these things. It could just be scrunched up and put in your pocket.
If you believe that deficit spending is the cause of our economic woes, then you are faced with the fact that the war is the cause of much of our recent deficit spending, and so you have to admit that the war is therefore the cause of our economic woes.
Si4, silane is spontaneously combustable in air, and gaseous at room temperature. However, if pressurizing hydrogen generates superconductivity at room temperature, then maybe other things could work too?
My understanding of superconductivity is not sufficient to determine if what I am saying is plausable, but what about compressing existing 'high temp' superconducting materials? Maybe less compression would be neccessary? ( I have no idea if the reason why hydrogen superconducts under pressure would apply to existing high temp superconductors ).
Glass in the center of tempered glass is compressed by the glass on the outside. Maybe it would be possible to create such materials that compress themselves so that they are superconducting on the inside at room temperature... Since the superconducting part would be surrounded by a non superconducting shell, maybe induction would be the way to interface non superconducting circuits to it instead of direct connections.
I think I want to master logic programming next, though it may be better for me to do some haskell programming first so I have a better foundation. Monads/Arrows give me a headache, but with enough time, I'm sure I could get used to them. s-expressions a-la lisp/scheme are very similar to xml, except better, but logic programming seems more likely to make the hardest parts of internet programming easier.
Unfortuately, I have nowhere near enough time to get proficient in all these languages.
One thing about ubiquitous surviellance, is that it has limits too. Even if they record everything, nobody is looking at it. At best, it is archived where it can be looked at later during an investigation. Really, more surviellance just forces the gubmint to purge their files more often to save disk space. Maybe there's the outside chance that it could all be monitored realtime by some facial recognition software that automatically alerts the cops so they can harass 'suspicious' people, but that's really not likely for most cameras. It probably won't ever get to the point where nobody wears sunglasses or hats anymore because they are tired of being harassed by the cops whenever the cameras can't recognize them.
This is great! Now what we need is an efficient way to convert H2 gas into a dense, storable, safe, easy to transport and use form like liquid hydrocarbons or ethanol.
Even if they had ruled it out, I don't think the counting would be the same as what we consider counting. If you are alone, it's obviously different than if there is a fish swimming by. If one fish is swimming by, then adding another fish is doubling the number of fish nearby, adding the next fish increases the number of fish nearby by fifty percent, and adding the fourth fish increases the number of nearby fish by 33 percent. Adding a fifth fish only increases the amount of nearby fish by twenty five percent. I think it would be interesting if they tried seeing if a fish can tell a school of one *pair* of fish from a school of two *pairs* of fish, and if the inability to distinguish falls off between four and five pairs of fish in the school. If fish could detect the size of their school to within 33 percent, that wouldn't mean fish could count by twos to eight or count by threes to twelve. Counting involves mapping the number of times you increment to a table of different abstract numbers. When the difference between 100 and 101 is just a single percent ( counting up ) and the average person would not be able to detect this, a true grasp of counting involves the knowlege that 100 is different than 101 even if you can't look at a set of 100 toothpicks scattered on the floor and tell it from 101 toothpicks scattered on the floor.
Yes! Of course they construct them on purpose! Constructing slippery slopes is great political strategy, since it allows you to change the game in a subtle way that your opponents may not notice, but that you have calculated will weigh heavily to your advantage as time goes on.
Slippery slopes are a bad thing if someone puts you on them, but first steps are a great thing if they steer events toward outcomes you desire.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. People who rely on logical thinking are more severely damaged by buying into baseless dogma because their first instinct is to take things to their logical conclusion.
Those who don't do this are more resilient against the damaging effects of garbage in garbage out because they don't tend to make logical conclusions and base their actions upon those conclusions, but rather use the 'garbage in' to justify whatever they would have done anyway.
I think much of the celebate clergy and other such religiously inspired Darwin Award winners are engineer types at core who got creamed by making the mistake of allowing garbage into their logical brains.
The antidote to this is scientific scepticism. It keeps the logical mind sane. The only article of faith I've personally found it neccessary to have is that 'what happens in the future will resemble that which has happened in the past'. That bit of faith that there will be no miracles allows one to make predictions about the future from past experience.
With all the dangerous and false information out there, I can't imagine a God that could qualify as good who would expect humans to accept any tenet or information as true without basis. I suppose the only critera that matters is how well off those who accept a fact tend to be, though if they be non-logical folk a logical person should beware that because of their nature they may not fare as well. Which ideas tend to work for logical folk? If you be one of them, then the answer may be useful to you.
It's not suprising that some folks do well with the advice to be found in 'holy' books. There is justification for just about every possible action and also forgiveness for most any mistake to be found within. If you use your religion that way, just to make yourself feel better about what you do anyway, to justify what your instincts, desires and emotions impel you to do of themselves, then it's not suprising if you do well in life. Natural human nature has served the human race effectively for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the way it is because it works, even lying to yourself and stroking your own ego. Being logical without the defence of scientific scepticism is an unmitigated liability.
I heard some astronomer dude on NPR today say that something this size is expected to come this close to earth about once every five years. So I fired up frink and got the following: ( ( pi * ( earthradius ^ 2 ) ) / ( pi * ( (540000 km + earthradius) ^ 2 ) ) ) / 5 = 0.000027193886039087225468
That's a hit by something this size every 3676 years.
Making transportation cheap again would rebound the economy
Yes it would, but cheap transportation is a key factor contributing to the vulnerability of the US economy to rising petroleum prices.
One of the best things that the gubmint could do to improve economic and national security would be to start paying for roads/bridges/etc with a federal gasoline tax. States should also begin paying for their part of the transportation infrastructure costs this way if they are not already.
Cheap transportation on roads paid for by those who don't use them has and does distort development towards being more transportation dependent. Cheaper labor in more far flung areas combined with cheap shipping to and from those areas causes development that would not be economic without the subsidy on transportation in the form of roads paid for by everyone that exists.
If the roads were maintained more exclusively by gasoline taxes then it would create the incentive to locate things with a greater eye toward efficiency with regards to transporting people and goods.
However because the existing development is currently overly dependent on cheap transportation, this pain could only be taken on gradually in times of economic prosperity. Over time, new developments would become more efficiently located.
Starting to pay for a portion of roads this way would be a good step, however rural areas would hate it. It might end up being the case that more urban areas pay for their transportation this way but less populated areas retain their road subsidy largely nullifying the effect. But if those subsidies can be cut down slowly, Innefficient transportation to and from the country can be eventually curbed.
And the employees who leave will be the ones best able to leave. The employees most valuable to other prospective employers will be the ones that have been most valuable to IBM.
"Does the article read well?" should be the acid test for wikipedia articles, math, or otherwise. Include what is necessary for the article with the general stuff up front. Make it easy to skim over, but don't worry about getting too in depth.
Wikipedia can handle depth because it can have an unbounded number of articles. If the article starts getting too long, move the details into it's own topic. Then they are easily skimmed over by not clicking the link.
Above all, if something is 'too in depth' DON'T delete it. Don't delete ANY correct or useful content ever. Find out where it goes, put it there, and link to it. Make it it's own topic if the topic doesn't exist. Since wikipedia can host an unbounded number of articles, the depth of knowledge it can contain is also unbounded.
This is something no paper encyclopedia can do. It is why, whereas I haven't opened a paper encyclopedia in years, I read wikipedia almost daily. One can't outgrow it.
Focused articles that are accessible to a general audience are a good thing, but I would be sad if wikipedia lost any of it's depth for the sake of keeping articles focused for a general audience.
The simple method of moving stuff to it's own topic and linking to it solves the problem. A proof that makes an article seem unfocused can easily be it's own topic. Just create a PROOF_OF_XYZ_THEOREM topic with the proof and have a link. It doesn't hurt the rest of wikipedia at all, and will help anyone who wants to see the proof immensely.
But what are we evolving into at such a breakneck speed? Morloks? Eloi? Or maybe we are evolving along lines similar to the movie 'Idiocracy' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ Maybe instead of worrying about it, we should just shut up and drink our BRAWNDO.
That claim was proudly plastered on the large ad for some pills in a flyer for suppliments etc. These idiots will buy anything. As long as there are no actual lies, I have to applaud these snake-oil peddlers for doing their moral duty to separate morons from their cash. Non-Hertzian frequencies! HA!
Where the fragility and power consumption makes a disk unattractive solid state storage will eat up niche after niche until it reaches parity with the capacity and performance of a disk. Then there will be no more disks.
But what is cooler is that there are no 'read heads' that must move in solid state storage. There is no performance penalty for non-sequential access. This is what will radically change the kinds of things people can do, things that are just not possible now.
I wouldn't neccessarily write off the irregularity of verbs as useless. Irregularity comes with the price that it is hard to learn, but the different forms serve as guideposts. Imagine listening to someone tell you something in a crowded room where everyone was talking and music was playing. If you hear the was, were, be, been, is, are then you know what to expect, and can often fill in the missing ( mis/un-heard ) bits because the irregularities help you narrow what could have been said. The more often an irregular verb is used, the more opportunities there are for the weirdness to be valuable. If a word is hardly ever used then the effort-cost of learning the weirdness, outweighs the benefits it gives in understanding/being better understood.
You know you are right. The last time this happened was in 1976 - right at the end of a U.S. spending spree called the Vietnam war.
The U.S. borrows to pay for a war, and our currency goes to SH*T.
And now we have tons of middle eastern enemies, just like then, plus we're cresting hubbert's peak. I wonder if we'll have another 1980's stagflation real soon, or if the Feds will be able to keep the ship running smoothly..
We're also going to be selling the T bills we bought to store the Social Security Surplus in in order to pay for retiring Baby Boomers.
Slashdot Mirror
Gators/Crocs are famous for having not changed much since the time of the dinosaurs.
I wonder if since they have a very strong immune system that kills viruses etc so well, if they have not denied themselves the opportunity to incorporate useful viral dna and bacterial plasmids into their own dna. It would be interesting to see if they have a different amount of viral origin genes in their genomes than other animals.
If your system is infected with malware, then everything you do or type is available to that malicious software. The malicious software definately can log into your account using the password you just typed and take your money. Even with some funky card/chip/biometric thingamabob, the malicious software, because it controls your computer, is already in a position to bypass any security measure you could hope to put in place. Banks can't offer online banking unless customers are responsible for their own security. Which really means banks can't offer online banking. Someday a botnet of hundreds of thousands of machines will all suddenly empty the bank accounts of all those they infect into random or not so random places, losing people billions or trillions of dollars, and putting the kebosh once and for all on online banking.
Banks might safely offer an unmesswithable *device* that could connect to the internet securely. Like a handheld atm, it would be under complete control of the bank. Sure you could probably devise some read only interface to download your crap to your computer. But ideally, your bank should offer most of the software you need to do everything you want right there on the closed and sealed and secure device.
A galley slave doesn't give a damn whether the boat goes fast or slow. He just wants to look like he is working whilst working the least.
So since the lever moves the furthest distance near the center, the motion is greater, meaning more work. Also the effects of a slave pretending to row are felt most acutely when the slave is seated in the middle of the boat.
Also, the guy with the whip is closest to the slaves in the center, however having some distance between the whipper and the whippee may make the speed of the lash higher for slaves further away.
Another consideration is whether being near the hull of the boat conferred any advantages/disadvantages in terms of ventilation/warmth/being out of the rain/being in the rain/etc.
I've never typed on a hard flat non-keyboard, but just tapping my fingers on my desk for a few moments, I can see what you mean by painful. Maybe not having to depress a key might make me type more softly over time though, but then again maybe some pressure is neccessary for the finger gymnastics of typing. I am also not sure one could get used to having no tactile feedback.
I've been typing for twenty years, all day every day at work for the past eleven years, and only in the last three years or so have I learned to stop looking at the keyboard. I need all the help I can get!
Here's what I envision: Your cell phone is your computer. It can be placed on your desk and project against a wall or onto the desk, and it can project a keyboard to type on if you want it to. It can also see your fingers to tell what you are typing.
For ultra-convenient portability, all you need is the cell phone/computer device itself, but for serious long term use, you would typically have a projector screen for a higher quality image than could be obtained from just projecting on any old surface like a desk or a wall. For added resolution, a rubbery roll-up keyboard mat made of the same silicone as dildoes are made from is laid down on the desk, and the keyboard is no longer projected, giving you more screen real estate and a cushioned tactile surface. The phone/computer detects your finger's position to know what keys you are pressing as before, and it also reads a special dot on the dildo-material keyboard to know the position of the mat. But the keyboard mat is pure dongstuff. It has no electronics inside. They would be like mousepads. Dirt cheap and disposable if they got too dirty.
If it turns out electronic eyes can't effectively detect keystrokes, then some kind of more intelligent keyboard mat would have to be devised. There might be a tiny version that could be rolled out and stored in the same form factor as the phone device with larger versions optionally available. Dongstuff with imbedded wires still seems like a fairly good way of making one of these things. It could just be scrunched up and put in your pocket.
Those kinds of books have lots to say about life in general.
More of this kind of thing can be found in the writings of Macheavelli, Clauswitz and Herman Kahn.
'Macheavellian' is a compliment, and cool clear thinking even about the horrible is the best way to mitigate it.
If you believe that deficit spending is the cause of our economic woes, then you are faced with the fact that the war is the cause of much of our recent deficit spending, and so you have to admit that the war is therefore the cause of our economic woes.
But is silane a gas at those pressures?
Si4, silane is spontaneously combustable in air, and gaseous at room temperature. However, if pressurizing hydrogen generates superconductivity at room temperature, then maybe other things could work too?
My understanding of superconductivity is not sufficient to determine if what I am saying is plausable, but what about compressing existing 'high temp' superconducting materials? Maybe less compression would be neccessary? ( I have no idea if the reason why hydrogen superconducts under pressure would apply to existing high temp superconductors ).
Glass in the center of tempered glass is compressed by the glass on the outside. Maybe it would be possible to create such materials that compress themselves so that they are superconducting on the inside at room temperature... Since the superconducting part would be surrounded by a non superconducting shell, maybe induction would be the way to interface non superconducting circuits to it instead of direct connections.
What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind.
I think I want to master logic programming next, though it may be better for me to do some haskell programming first so I have a better foundation. Monads/Arrows give me a headache, but with enough time, I'm sure I could get used to them. s-expressions a-la lisp/scheme are very similar to xml, except better, but logic programming seems more likely to make the hardest parts of internet programming easier.
Unfortuately, I have nowhere near enough time to get proficient in all these languages.
One thing about ubiquitous surviellance, is that it has limits too. Even if they record everything, nobody is looking at it. At best, it is archived where it can be looked at later during an investigation. Really, more surviellance just forces the gubmint to purge their files more often to save disk space.
Maybe there's the outside chance that it could all be monitored realtime by some facial recognition software that automatically alerts the cops so they can harass 'suspicious' people, but that's really not likely for most cameras. It probably won't ever get to the point where nobody wears sunglasses or hats anymore because they are tired of being harassed by the cops whenever the cameras can't recognize them.
This is great! Now what we need is an efficient way to convert H2 gas into a dense, storable, safe, easy to transport and use form like liquid hydrocarbons or ethanol.
Even if they had ruled it out, I don't think the counting would be the same as what we consider counting.
If you are alone, it's obviously different than if there is a fish swimming by. If one fish is swimming by, then adding another fish is doubling the number of fish nearby, adding the next fish increases the number of fish nearby by fifty percent, and adding the fourth fish increases the number of nearby fish by 33 percent. Adding a fifth fish only increases the amount of nearby fish by twenty five percent. I think it would be interesting if they tried seeing if a fish can tell a school of one *pair* of fish from a school of two *pairs* of fish, and if the inability to distinguish falls off between four and five pairs of fish in the school. If fish could detect the size of their school to within 33 percent, that wouldn't mean fish could count by twos to eight or count by threes to twelve.
Counting involves mapping the number of times you increment to a table of different abstract numbers. When the difference between 100 and 101 is just a single percent ( counting up ) and the average person would not be able to detect this, a true grasp of counting involves the knowlege that 100 is different than 101 even if you can't look at a set of 100 toothpicks scattered on the floor and tell it from 101 toothpicks scattered on the floor.
Why am I working in the basement?
Where is my paycheck?
Yes! Of course they construct them on purpose! Constructing slippery slopes is great political strategy, since it allows you to change the game in a subtle way that your opponents may not notice, but that you have calculated will weigh heavily to your advantage as time goes on.
Slippery slopes are a bad thing if someone puts you on them, but first steps are a great thing if they steer events toward outcomes you desire.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. People who rely on logical thinking are more severely damaged by buying into baseless dogma because their first instinct is to take things to their logical conclusion. Those who don't do this are more resilient against the damaging effects of garbage in garbage out because they don't tend to make logical conclusions and base their actions upon those conclusions, but rather use the 'garbage in' to justify whatever they would have done anyway. I think much of the celebate clergy and other such religiously inspired Darwin Award winners are engineer types at core who got creamed by making the mistake of allowing garbage into their logical brains. The antidote to this is scientific scepticism. It keeps the logical mind sane. The only article of faith I've personally found it neccessary to have is that 'what happens in the future will resemble that which has happened in the past'. That bit of faith that there will be no miracles allows one to make predictions about the future from past experience. With all the dangerous and false information out there, I can't imagine a God that could qualify as good who would expect humans to accept any tenet or information as true without basis. I suppose the only critera that matters is how well off those who accept a fact tend to be, though if they be non-logical folk a logical person should beware that because of their nature they may not fare as well. Which ideas tend to work for logical folk? If you be one of them, then the answer may be useful to you. It's not suprising that some folks do well with the advice to be found in 'holy' books. There is justification for just about every possible action and also forgiveness for most any mistake to be found within. If you use your religion that way, just to make yourself feel better about what you do anyway, to justify what your instincts, desires and emotions impel you to do of themselves, then it's not suprising if you do well in life. Natural human nature has served the human race effectively for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the way it is because it works, even lying to yourself and stroking your own ego. Being logical without the defence of scientific scepticism is an unmitigated liability.
I heard some astronomer dude on NPR today say that something this size is expected to come this close to earth about once every five years. So I fired up frink and got the following:
( ( pi * ( earthradius ^ 2 ) ) / ( pi * ( (540000 km + earthradius) ^ 2 ) ) ) / 5 = 0.000027193886039087225468
That's a hit by something this size every 3676 years.
Yes it would, but cheap transportation is a key factor contributing to the vulnerability of the US economy to rising petroleum prices.
One of the best things that the gubmint could do to improve economic and national security would be to start paying for roads/bridges/etc with a federal gasoline tax. States should also begin paying for their part of the transportation infrastructure costs this way if they are not already.
Cheap transportation on roads paid for by those who don't use them has and does distort development towards being more transportation dependent. Cheaper labor in more far flung areas combined with cheap shipping to and from those areas causes development that would not be economic without the subsidy on transportation in the form of roads paid for by everyone that exists.
If the roads were maintained more exclusively by gasoline taxes then it would create the incentive to locate things with a greater eye toward efficiency with regards to transporting people and goods.
However because the existing development is currently overly dependent on cheap transportation, this pain could only be taken on gradually in times of economic prosperity. Over time, new developments would become more efficiently located.
Starting to pay for a portion of roads this way would be a good step, however rural areas would hate it. It might end up being the case that more urban areas pay for their transportation this way but less populated areas retain their road subsidy largely nullifying the effect. But if those subsidies can be cut down slowly, Innefficient transportation to and from the country can be eventually curbed.
And the employees who leave will be the ones best able to leave. The employees most valuable to other prospective employers will be the ones that have been most valuable to IBM.
"Does the article read well?" should be the acid test for wikipedia articles, math, or otherwise. Include what is necessary for the article with the general stuff up front. Make it easy to skim over, but don't worry about getting too in depth.
Wikipedia can handle depth because it can have an unbounded number of articles. If the article starts getting too long, move the details into it's own topic. Then they are easily skimmed over by not clicking the link.
Above all, if something is 'too in depth' DON'T delete it. Don't delete ANY correct or useful content ever. Find out where it goes, put it there, and link to it. Make it it's own topic if the topic doesn't exist. Since wikipedia can host an unbounded number of articles, the depth of knowledge it can contain is also unbounded.
This is something no paper encyclopedia can do. It is why, whereas I haven't opened a paper encyclopedia in years, I read wikipedia almost daily. One can't outgrow it.
Focused articles that are accessible to a general audience are a good thing, but I would be sad if wikipedia lost any of it's depth for the sake of keeping articles focused for a general audience.
The simple method of moving stuff to it's own topic and linking to it solves the problem. A proof that makes an article seem unfocused can easily be it's own topic. Just create a PROOF_OF_XYZ_THEOREM topic with the proof and have a link. It doesn't hurt the rest of wikipedia at all, and will help anyone who wants to see the proof immensely.
But what are we evolving into at such a breakneck speed? Morloks? Eloi?
Or maybe we are evolving along lines similar to the movie 'Idiocracy' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Maybe instead of worrying about it, we should just shut up and drink our BRAWNDO.
That claim was proudly plastered on the large ad for some pills in a flyer for suppliments etc. These idiots will buy anything.
As long as there are no actual lies, I have to applaud these snake-oil peddlers for doing their moral duty to separate morons from their cash. Non-Hertzian frequencies! HA!
Where the fragility and power consumption makes a disk unattractive solid state storage will eat up niche after niche until it reaches parity with the capacity and performance of a disk. Then there will be no more disks. But what is cooler is that there are no 'read heads' that must move in solid state storage. There is no performance penalty for non-sequential access. This is what will radically change the kinds of things people can do, things that are just not possible now.
I wouldn't neccessarily write off the irregularity of verbs as useless. Irregularity comes with the price that it is hard to learn, but the different forms serve as guideposts. Imagine listening to someone tell you something in a crowded room where everyone was talking and music was playing. If you hear the was, were, be, been, is, are then you know what to expect, and can often fill in the missing ( mis/un-heard ) bits because the irregularities help you narrow what could have been said. The more often an irregular verb is used, the more opportunities there are for the weirdness to be valuable. If a word is hardly ever used then the effort-cost of learning the weirdness, outweighs the benefits it gives in understanding/being better understood.
You know you are right. The last time this happened was in 1976 - right at the end of a U.S. spending spree called the Vietnam war.
The U.S. borrows to pay for a war, and our currency goes to SH*T.
And now we have tons of middle eastern enemies, just like then, plus we're cresting hubbert's peak. I wonder if we'll have another 1980's stagflation real soon, or if the Feds will be able to keep the ship running smoothly..
We're also going to be selling the T bills we bought to store the Social Security Surplus in in order to pay for retiring Baby Boomers.
What's next? Who knows..