So it's illegal to exceed the speed limit and it's also illegal to not exceed the speed limit? Nice.

I was under the impression that for some time now car brakes have been designed to bring you to a full stop even if you have both the gas and the brake floored, so I find that rather unlikely unless you're going 140mph or something...in which case the brakes might overheat and fail by the time you get slowed down enough?

With the sheer obliviousness of pedestrians around near where I grew up, it will inevitably happen.

If you're in the right-hand (non-passing) lane and you get rear-ended by a semi, I think 4 times out of 5 it's going to be pretty clearly the semi's fault. Unless you just passed him, pulled back into the right, and slammed on your brakes, which Google would undoubtedly make sure their cars don't do, he should have time to slow down or pass you if the passing lane is open.

If the rain is sufficiently torrential, wouldn't radar get scattered and/or reflected by it?

Deorge W. Bush?

Hey, at least they're a damn sight wider than hockey goals. Whenever I see a hockey game I wonder why the goalie doesn't just lie down in front of the goal; he's wearing enough padding and gear that it's not like he'll even feel people bouncing pucks off him. And unless somebody can loft it like 1.5 feet in the air, it's not getting in.

Hockey = Canadian football?

Pulling out the excuse "my grandparent says that" doesn't work when we're talking racism. Lots of grandparents spout racist shit.

You were largely correct.

It's "a university" because the English pronunciation is YOO-niversity, which starts with a consonant(ish) sound. If we pronounced it OOH-niversity which is a vowel sound it would be "an."

Other than the rampant conjugation and screwy prepositions in German (several seem to translate to 3 different English ones) I'd say I like what I've learned of the language. In some ways it really makes more sense than English...and it's mostly easier to spell :) Maybe there are rules about double-vowels-with-an-umlaut that I just haven't seen.

I believe the exception is if the first letter is something that is a *silent* consonant, leave it with "a." For example, honorable or university*. A lot of people (native speakers) seem to not get this as you'll see "an historic" a lot of the time but the 'h' isn't silent so it should still be 'a.'

I'll admit that the "if it's separated by another word, use that word instead" seems maddeningly inconsistent. I consider it a bonus that we don't conjugate every god damn part of speech, though. After taking a few years of German, it seems like in German you have to conjugate 6 or 7 out of 10 parts of speech, while in English it's only really 3 (pronouns, verbs, and articles). And of course the genders for 90% of nouns are completely random. My favorite is "das Mädchen." Argh!

* Do I remember correctly that Universität is begun with an "oo" pronunciation? In English it's a "yoo" pronunciation.

The first 2 results for "a vs an" on Google agree with me, anyway. I wouldn't be surprised at a dissenting opinion.
https://owl.english.purdue.edu...
http://www.quickanddirtytips.c...

Ah, okay. I probably would have picked up on that if you had said "at university" instead of "at an university."

(Not sure what the rule is officially but I'd say "a university" not "an university." Cf. whether it's the spelling or the pronunciation that determines a vs. an.)

Having just recently bought a used stick-shift, I've vaguely wondered each time I had to take it in for something whether all the probably barely 20yo assistants who move the cars around at these places know how to drive stick...and if so, how to do it without mangling my transmission.

Admittedly I'm only 25 myself so hey :) But I also know the basics of assembly so I'm probably in a pretty weird demographic these days.

*in the same vein

*middle option

To clarify, I did take *a* course in COBOL and a half-course in assembly. Sadly they had crammed together the courses for Computer Architecture and Operating Systems into one, CAOS, so the other half was basically threading in Java.

Don't know about where you went, but we have separate majors for CS and SE where I graduated. The SE guys took a couple extra NIC programming classes and suchlike, while at the other end the Computer Information Systems people did a bunch of COBOL classes. I did Computer Technology, the "middle options."

CT and CIS were both internal branches of CS, and CS and SE made up the agglomerated CSSE department. Post-graduation I'm not really qualified to say, but you specifically said "at an university."