I am as stunned as you are. How many other localized /.s are there I wonder? Is there a slashdot in Russia? Germany? I think its neat.
Sadly I don't read any Japanese at all.

Just a note: where I live there are *almost* no public bathrooms. McDonalds only allows some people into theirs and then only if you spend money, other places lock the bathrooms between 9pm and 7am (ignoring the laws that say they cannot do this, but no repercussions so far). There are almost no options available and many are miles apart.
I don't approve when people pee into the bushes, but I do understand it. If you don't own a car - or if you are drunk and responsibly not driving it - you are SOL in 90% of the city.
Going behind a bush to pee should *not* get you registered as a sex offender, that is absolutely ridiculous. Now, waving it around in full view of the public, sure no problem.

Ah very good criticism of Esperanto, thanks for that. Note that I didn't suggest it because I thought it was a terribly good language but simply because its an easy to learn second language :)

There is no actual "Justice" available. Its for sale these days, all it takes is enough litigation to break the opposition, or the threat of it, and your principles, justice, honor etc, is meaningless. So we have gone from "Justice is Blind" to "Justice is a Whore"...
This is why corporations are so evil I think, it enables people with an agenda to wield bigger bank accounts with zero risk to themselves and use those to bludgeon free speech and political opinion to death.

Have you not played any space empire games? Its just because the power-that-be have been spending points on the Communications and Electronic Engineering lines of research and not enough points on Basic Drive Systems. Once they realize their mistake they will develop new drives in short order. Once we finish the next box or two we can move on to Interstellar Drives or Jump Drives no problem.

Useful? Probably not, but you are already speaking the most useful language for tech related discussions and the effective Lingua Franca for the modern world.
I only suggest Esperanto because it is very logical, and thus very easy to learn (I think it has 16 rules of grammar, and the spelling is *perfectly* regular). There is a fair amount of material to read much of it available on the web. its based on a variety of European languages and has vocabulary that is similar to a lot of them. It uses the Latin alphabet which means you don't need to spend any additional time learning an orthography. There are small pockets of Esperanto speakers in almost every country in the world, so if you travel at the least you should be able to find someone who can help you - although again we are back to English which is becoming the default 2nd language for anyone who doesn't speak it as their first language.

My other suggestions would be Spanish, French, German and Russian. Mandarin would be good to learn and no doubt useful - but the learning curve is so steep its a cliff and learning the writing system will be a royal pain at the least.

Shame on you for leaving out Icelandic - the girls are definitely hot there too :P
Plus the language is somewhat like hearing Old English. its not an easy one to learn though.

Yes given that you need to pay for Cable up here in Canada, then pay for specialty channels etc, someone in another forum post worked out that watching Game of Thrones would cost you something around $1000 Cdn. I can't recall the math but its hardly impossible.
I don't have cable at the moment and haven't had it for most of the past 3 years - except when the Olympics are on or something similar - because the bulk of the programming is complete shit and not worth watching, and the few shows that I do consider worth watching are only available if I subscribe to specialty channel packages that are arranged to maximize Shaw's profits (although Telus is no better), not to be convenient to the customer. TV is simply not worth bothering with. Oh and of course I now no longer have to endure ads.
If I need to watch something, there are DvDs. In the end its far cheaper to download the content, or go buy the content, or take it out of the library than it is to sign up for cable TV.
Netflix and the iOS BBC app are a godsend for good programs. This is the way to go for the future IMHO.

The content producers are pricing themselves out of the market and making consuming their content so difficult that potential customers chose other means - sometimes illegally downloading that content. If it was priced effectively and conveniently a *lot* of those users would choose to pay for it. Instead they present as many obstacles to viewing their content as I can conceive possible.
Bad marketing strategy is bad and doomed to fail.

Well far be it from me to advocate murder :P
BUT, if some of the Westboro people are ever slaughtered out of hand by someone who has had enough of their putrid hate and evil actions - I suggest that we need to combine the situation with the suggestion someone made above about busing 10k gay activists to the Westboro funeral to do some protesting in turn. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

No perhaps they won't go *directly* to beating up workers who complain, but I can see:
* less attention spent on worker safety, updating fire suppression systems, ensuring First Aid personnel are available, equipped etc. That costs money for no visible gain, easy to reduce spending on.
* longer hours demanded of workers, no overtime paid, lower wages - you want to keep your job? Shut up and suck it up. There are long lines of people waiting for your position.
* Less vacation time, possibly a culture of insisting people not take a vaction but take cash in its place - with the cash amount being reduced over time.
* no more payments from the company into retirement plans/pensions, or at least reduced rates before its eliminated.
* On the spot firing for anyone who complains. Don't like it? talk to our lawyers, we have the cash, you don't.
* Gonna try striking?, the management will hire Blackwater or their like to ensure you let strikebreakers through, and they won't worry about how rough they are.
* No one to call out management when they do any sort of abuse of employees.

Not all companies are going to behave badly lacking workers having some organized way to resist changes, but the bigger the company the better the chance they will. Mix in a healthy dose of corruption in government and law enforcement for added problems.

Look at employment conditions in poor third world countries if you want the model for the workplace environment when *no one* is enforcing the rules. Unions at least can speak for their workers in some instances to help push the rights of all workers - even none union ones (minimum wage, 40 hour work week, pensions, overtime - all the result of union actions in the past).

The only way to get a fair and reasonable deal between workers and employers is for both sides to have people who can hash out an agreement. If the unions get too powerful then its bad for business, if there are no unions, then the corporations are too powerful and its bad for their employees. Its pretty simple.
A lot of the basic concepts concerning the workplace, worker's rights and expectations etc that we hold as obvious have been bought with the blood of unionized workers who fought for those rights and died in the hundreds in the last century.
I have only been part of one union, and personally speaking they were pretty useless, but I fully support the right of employees to unionize and defend their rights.

Do I think that perhaps the way in which unions are run needs some supervising to avoid abuses, sure, that might be the case, but we *need* unions more than ever these days, despite what all the right-wing nutjobs will post here in response.

Yep get rid of all the unions and we can go back to the good old days of companies hiring "Strike-Breakers" to beat people to death because they don't want to work for slave labor wages. That'll be fun. /sarcasm off

Unions served to get some essential rights for workers from the rich industrial barons who didn't give a fuck about those who slaved for them. For a while they served very well.

Now the rich and powerful are destroying the unions in the name of increased profits and will again fuck their employees. Its an Employers world right now, and they get to make the rules - unless you are in high demand in a few rare industries, government or management. The loss of union power and collective bargaining will NOT be good for North America. I guess this is what they mean by "trickle down economics" eh?

I forsee the rise of the welfare state - without any welfare. Except of course, someone has to *buy* the stuff our robot overlords are producing on behalf of the rich elite who own us. So we have to be given enough money to be consumers, but the rest can continue to go to the 1%

As someone who has been at least nominally Wiccan for the past 30 years, I suspect your only exposure to Wiccans has been the teenage angst-filled dressed like a goth crowd. There are others out there who don't fill the stereotype who are otherwise normal people. We blend in.

Just sayin'

Its "Monotheism" that is evil specifically. It teaches people that they have the *one* truth, and that anyone else must be wrong. Polytheists are generally more accepting I find.