You are right, the laws themselves are classist, not racist. However, the selective enforcement of these laws does tend to fall on racist lines quite often.

That's not even getting into the fact that our class structure itself is still racist (although that is slowly changing, we're totally not there yet).

Obviously, the orientation of the USB cable is in a state of superposition until you make an observation, collapsing the quantum wave function to a single orientation, thus allowing it to fit....

I want my body to be cremated and then have the leftover carbon turned into a diamond!

Exactly. As a poetic friend of mine puts it, "There's no such thing as random, even dice have a past."

The exact value of pi is actually that irrational number that people like to waste supercomputer time on calculating to millions of decimal places, but a calculation of pi to such extreme precision is useless for any practical purpose. You're on the right track but you're asking the wrong question. The catch is that circles are purely a mathematical abstraction, not a real thing. In the real physical world, circles don't exist. The closest we could come is a bajillion-sided polygon where each side is one Planck Unit long.

You forgot about the deceased..... Should we go with nukes or bioweapons?

If I had mod points right now you would get a "Funny" for that.

If I had a nickel for every gay man with a girlfriend or wife.....

I hear electronics also. TVs and monitors make a high-pitched whine that I can tune out if there's other noise going on, but can actually get to be painful if someone has left their TV on displaying nothing in a quiet room.

Hey! I thought that seeing Yoda fight in a light-saber duel (presumably throwing his own body around with force-telekinesis) was one of the only good moments in the otherwise unspeakably horrible prequel trilogy. Don't take that away from me!

I don't actually like guns but I still very much want them to be legal. As long as guns physically exist, bad people will be able to get their hands on them. Period. Can't put the genie back in the bottle no matter how many laws you pass. As long as bad people have physical access to guns, everyone else needs access to guns to be on equal footing to properly defend themselves. (Though I do agree that most people could use more training on how to properly use their guns, and I would be in favor of mandatory training like what Switzerland does.)

More police is also not an answer. The NRA has used this line so much that it's a cliche now, but that doesn't invalidate the point: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." Emergency services can take a life-threatening amount of time to respond. This is why we have privately owned fire extinguishers and first aid kits. Privately owned guns are the same sort of precaution.

Also, another true cliche: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Even if you somehow manage to miraculously remove every gun on the planet and remove the knowledge of how to build them from our collective consciousness, people will go right on killing each other with knives and rocks and whatever else happens to be handy at the time. In a world without guns, wheelchair granny cannot defend herself against a thug with a baseball bat. Guns just level the playing field a bit.

The thing that bugs me the most about this issue though (at least in America) is that the liberals, who I usually side with come voting day, are on the side of disarmament. When it comes to electing politicians, why do I have to choose between civil rights and gun ownership? I see private gun ownership as a fundamental civil rights issue. I contribute to the ACLU and the NRA, and I don't understand why more "liberals" don't see it the same way.

The problem is there is no such thing as "proper spelling and grammar". By who's authority is it "proper"? The dictionary can't even produce self-consistency, let alone some sort of overall fundamental logical sense.

Fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with your string of l33t-speak (or text-speak as the kids are calling it now) as long as its meaning is unambiguous.

If "irregardless" makes you wince, how do you feel about flammable/inflammable? Also, will "irregardless" suddenly be acceptable ~5-10 years from now when it makes its way into an "official" printed dictionary like Webster's? Irregardless doesn't cause confusion, because the only people that don't understand its definition (synonym for "regardless", despite apparent root structure) are grammar nazis who refuse to learn.

Evolution is, by definition, made of aberrations.

As I said in my original post, I am a recovering former grammar nazi. I understand, to some extent, where you are coming from. They key realization for me was that an "error" isn't really an "error" unless it actually prevents communication from occurring.

I love my language too. "If you love something, set it free." If you dig in your heels and stick to "proper" spelling and grammar, you will rapidly find yourself unable to communicate with the rest of us.

As a recovering former grammar nazi, I would just like to say:

FUCK THE DICTIONARY!

Thanks to popular (mis)use, ironic now has multiple definitions, irregardless of what the dictionary might say.

Yeah grammar nazis, I just said "irregardless". Based on common usage, it is simply a synonym for "regardless". It's here to stay, you might as well get used to it. And I put periods outside of quotation marks and parentheses when it makes logical sense to do so (blame math/programming for that one if you must have a scapegoat). And cellphone is one word. And I can start a sentence with "and" if I want to. :P

Really, as long as communication occurs, what's the big deal? Why religiously stick to arbitrary rules of grammar/spelling/usage? Webster is not the final authority on what is or isn't valid english communication. (Actual real-world usage is.) Our language is constantly evolving, why can't you evolve along with it?

...or a broken/sticky/inaccurate fuel gauge. It's happened to me more than once, on different cars no less. Don't see how that can fairly be called incompetence.

I once even had a car run out of gas as I was pulling into the gas station, and I was able to coast up to the pump. Now that's lucky.

You know, a small subset of the population actually does react to marijuana that strongly. My wife is one of them (and yes, she has experience with stronger stuff like mushrooms too, so she knows what she's talking about).

Personally, I'm rather disappointed by most illicit drugs. Hollywood told me they would have a much stronger effect. I've tried alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms, acid, opium, ecstasy, cocaine, speed, and DMT, and not one of them made me actually lose control of myself or hallucinate in such a way that I couldn't easily differentiate it from reality. I still haven't tried some of the more exotic hallucinogens (like peyote), but I strongly suspect they won't be much different from mushrooms/acid.

No, HUMANS are stupid and selfish. It really has very little to do with age.

Please don't propagate ageism.

Oh, and no matter how young they are, your kids aren't your property. They are fully sentient individuals, and are generally capable of making their own decisions and learning from the bad ones all by themselves. The sooner you realize that, the better your relationship with them will be.