I'm assuming it was a translation, unless GP was reading English as well as German in grade 2.

To be fair, I think it may be something in the water, as this clip of Steve McLaren shows.

(For those who don't know, Steve McLaren is English, born in York. This interview was from a Dutch TV station after he had been managing a Dutch football side for a while. And yes, it is hilarious).

Brazil is more diverse, with just under 50% white (mainly consisting of those of Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Ukrainian descent). It has more people of Lebanese descent than Lebanon, and the largest population of those of Japanese descent outside of Japan, as an example of two surprising stats.

The purpose of lights is to improve safety on high speed roads. Hence lighted highways. Otherwise, night time driving would have to be slowed significantly to be safe, unless you're driving with high beams.

Most of the UK's motorway network is not lit, and just about all of the dual carriageway network isn't either. In some places they're turned off after a certain time (usually about midnight). In quite a few places, they've got lights, but have stopped using them. You get used to it, and no one drives with full beams on. Technically you're allowed to use large A roads (not motorways) for all sorts of things because they're public rights of way, so you are allowed to walk down them, ride (either bike or horse) down them, even drive geese down them. The speed limit is 70mph, but generally people drive up to 80.

I'd guess that under 5% of advanced boards can be solved without guessing.

Oops

I'm assuming you've never played minesweeper, because if you had you wouldn't believe this. I'd guess that under 5% of advanced boards can't be solved without guessing. There are absolutely loads of situations in which guessing is necessary, for example any straight line of ones. Another common one is mentioned higher up in the thread

And yes I do know most (if not all) of the advanced techniques, they're not exactly that complex.

They even tried to hijack Xmas and turn it into a purely secular holiday.

It was already pretty secular, and the bits that weren't weren't Christian. I mean, we put up decorations, give gifts to friends and family, put a tree in our house, and Santa comes down the chimney. Which parts of the way most people celebrate Christmas are religious, (except for the tree which most definitely is not Christian)?

The same's true about Easter... we paint eggs, and give chocolate bunnies and eggs, because obviously they symbolise the resurrection of Jesus.

The only thing windows does that linux doesn't is directX and better gaming support, which will soon change if valve is sucessful, people will switch because they don't want to pay $200 a year just to browse the internet

Which is why this story is about gaming systems the NHS has in use, obviously.

I wonder when microsoft will get around to getting their vendors to stop accepting kickbacks for shitty adware on new systems.

This practice is one of the reasons why I still build my own desktop systems. Getting rid of the junk is a massive hassle, and restoration of the system from partition brings it all back.

As for lack of proof of them doing birth control and infanticide I would say the Tanit necropolis is good enough evidence.

Infanticide is not birth control. It happens after birth. So, no, Carthage did not practice birth control. The question about whether Carthage practiced infanticide is still up for debate. What is not up for debate is whether the Romans and the Greeks practiced infanticide - they did.

Your claim was that birth control (which Carthage did not do) had a contributing factor in their demise. That's just wrong on every level.

What we cannot have is everyone or even a large segment of the population choosing to do that. Once that becomes a trend the end result is extinction.

FFS... there are 7 billion people in the world. Prior to basic technology, less than ten thousand years ago, that number was less than 5 million.

You want an example of an ancient society which embraced birth control as an ethos? Carthage. As a result they became over dependent on military assistance from Libyan and Numidian mercenaries. When the Romans invaded guess who won?

The Romans invaded basically all of Europe. They did not succeed because all of Europe was practicing birth control. To say that the military success of ancient Rome was due to their opponents practicing birth control is... interesting. Also, Carthage did not practice birth control, but don't let that spoil your argument.

You mean "could be", not "are", because it isn't happening. At least in the U.S.

No, I meant "are". There's an "if" in the middle of the sentence.

So you're saying that the people who deliberately exposed the native americans to smallpox did the same to themself? Doesn't that imply that they were not trying to kill them with it, but inoculate them?

From your wikipedia link : "Infection via inhaled viral particles in droplets spread the infection more widely than the deliberate infection through a small skin wound. The smaller, localised infection is adequate to stimulate the immune system to produce specific immunity to the virus, while requiring more generations of the virus to reach levels of infection likely to kill the patient. The rising immunity terminates the infection. So the twofold effect is to ensure the less fatal form of the disease is the one caught, and to give the immune system the best start possible in combating it."

No one knew for certain anything about germs and the transmission of diseases then, and like I said, the miasma theory was still mainstream.

Government handouts are massively productive if they help someone who has just been made redundant get back into work. That's kind of the point of government, in my opinion, to help and protect those at shitty parts of their life.

Stuff like child benefit is a different matter, and annoys me (in the UK, you've got to be rich to not qualify for child benefits, I think they should go to the poor only). Also, taxing and giving benefits to one person at the same time is counterproductive... getting rid of taxes for the poor will go a long way to ending benefit culture.

One thing to remember is that back then most people believed in the miasma theory. It was only by the second half of the 19th century that germ theory became accepted.