It's not a useless right. The 5th only applies to self incrimination, and incrimination of a spouse IIRC, and it's not useless. If you could just refuse to testify about anything at all using the fifth, then court proceedings would often go nowhere as witnesses would refuse to testify about anything that was mildly inconvenient.

Nope, I'm sorry, but American English is common to both America and Canada. It's really more like North American English, as the features of the two are very similar. Sure, there are regionalisms, but English itself doesn't vary that much between the two. Most of the time to somebody from elsewhere on the planet, you wouldn't know whether a person is Canadian or English based upon speaking alone.

According to that page, there are more English speakers in Seattle than there are in the entire sub-continent of India.

But, why let facts get in the way of the American bashing. America itself consists of nearly 60% of all native speakers of English and just over half of all speakers globally. And that's precisely the same page that you allege claims otherwise.

Of course you have that right. The 5th amendment only applies to self incrimination. They can force you to testify about other things that wouldn't result in self incrimination. So, if you were on trial for tax evasion, you might be required to answer some questions about how you kept your records, but not the ones that would result in self incrimination. And they wouldn't permit you to leave the stand just because you hit one question for which the 5th applied.

That's certainly possible, however you want to be mindful as any language, mother tongue included, will get forgotten if you don't use it. How long you can go without using will depend upon how thoroughly you learned it in the first place and likely other factors.

But, you do want to make sure exercise it a bit from time to time, just to keep it as firmly embedded as possible. What you're describing sounds like you still have a lot of it there, but access is the issue rather than forgetting it.

Precisely. I saw the same thing when I went to a Starbucks in Guangdong province. I could order in English and in Mandarin, but my brain wanted to do both at the same time. I was ultimately able to order, but I would have gotten my point across better by pointing and grunting.

More recently I was having trouble getting take out from the local supermarket, because the woman working behind the counter spoke Chinese to a colleague, which temporarily caused me to revert to my typical ordering pattern from when I was in China. Trying to override that and order in English just made it worse.

Indeed, people forget about that. I'm effectively a first generation immigrant because of that. My last arriving ancestor came to the US from Germany over a hundred years ago, but it wasn't until my Dad's generation that they stopped speaking German fluently. My Grandfather's working papers were even in German.

This is both my greatest point of pride about the US and one of my biggest concerns about the country. As long as it's dealt with in a mature way, it's a great resource to power our future.

Sometimes it's an innate gift, most of the time though it's just a lot of work. Basically the process works differently for some people than it does for others, and if you're using the wrong methods, you could easily think that you have no talent, when really what's going on is that the method isn't compatible with your particular brain composition.

I've personally struggled a great deal with vocabulary. I wouldn't typically have too much trouble with grammars, but the spelling and vocabulary would take tons of work to learn. It turns out that I'm more of a right brained visual person, so if I want to learn a language, I have to do it backwards. Stare at the words written in multiple colors until they stick, and focus on picking up my vocabulary from written texts and TV.

Also, once one has the idea that they suck at something, it can become a self fulfilling prophesy that may or may not be true.

True, but American English is the predominant form of English at this point. So, learnt and spelt are technically acceptable words, but as things go increasingly in the direction of American, you'll see fewer and fewer people accepting it as the correct words.

This isn't obvious to people who haven't been in that situation and it's a phenomenon that deserves more attention.

What's more, you're completely full of it, if you're suggesting that this level of ease is normal. The people I've met that know 8 or more languages, all had to put in a substantial amount of time doing, time which they didn't have available for other tasks.

The first time that I personally encountered this was at Starbucks in China, where I couldn't decide whether to use English or Chinese and was barely able to blurt out comprehensible words in either language.

As for the 1st world, what does that have to do with anything? Part of the reason why the 1st world is the 1st world is the efficiencies inherent at being able to conduct business in just one language. The time it took you to learn those extra languages didn't just get spontaneously generated, you made choices to use your time in that fashion. In the 1st world, we generally use that time and energy on school and work.

That would involved increasing tax rates.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the government should pay the assessed value when they need to seize land, and that they should pay for the cost of replacing sidewalks, or in this case investigating the caverns, but the reality is that people don't want to pay the cost of that via taxes, and most people will never be directly affected by it.

The answer ultimately, is to catch as many of them as possible, and give them medical treatment, or at least monitoring. And in cases where that doesn't work, you send them to prison or the hospital until a resolution has been reached.

Despite what people think, the reality is that people in prison generally require treatment and frequently have brain damage or other abnormalities. You can increase the penalties all you want, but at the end of the day, that isn't going to deter anybody that isn't thinking about the consequences of their actions. At best you're housing and storing them separate from society, you're not actually preventing crime like that.

What, you mean doWhatImean( X ) isn't a valid way of coding?

But, that wasn't what the GGP was arguing about. He's arguing about the advice that he quoted. And except for a minority of people, who probably aren't harmed by doing it themselves, it's sound advice for everybody.

My son's a photography major you insensitive clod!