I know Family Guy isn't obligatory, but given where this discussion ended up, I just couldn't resist...

I think you meant prorogue. Perogies are delicious though!

For what it's worth, my great-grandfather was born in Prussia (no idea where, he died way before I was born and he never spoke of it apparently) and left as a boy, about 12 years old I think and came to Canada. My grandpa, who was in school during WW2, told me that it was not very fun sometimes to have a German surname. Some people wouldn't talk to you and were very suspicious of your family. Even though you had nothing at all to do with Nazis or Hitler, and outwardly expressed your support of the British Empire and Canada, you were associated with them.

Disclaimer: I was a Foreign Language Assistant in a vocational school in Germany.

This sounds exactly like Germany with their vocational schools and apprenticeship system.

Want to do a skilled trade? Go to school and learn all about it until age 16, then you're off on an apprenticeship for a year or two. Then you can come back for more school afterwards, or continue working (I think).

Want to go to university? You have two options AFAIK: be smart enough in the initial weeding out process to go the Gymnasium route (that's their word for what we would generally consider as AP classes in high school, except the school is entirely devoted to AP students), or you can do your apprenticeship and come back to school and do I think 2 years of Fachoberschule (vocational/technical secondary school). With an FOS diploma, you're allowed to go to university, at least in Hessen. I can't comment on other federal states.

My info might not be 100% accurate... I only observed it in action and participated from a teacher's perspective.

As rusty as my French is, I'll try to give this a shot..

In the indicative present tense, the second person plural of the verb "penser" is vous pensez, whereas in the imperative case, the second person plural is pensez.

If you're speaking formally, you normally use the 2nd person plural (vous) if you're speaking to a single person. Informally, speaking to a single person, the use of the 2nd person singular is called for*. This differs from, say, German where the formal person is the 3rd person plural (some might argue it's an entirely different person, but it never differs from the 3rd person plural other than the pronoun, Sie, is always capitalized). You usually always drop the pronoun, which is fairly common throughout many languages.

As for "think of the children," the correct translations as far as I know are "Pensez aux enfants!" (2nd person plural, formal or to command a group, exclusive of yourself) but you could also say "Pense aux enfants!" (2nd person singular, informal to command a single person) or "Pensons aux enfants!" (1st person plural, to a group, including yourself, "Let's think of the children!").

*FYI, just like in English, use of the 2nd person singular in the imperative is generally considered rude in most social settings. There are exceptions though, such as in the military, speaking to children, etc.

It's been a while since I thought about French grammar. I thought it was dead and gone and replaced with German, but I guess it's still rattling around in there somewhere... Looks like 13 years of French Immersion wasn't a complete waste after all!

Yeah, line quality. We've got DSL from MTS at home (rural Manitoba, Canada, in a town) and suffer from frequent disconnects. We're supposed to have 8000/1000 service, but it disconnects too frequently. They tried cutting my upload to 512 and that didn't change anything. They've now set it to 5000/512 to see if that helps, and so far it's been worse, but I could just be jaded. I've been fighting with this crap for too long, tried everything. I wasn't home for the appointment, so I unfortunately wasn't able to talk to the tech directly. That would have been nice.

During the day it's fine since it's a bedroom community and mostly everyone works somewhere else. I run an SSH tunnel to home while I'm at work so I know exactly when it goes down, and during the day it's pretty good mostly. Evenings between about 5 and 9 are especially horrible because everyone gets home and jumps online which saturates the line to Winnipeg. Basically they've completely and utterly oversold the area to the point that you disconnect 10 times per evening. According to the tech, they're supposed to be running fibre out in the spring. I'm not sure if that's going to be FTTC or FTTH, but either way it should be much better than what we've got now.

Anyway, I've got Assassin's Creed 2 for my 360, and luckily it doesn't need a constant connection like the PC version or I probably would have broken something by now!

We have an official Mosquito Magnet (I think it's a half acre model, but I could be wrong) in the back yard in the spring & summer. The thing traps ungodly amounts of mosquitoes. The creepiest thing is pulling the trap box out and holding it up to your ear and listening to thousands of mosquitoes buzzing at once. It's insane. It goes through a tank of propane in 21 days or so, and you have to change the scent cartridge every 2-3 propane tanks.

Does it actually put a dent in the biting mosquito population? I have no idea. Possibly, but there are so many of them (especially with a wet spring or summer) that it's hard to notice a difference.

Thanks for this. I just found out that my future home is on a fibre cabled street. 10, 20 and 50mbps are available and £38 for 50mbps naked cable sounds pretty damn good to me. The only problem is the existing Tiscali line has the best international calling plan known to man with unlimited free calls (up to 1 hour long, but they recommend hanging up and calling back) to a list of 50 countries and it is very important for us to keep that. The only downside to Tiscali is the abhorrent DSL speeds. Hovering around 1mbps, sometimes less, they're absoultely pathetic. Maybe we can just drop the DSL part and just keep the phone plan. That would be nice. I'll have to look into that.

Maybe moving to the UK isn't going to be so bad after all...

I believe you're thinking of Xlink Kai. It was tunnelling software with some kind of centralized server that had a friends list and stuff that fooled the Xbox into thinking remotely tunnelled LAN players were local. I remember setting it up, but I don't recall using it to play a game with anybody since I didn't know many people with an Xbox.

Obligatory Family Guy reference!

Yeah, but all Senate appointments are POLITICAL!

Harper just padded the Senate with some of his cronies the other day. Haven't you ever noticed that the PM will only appoint senators from within his own party? Usually it's their close friends or party minions who have put in a lot of time on Parliament Hill and "deserve" an appointment. Luckily the maximum age for a Senator is 75.

Yeah and those sticks cost a ton. You can replace a wooden hockey stick for like $20-$30 easily, but a carbon fibre stick costs like 4x more than that. NHL players likely don't know or care what it costs, they just tell the equipment manager to get them whatever and it appears. Hell, most of their stuff is likely given to them free by sponsors anyways. "Hey if Sidney Crosby is using an Easton/Sherwood/Nike/Bauer/etc stick, then every kid in Canada will want to use one too... hmm why don't we give him an unlimited supply?"

No I tend to get out of the way as quickly as possible then pick it up once it hits the floor, much like when dropping a knife.

I think you meant soldiering... soldering isn't all that dangerous.

A couple problems...

1) Due to the fact that the ISS orbits Earth very quickly, with an orbital period of 91 minutes, you'd barely get your receiver up and running and locked onto the signal before it disappeared again. DirecTV doesn't work on the opposite side of the planet to the USA, and the planet definitely makes a better door than a window in this case.
2) TV birds are generally spot beamed. Yes the ISS orbits much closer to Earth than satellites in geostationary orbit, but regardless, if you're outside of the spot beam, you might not get much of a signal. Also, as in my first point, the planet tends to get in the way.
3) The astronauts presumably have much more important things to do, like trying not to screw up and kill everyone on board, science experiments, station maintenance/building, etc, than to goof around with some stupid satellite TV service.

Not quite true, as VW have been making the VR6 engine for quite some time. Yes, technically it's still a V configuration, but it's a 15 degree V, not a 90 degree V. And the pistons aren't directly across from one another, they're staggered to make it more compact.

The kicker is that it's one of the only, if not the only V6 out there with just one cylinder head and it can fit under the hood of pretty much any 1980+ VW vehicle due to it's much smaller form factor (compared to a 90 degree V).

They also make other crazy configurations like the W8's (available in the VW Passat), W12's (available in the VW Phaeton & Touareg) and W16's (available only in the Bugatti Veyron).