About 95% of what I read and write daily is in English, but I converse almost exclusively in Japanese.

The drone pilots are military pilots, in uniform, on military installations. The aircraft themselves are clearly marked with U.S. Air Force insignia.

"Hiding among civilians" would be If the drone aircraft were carrying out their attacks while mixed in among a formation of CNN-chartered helicopters and UN support transports, or if the pilots remotely operating the aircraft were doing so sitting in public cafes dressed as businessman.

The enemy are wholly justified under the rules of warfare to attack the drone aircraft, or the pilots who control them. Neither of these actions in any way necessitate engaging civilians. If Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan don't have the means to take out a pilot sitting in a underground bunker in Las Vegas, that's their problem.

Actually, if you're talking about academic publications, I would bet that the typical foreign (non-native speaker or English) reader would have no more, perhaps even less, trouble understanding modern SMS-influenced grammar than a typical middle-aged, non-academic native speaker of English (myself). Why? Because such people have probably picked up all their informal English from their peers -- fellow grad students who are young and tech-savvy.

There's no arguing your main point that using "cuz" in an academic paper is a very bad idea, but I think you're underestimating the ability of non-native speakers to pick up informal language. The French speaker can figure out a phonetic transform in English-as-a-second-language just as well as the native speaker.

I frequently read English-language e-mails/postings by Japanese, Turkish, and Brazilian people and they use "pls" and "ur" and the rest all the time. Conversely, I occasionally read Portuguese (my third or fourth language) on net forums, and figuring out abbreviations like
  "vc" for "você" is quite simple.

Get your ass to Mars!

What makes this different from Legos, pixelblocks, ASCII art, or even a JPEG image, is that the selection of pixels/pieces is predetermined, limited, and they must all be used to make the image. For all those other forms you're allowed to pick the closest color value for each pixel.

With this puzzle, supposing you did it manually, scanning row by row, and picking the best-fitting piece for each pixel. It'll look great at first, but soon you'll be running out of good matches and having to choose less and less optimal pieces; you can't say "give me a 45% with a sideways gradient" when you've used them all up. So the algorithm has to consider how to distribute all the pieces throughout the image for the optimum match.

"Jigazo" means "self-portrait" in Japanese. Clever naming.

I regularly use a 133MHz, 48MB RAM laptop running an eight-year-old RedHat distribution, for programming for fun.
I've used it to work through Peter Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp" and SICP. Other than the compiler/interpreter setup, all I need is a bare-bones X window manager and Emacs.

Yeah, yeah. You know what's another lazy form of protest? Stupid people who protest to show how much they disagree with the policy of their country's government. If they take such exception, they should stop being subject to the government by renouncing their citizenship and moving to another country. Sheesh.

Two is, in fact, a somewhat magical number, and thus a legitimate condition for unions (of people or anything else). In a group of two, each member has one and only one partner.

What if an outside agency (such as the police) is in a situation of having to notify or otherwise grant some priviledge to a person's spouse in an emergency? If the person has multiple spouses, which should come first? If one can't be tracked down, how many more should be tried?

With just two people, one can't get jealous of the "other". Two or more can't conspire against others.

As every software tester should know, there are three classes of numbers: zero, one, and more than one. And a partnership by definition is one to one, not zero, no more than one.

Why should marriage be tied to the issue of having children? The two acts are completely independent of each other, and an enlightened definition of marriage should thus pose no restrictions based on consanguinity. What if one or both are infertile?

Preventing inbred children is a legitimate concern, but that is, and should be, out the reach of marriage laws.

Yeah, after all everyone knows just how superior -- in terms of nutrition, environmental impact, and taste -- the typical Western diet (beef and processed everything) is, right?

We ought to be subsidizing McDonald's to provide meals in space.

>> The other straws being waiting three hours in
>> security lines, having your baggage smashed by
>> pissed-off hispanic handlers, ....

I'm neither hispanic, nor a particular fan of airport baggage handlers, but as an American I say, by all means, take your ethnic stereotypes to other countries whose baggage handlers will most certainly appreciate them.

Let's see, from your post I surmise that you are neither a EU citizen nor a US citizen.

So what is/was your citizenship? The Soviet Union? Some "non-aligned" African republic? (How many foreigners were able to enter The German Democratic Republic without a visa?!)

>They wont let me in the country, even if I
> have a visa, even if I answer all the
> intrusive questions they want to ask.

If you have a visa, doesn't that by definition mean they've agreed to let you in the country?