Yep. There most likely were multiple waves of emigration from Africa. It's just that the most recent one is the one that made the largest impression in the gene pool.
It's made for tinkering and learning. It's used for a lot more due to it being so easily replaceable.
After all, I don't care if there are binary blobs from a trusted vendor for the device playing retro video games -- the TV is bound to have more spyware anyway...
MOC will play mods as well as other audio, and since it can be controlled over the console, you can probably hook it up to a web page too, if you're prepared to tinker with it.
People from the Nordics had trade relations with Southern Europe and Asia all the way back in the bronze age. Alas, records are vague at best, but there's definitely reason to believe there was an influx of people and ideas from the Black Sea area before and during the migration period, just a few hundred years before the viking raids and Norse settlements all over Europe.
And as if that wasn't enough, the Norse were quite infamous for taking captured women as wives and they also took slaves from the peoples they raided. Those people didn't just dissapear from the gene record.
Adding my voice to this argument: Xbox live stopped my pirating simply by providing a more easily accessible alternative and with prices that are competitive enough for me to prefer to pay for games rather than getting through the hassle of pirating.
Life, as we know it, only exists in one single known location in the Universe: Earth.
If we assume life is abundant in the Universe, then we should be able to pick up signs of others, such as radio signals, or bio-indicators in other planets' atmospheres, and so, we ask where the aliens are.
Since we don't find any, we then assume that there is something preventing this abundance of life from developing into something we can detect, and something's called the Great Filter.
As of yet, we only have a single point of data, and since we're still here there's some speculation that we've allready passed through the filter. Another data point would mess up the math a bit and we could, statistically speaking, end up with a scenario meaning we still haven't passed the filter, and that we might still have an apocalyptic event wiping us out.
Life on Venus would give us a better idea of what to look for in other places, and that might help us narrow down the search a bit and find other places with life.
Intelligent life is a different matter. We don't know how common it is for
1) a planet to have formed around a star with the right composition of materials
2) have the exact right conditions for life to form early
3) for that life to survive for billions of years while
4) building up large reserves of substances that can
5) be used as fuel by a tool using bunch of talking apes
6) propel their civilization's technology far enough to match ours
7) send a signal that can reach our specific little dot
8) for that signal to be reach us during the miniscule time-frame that we've been able to pick it up.
I mean, what if the glory days of the Milky Way was 500 million years ago and we're developed just a little to late to be able to see the last remnants of galactic civilization crumble to dust? What if we just happen to be the first, and we develop past such technology before anyone else develops it?
Yep. A common European first language would start a process which would result in a terrible loss of local cultural tradition. Cultural suicude for the common good has been suggested before, but I can't imagine that there would be a lot of people who'd agree with it.
As a Swedish-speaking Finn, I can confirm that a culture can end up on the decline even if there's powerful legal backing to preserving it (including forcing the remaining ~90% of the population to learning Swedish in school). Incidentally, I'd say there's a large correlation with English being more and more accepted in Finnish society, but I suspect the actual root cause simply is that cultural production is mainly taking place in the first language (Finnish) and that it leaves less for the others.
The same would happen if you managed to get the entire EU to agree to switch to one single language (remember, it's likely that it would be French or German instead of English). As a result of pushing adoption of the new first language, it would mean increased cultural output in that language, and a reduced output for the others. After a while, the differences will start showing.
I've lived in Denmark for quite a few years and I agree that people in Copenhagen and the other larger cities wouldn't notice that much of a difference to begin with, but remember that this would mean a cultural shift that will take multiple generations. Ask the German speakers in southern Jutland in another 24 years, and compare how their culture thrives compared to how they did before the war and you will probably have a pretty decent view on how the situation would be for many, many of EU's minorities 100 years after the switch to a single European first language.
