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"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

~ Socrates (399 BC)

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Socrates ever said that. Your quote first appeared in the book Personality and Adjustment in 1953. There is no evidence of the quote before that date. See

  http://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html
  http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398104

you've never had the right to libel or slander people, nor have you had the right to commit fraud. Hate speech is similar in the fact that it's not something that advances any meaningful purpose.

Actually you do have a right to libel or slander people. That was the issue in New York Times vs. Sullivan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_vs._Sullivan. You do have a right to libel public figures as long as the public figures can't prove that you did it with "malice." In Sullivan, the Alabama police department was actually wrongly accused.

(Although you might redefine libel. You could say that what would otherwise be libel isn't libel if the subject is a public figure).

The problem is that we've gone too far in being accommodating of hate speech. And I say that as a legitimate civil libertarian.

I'm going to complain to the civil libertarian club and demand they revoke your membership. You're not a civil libertarian at all.

Perhaps I can inject some intelligent ideas into this discussion by recommending that everybody who is interested in understanding free speech read the classic, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. http://bartleby.com/130/2.html

Teachers used to assign Mill during the McCarthy days to show their students how the government was violating the First Amendment.

It is often considered a threat to Christianity because without a literal Adam and Eve there was no "fall" and therefor we didn't inherit a "sinful nature" from them making the need for God to sacrifice himself, as a child of himself, to himself, to save us from himself, unnecessary. You are correct, though, that it is often literalists who take the most offense to the notion of evolution. I find that most Christians (people in general, really) are startlingly ignorant of the content of the bible and the actual mechanisms and theory of evolution.

Being someone from the deep south, I can definitely understand the threat. And, you're exactly right, it's a huge threat to the literalists that insist on treating the Bible like it's some legal document (Biblical law not withstanding). It's not so much the Adam and Eve thing that I have heard. It's usually those saying that the Bible says it was 7 days, so it was 7 days.

I usually try to show them that evolution is perfectly compatible with creation if you don't insist on the literal interpretation. First off, what is a "day" to God (I usually don't bother bringing relativity or God's mass into it, though that usually is quite entertaining). Second, Genesis 1 says that life was created first in the oceans. Then, the next day, God created the land animals and FINALLY man. The timelines and "details" match perfectly if the single week interpretation isn't insisted upon.

Of course, many still insist on being literalists. Then, I ask them to explain to me why Ecclesiastes chapter 9 doesn't say there's no heaven or hell if "the words mean what the words mean." They start losing their preference for literal interpretation at that point.

It is an old story about br'er rabbit, br'er fox, and br'er bear. It is a kid's story that has been told for ages in the south until a bunch of racist Yankees started seeing "hidden meaning" in the story. Of course these are the same folks that probably think being tarred and feathered was about changing a white man's skin color too, so there you go.

You can get an overview here on wikipedia and please notice it is a fucking politician that screams racist. Because as much as liberal politicians would like to believe that kids are just little klan members, little kids aren't racist like them. You tell them a story about a bear and a fox that tricks a rabbit with a ball of tar in a hat? Well they actually think it is about a bear a rabbit and a fox, not "Whitey keeping the black man down!" or some such bullshit.

And if you read the story NOBODY says nigger, or any other racist shit about the tar baby trap. Br'er rabbit merely gets insulted because he says good morning to the tar baby and the tar baby refuses to show him the courtesy of saying good morning back, and when he punches the tar baby for refusing to show him common courtesy he gets caught in the trap. Anyone who is southern knows it is an insult to refuse to return a common courtesy when it is shown to you, and is similar to the old English cut direct and Br'er Fox and Br'er bear know Br'er rabbit is a proud bunny and ain't gonna take being insulted like that.

It is a damned shame that little kids stories like that are treated as racist taboo when the intended audience simply doesn't think like that if not brought up in a racist household. I had those stories read to me as a kid, and never once did I think "oppressive whitey" because like any other kid I took it on face value, that it was a rabbit, a fox, a bear, and a ball of tar with a hat and coat. Only adults see that as some racist diatribe on black oppression.

Umm... hate to tell you

Though not exactly English either...

and if you believe otherwise, you very much are a good definition of what is wrong with this world, in terms of a stunning display of greed backed up with force, overwhelming the common goodquote>and if you believe otherwise, you very much are a good definition of what is wrong with this world, in terms of a stunning display of greed backed up with force, overwhelming the common good

I see. So I'm assuming that you plan on releasing YOUR PRODUCTION for everyone's free use, right?? And you wouldn't mind at all if anyone feels like using your movie however they see fit, right?? And you wouldn't feel the least bit sleighted if your movie was used all over the place, millions of times, yet you saw only $11, right??

Or maybe some Aesop might be in order here.

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -T. S. Elliot

"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal." -Pablo Picasso

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -Igor Stravinsky

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." -Steve Jobs

"Good coders code, great coders reuse." -anonymous

You mean like the free Acrobat Reader? No wait, that supports only PDFs. Really the main advantage of this e-reader is that unlike Kindle, it uses a full sized monitor AND your computer [...]

TFA tries very hard to highlight the main advantage of Blio over Kindle. If you look at the very first screenshot in the article, it's a color illustration of a human skull from an anatomy textbook. This is an appplication that Kindle can't handle: illustrated textbooks. Kindle is black and white, has a page that's relatively small, doesn't usually (ever?) include illustrations, and doesn't have proper formatting for math.

I think the main advantage of Blio over PDF is this: "Like all e-readers, Blio will adopt some form of DRM and proprietary formatting [...]" Well, that's only an advantage in the publisher's eyes, but they do seem to see it as crucial.

I can also imagine certain categories of books where Blio could do something useful for the reader that can't be done as well by PDF. Consider a public-domain edition of Gray's Anatomy. You can get it here in html format. Now suppose you want to read it on the bus, without carrying a full-size laptop computer with you. If the Blio software is done well, it might adapt itself better to an e-book reader than html or pdf.

TFA says, "Kurzweil and knfb are working with Google to try to make their extensive catalog of printed materials available for Blio." Google is not in the same market as kindle. Amazon sells a relatively small number of recent, profitable books, each of which has to be formatted for the kindle. Google has a gigantic archive of old, public-domain books, none of which is a profitable item in and of itself, but which, aggregated, make something that google might be able to profit from. There is no way that google is going to bring out special e-book editions of all those books.

just an fyi:

That was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inauguration speech in 1933 during the Great Depression. I was starting to wonder why I should bother posting this info until it prompted me to look for a bit more info on it and I found this cool site: http://www.bartleby.com/124/

which contains the texts of the inauguration speeches for all of the Presidents of the US. Here's the actual quote, with a little more context:

I AM certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.

quite a contrast to the 43rd President!

I spend a big part of my life taking complicated scientific information and making it simple enough for people to read on the Internet in bite-sized chunks.

But sometimes it isn't possible.

Sometimes if you want to understand something important, you just have to sit down and go through something long, with difficult language, and boring parts, where you have to read it several times and look things up before you get it right. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html

The Republicans and Democrats are competing with each other to see who can destroy the common good faster and make more money out of it for their campaign contributors.

If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 that shows you how the free market system is failing and how the Bush administration was pimping the regulatory system, you won't understand what they're doing to you (us).

If everybody is like you, this democracy is in trouble.

Yeah, I read the blogs, I read Glen Greenwald, Common Dreams and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But even Greenwald (he's a lawyer) will tell you that sometimes the only way to find out the truth is to read the (long, complicated) original source.

This idea that you can take a lot of snippets from ideological bloggers on all sides, throw them into a box and somehow the truth will shake out, is like the idea that you can take a lot of bad mortgages, aggregate them together and have them turn into good investments. That's what we call "A mile wide and an inch deep." You wind up with a lot of manipulation and cynicism.

Sometimes you have to do hard work. And one thing I don't tolerate is being lazy when you have an important job to do.

You could make an argument that nobody deserves George Bush. That may be true. But we get him because Americans are too lazy to read a 5,000-word news story.

For concrete ways to downsize essays like hers, refer to the Elements of Style.

My favorite quote from the book,

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

And as with most manuals of style, this can be taken wildly out of context.

The poster you're referring to is complaining that the mechanical details of what's being discussed didn't need the descriptive and alliterative treatment in order to convey their meaning. Of course, that's true on some level, but it's also not what the manual of style that you quote is trying to caution against. Let's take an example

The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.

What's being communicated, here? I read it as a nod to some of the informal check-lists that MIT admissions wants to fill up. She's aware of the world outside of her chosen field, capable of ignoring rules when exploring and aware of the consequences of doing so. This is an admission of trespassing in an application essay. It's exactly the kind of honesty that they want to see, but at the same time, it requires careful introduction so that the reader understands that the student has matured from the experience and isn't simply bragging.

Also, not surprisingly, manuals of style mean little to someone reviewing an application to a top school (though MIT perhaps slightly less so than some). The assumption is that you could probably quote from it. What's interesting is where and when you choose to deviate from the standard and when you don't. The same is true in poetry. Iambic pentameter to novices is about 5 iambs per line. To those who understand the form, it's not nearly so simple. It's about setting the reader up to expect a certain rhythm and then deviating at key times in order to control the experience.

For concrete ways to downsize essays like hers, refer to the Elements of Style.

My favorite quote from the book,

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

The power to tax is the power to destroy

You've got a long way to go to convince me that Hate Speech should be protected under Freedom of Speech - or for that matter, that they're even the same thing.

Don't they make people read J.S. Mill in school any more?

Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

-J.S. Mill, On Liberty

and what we have now is an empire, not a democracy or a republic.

per Franklin, http://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html, we've failed to keep it.

Elements of Style says:

Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's.

Follow this rule whatever the final consonant. Thus write,

Charles's friend
Burns's poems
the witch's malice

This is the usage of the United States Government Printing Office and of the Oxford University Press.

Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus', and such forms as for conscience' sake, for righteousness' sake. But such forms as Achilles' heel, Moses' laws, Isis' temple are commonly replaced by

the heel of Achilles
the laws of Moses
the temple of Isis

The pronominal possessives hers, its, theirs, yours, and oneself have no apostrophe.

---

I think we can all agree that Linus is on par with Jesus and therefore a single apostrophe is correct.

It's not that hard!

Not necessarily true: http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html#1

Haven't seen Doubt, but I do recall that the Streep character was an extremely conservative nun, the sort of person who thinks of all change as evil. I don't think her attitudes were being held up as something to emulate

The problem with your argument is that you don't say how you think ballpoint pens cause bad penmanship. Without some hypothetical mechanism all you've got is just another post hoc argument. You could just as easily claim that the decline in penmanship was caused by the invention of TV, the construction of the Interstate Highway System, or fluoridation. That last one is probably very popular in some circles.

Here's a much simpler mechanism: when skills stop being valuable, people stop learning them. What's the value of handwriting? Well, if your business correspondence is handwritten, then you better make sure that whoever writes out the "fair copy" has really good handwriting. And indeed, there used to be professional scriveners whose sole job skill was extremely good penmanship.

But businesses stopped hiring scriveners after typewriters became common about 125 years ago. There are other uses for handwriting, but they've been gradually eaten away by technology. Nowadays, ability to hack out text on a QWERTY keyboard is a lot more valuable than good penmanship. And that's the skill people have.

Incidentally, a certain politician is considered to have pretty good penmanship, despite having grown up after the decline of the fountain pen. Judging from his autobiography, I suspect his achievement-oriented mother stood over him as he practiced it. Which is the only way you can get a kid to acquire such a skill.

And notice from the document that I link: the dude writes with a felt tip!!!

I'm assuming that the proper transliteration for the Russian title is "Tsar". I believe that "czar" is the proper transliteration of a Polish title. I believe that Russian Ц is usually transliterated as "ts".

http://www.bartleby.com/61/87/C0848700.html

I am aware of this. What's your point?

"In any event both terms are used in the context of computing e.g. "I'm going to burn these files from my hard-disk, to my compact disc.""

I have already mentioned this. But for your sake I will repeat myself: there is in fact a spelling rule (whether you want to give it any credence or not), which has been around for a couple of decades now, and which states that in the context of computing, at least in the U.S., a disk, in the sense of disk-shaped object, is always spelled with a "k". I know that some disk manufacturers spell it "disc". That is not relevant to my point.

See a bit of the history here.

I looked it up at http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html, and it said you must precede the conjunction with a comma when introducing an independent clause.

After providing a $25000M bailout to Detroit's Big Three, when asked if he should earmark $350M in loan guarantees to Tesla Motors in order to appease California voters, the Automotive Czar was reported to have said, "Tesla? How many lobbyists do they have?"

I think Market Socialism is pretty self explanatory. It is a system of free markets and public ownership

A free market is a two way street not one way. If I can't own my own business it's not a free market.

Benjamin Tucker was America's foremost Individualist Anarchist. He founded and edited the journal Liberty.

Let me check that... My copies don't list him but wiki says he published it.

Many American Libertarians worship him, presumably because they don't understand his beliefs fully.

I read "Liberty" semi-regularly, and subscribe to "Reason" magazine, and don't recall reading about him before.

But why should you care about anyone you haven't heard of? They couldn't have been important.

Perhaps I phrased it wrong. I hadn't heard of them before and didn't know if they were important.

Oh also, anyone who reads Paine should also read Mary Wollstonecraft.

The name looks familiar but I don't really recall why. According to your link she supported woman's rights in the late 1700s. That's two people I know of that did back then, Thomas Jefferson also supported equal rights for women and Blacks. In his early drafts of the "Declaration of Independence" he included both as enjoying rights also. However others had to sign it and they opposed this.

Falcon

I am not a socialist, not even a market socialist, whatever that is. I believe in free trade, private (real) property, and voluntary exchanges. I put real in parentheses because I oppose imaginary Intellectual Property, IP, like patents. They may of been useful at one tyme but now they hinder progress.

Your definition would seriously disappoint market socialists like Sam Bowles or Ben Tucker.

I don't know who either one is, I don't recall ever hearing of either one, so I don't care.

Falcon

I think Market Socialism is pretty self explanatory. It is a system of free markets and public ownership. Because, you know, Socialism and Capitalism are not market models in and of themselves. Sam Bowles is a famous American economist. Benjamin Tucker was America's foremost Individualist Anarchist. He founded and edited the journal Liberty. He was a 19th/20th century market socialist who argued passionately against private property, which he called the land monopoly, and for free markets. Many American Libertarians worship him, presumably because they don't understand his beliefs fully.

But why should you care about anyone you haven't heard of? They couldn't have been important.

Oh also, anyone who reads Paine should also read Mary Wollstonecraft.

Sorry, but that's bullshit. (Do you have a citation to support this theory?)

The American Heritage Dictionary
OK. WORD HISTORY: Its origin was the subject of scholarly debate for many years until Allen Walker Read showed that OK is based on a joke of sorts. OK is first recorded in 1839 but was probably in circulation before that date. During the 1830s there was a humoristic fashion in Boston newspapers to reduce a phrase to initials and supply an explanation in parentheses. Sometimes the abbreviations were misspelled to add to the humor. OK was used in March 1839 as an abbreviation for all correct, the joke being that neither the O nor the K was correct.

-- You're the Zogger from Technocrat? Bruce was a bit of a bastard to pull the plug with not a word of warning, wasn't he. I'll never sign up for anything he does again.

Ozymandias of Egypt, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

"Their" is not singular, you cretin. Use "his": it's a perfectly fucking good word.

Oh, come off it. Quit wasting the world's time.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have"

I like that quote, but have never heard it before. It didn't quite ring right for Jefferson, so I dug. According to WikiQuote, it's actually from Gerald Ford's address to Congress in August, 1974.

Albert Einstein's little book _Relativity: The Special and the General Theory_ is a popular book aimed at people with a high school math education (a German one, though, I suppose). I really enjoyed the special relativity part of it when I was in high school, and the math you need to know doesn't get beyond algebraic shuffling with square roots. No calculus is needed.

It's even online for free for readers in countries where 1920 books are public domain (U.S., say): http://www.bartleby.com/173/

I think there may be in-copyright in-print versions that are slightly more up-to-date, though.

Now that I am older, the positivist approach bothers me a lot, but the arguments are still pretty cool.

I think you may be wrong there.

would you say:
a) "all of the data in a computer is crap"
b) "all of the data in a computer are crap"

I know that 'data' is technically a plural, but it's not treated that way by most people.

also - "ones and zeros" is correct. If you were asked "what numbers are there in that hard-drive", you would not answer "ones or zeros"

also, to the other replier - "zeros" and "zeroes" are both correct.
http://www.bartleby.com/68/49/6649.html

The word you were trying to use should be discrete. Your set-top box has no need to pull its punches.

If you are not sure whether you should throw down the gantlet or the gauntlet, don't throw in the towel. There are two words spelled gauntlet and both have gantlet as a spelling variant, so you can't go wrong.

So, if you can't go wrong, I'm not sure what's gotten you worked up.

The summary above says that "problems with the astronauts' restraint systems were the ultimate cause of death for the seven astronauts".

1. Nowhere does the report say that
2. By no definition of ultimate could problems with the restraint systems been indicated as such a cause
3. The CNN's John Zarrella repeatedly states that hypoxia was the ultimate cause of death

Therefore, the problems with the restraint systems could at best be described as "ancillary".

Sorry to go a little grammer nazi on you, but there is no fullstop after Dr. Since the last letter of word to be abbreviated is the last letter of the abbreviation, the fullstop should not be present.

That's been the case in the UK for the last decade or two (longer at Cambridge) but in the U.S. the period is still the norm (as it was pretty much everywhere up until 1950 or so.

Not to go all history nazi on you or anything...

--MarkusQ

P.S. And (switching to spelling Nazi mode) grammar is spelt with an "a."

The American Heritage Dictionary says:

Octopus, noun: inflected forms: pl. octopuses or octopi.

I think you are thinking of the plural of "octopod," which refers, not to an individual, but to an octopus species

Thus: there are twenty octopi in that tank; or, there are twenty octopuses on that tank; but, the octopuses in that tank belong to three different species of octopodes.

The phrase "to better say it" is awkward. However, pedantry in the critique of a long, semi-professionally presented, and ostensibly edited, piece of journalism is not the same sin that it is in the context of a Slashdot post. Furthermore, a split infinitive is not always ungrammatical.

A dictionary merely record usage: what you want is a style guide. Style is always a matter of opinion, but there are experts, and where experts agree you have a guideline worth following. http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/0165.html

As the reference notes, "Impact" has become so widely abused that it will likely "age in" as acceptable.

Don't good fences make good neigbors?

No.

The expression comes from a poem - "Mending Wall" - by Robert Frost, which is an ironic criticism of peoples' need to separate themselves from one another without understanding why - or indeed whether - they should. Walls are by their very nature divisive, and hamper cooperation by design. It is foolish, therefore, just to blindly put them up wherever we can in the name of "security".

To quote:
'"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!"' (Lines 29-34, taken from http://www.bartleby.com/104/64.html )

And on a less literary note:

Walling off every separate bit of the internet is necessary, since the internet by design has no inside and outside that you can separate. However, as we've pretty much proved by trying, that isn't enough to make the internet secure. It's the same lesson that you learn in physical security; if there's no response, it doesn't matter how good your defences are. There needs to be some sort of globalised response to online criminals, because the internet is both global and in need of defense. Otherwise we just carry on with the problem we have now - that a criminal gang in Russia/China/wherever can attack our computers with impunity, safe in the knowledge that there is nothing we can do to stop them, so they have as much times as they need to break in.

All that means is that the law is wrong. Goading someone into killing themselves is murder.

Or at the very least, manslaughter. It's definitely very, very wrong.

I have no idea why you brought up anarchy. I am advocating that we change our Justice system to actually mete out justice. That doesn't sound like anarchy to me.

In this case, the prosecution used tortured logic and applied an almost entirely unrelated law. Interpreting that law in this way makes millions of otherwise innocent people into criminals. That is not justice.

Justice based on how the Jury feels is anarchy. It's the definition of mob rule. You either have very articulate laws that spell out when and where something is wrong/right, or you end up with total chaos.

It is not justice to allow a murderer to go free. Technicalities are not justice.

“That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.” — Benjamin Franklin [Cite]

In your world, pushing someone off a cliff is OK because you didn't kill them. After all, is it your fault they hit the ground?

Making ridiculous strawman arguments only makes you look like hyperventilating internet flamebait. The "new hotness" in internet scams is to impersonate your Facebook friends for fun and profit. It's insidiously clever social engineering and easily accomplished. This is a real issue that needs to be addressed by real legislation, not grandstanding DAs convicting someone in isolated cases on odd technicalities that will affect millions of otherwise innocent people.

So our gilded cages with literal police microphones in the bushes now include free wi-fi? Can I get cappuccino with that? I mean who cares none of us were using our freedom, any ways? Right?

Dumbasses! A cage isn't better just because it's gilded...

"To be like âoea bird in a gilded cageâ is to live in luxury but without freedom.."

http://www.bartleby.com/59/4/gildedcage.html

Every time another cop camera goes up you make a founding father rotate at high velocity in their grave.

Some style-guides' guidance on apostrophes: The Economist, The Times, The American Heritage Book of English Usage.

The Guardian and the Emory Writing Center are more tolerant and admit your way of doing it, albeit as a less common alternative.

And that's just the links on the relevant Wikipedia article. Please inform yourself before dictating dogma.

Where and when did society decide that a problem is only a problem if it is found?
496 - 406 B.C.?

Parlous is perfectly valid English, and a nice word to boot. (Also, you misspelled pardner.)

The Grasshopper said the Ant was a paranoid fringer joke as well guess how that ended up?

The Truth(TM) is the liberal biased lie which became propaganda and is repacked as Hollywood films, repeated by Hollywood actors, as TV shows, and the NBC/MSNBC/PBS/NPR news. It bares nothing to the real truth, and it is the big lie they tell socialist zombies so they won't know when the economy will collapse, or they lose their jobs or house, or go deep into debt, or get so sick from smoking dope and drinking booze and STDS/HIV from all that sex, that they finally learn it was all genocide by the liberal nazis to get us all to kill ourselves because the real liberals that control everything think the planet is overpopulated and they aren't real liberals but left-wing nazis that push genocide in the form of assisted suicide, drug use, too much sex, too much booze, too much fast food, buying too much crap, abortion (1/3rd of your generation are already dead by abortion, the other 1/3rd are dead via suicide, the rest of you are going to die by your own hands if you don't change your ways), and if none of that works enough they will round us up into camps and murder us in the name of global warming or peak oil or some other "liberal cause".

It amuses me to no end to watch people like you go on about how christian fundamentalists are attacking (group they hate of the week) unprovoked, yet maintain that islamic fundamentalists were provoked. Not that I think or foreign policy in that part of the world has helped one bit, but seriously, that is some bullshit stink of an argument.

Well, I didn't say a damn thing about Christian fundamentalist, did I? It amuses me to no end to watch people like you use phrase like "people like you" about people they don't know at all..

If there was a foreign military force occupying the homeland of some group of Christian fundamentalists, I'd call that a provocation. However, such is not the case for Christian fundamentalists in the U.S.

And again, I point out that a provocation is not necessarily a justification.

There was a tremendous amount of debate over the risks of having a standing military weighed against the risk of not having one.

And it ended up with a Constitution that doesn't provide for one (" To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years"), and that relies on a "well regulated militia" as the primary line of defense for the nation.

Ultimately (and rightfully so) the decision was made that not having a standing army with proper training and organization was more of a threat to the Union than having a standing army.

The decision was made that a standing army was useful to steal land from the Natives, and later to conduct invasions of other nations.

"The tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of patriots."

Curious how you abridged that: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787 [emphasis added -tms]

I think Vista is getting a bad rap. I'm not a gammer, so I can't speak of it in that regard.

I fail to see why elderly ladies are qualified to speak for Vista.

I don't care what you do for a living, as long as you don't work for us. :-)

http://www.rucharacter.org/page/ea_glossary/
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=average
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/average
http://www.bartleby.com/61/53/A0545300.html
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average

Even the ones that don't explicitly mention mean, median, and mode say that an average typically typifies a list of numbers. It can also be mean, of course, and that's the common definition, but I'm amazed that a statistician does not know this. What school did you go to?

I don't know what's funnier, that you're citing Wiktionary as a source, or that you're suggesting "university level" philosophy courses to a statistician. ;-)

If you're really that interested in pedantry, though, I might suggest Bartleby on the meaning of average as compared with median or mode. HTH, HAND, &c.

I'm not sure nagging is much of a concern. Many (most?) of the cultures which allow polygamy also tend to turn a blind eye to domestic abuse.

Name one culture which allows polygamy and turns a blind eye to domestic abuse. Remember, polygamy not polygyny.

Falcon

And what if the wives felt they wanted to bring in an extra husband? i'd have less trouble with polygamy if it worked both ways.

Polygamy does work both ways, both men and women can have more than one spouse. It's polygyny, where a man can have more than one wife, and polyandry, where a woman can have more than one spouse, that might not go both ways. Polygamy itself, despite what the mass media keeps saying about the FDLS, allows both men and women to have multiple spouses.

why bother with marriage at all?

Because some want the piece of paper and or the ceremony.

Just live with whomever, breed with whomever and keep rituals and paperwork out of it.

Some do. However if you go through the first website you'll see they still do some. For instance what can be done about children, who has authority over them or who can take them to a doctor. Children are a big factor legally so paper work needs to be done for them. Actually it takes more work to get polygamy/polyamory relationships working smoothly than it does 1 man and 1 woman marriages.

Still, there is the matter of what do the unmarried men in such cultures do?

They can get married, polygamy allows women to have more than one spouse.

Falcon