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Attacks against The Enlightenment (see also: Age of Enlightenment) say for example, upon the idea of freedom of speech, in the name of one religion or another (let's just stick with this one religion for now) have been ongoing since reason began to displace superstition.

More recently, you may remember the cartoon controversy? This faded from the collective consciousness after "they" (people whose minds are captive to superstition of the islamic brand) repeatedly threatened, and then killed Dutch Filmmaker Theo van Gogh , great grandson of the brother (also named Theo) of the famous painter, Vincent. Contemporary Theo was guilty in the eyes of islam of making a film which was critical of the treatment of women under islam.

The great clash between Islam (unwittingly and unstably allied, by the way, with fundamentalist Christian radicals who are working within the western democracies to undermine the same feared Enlightenment values and institutions in favor of their own brand of superstition) on the one side, against the cultures and nations descended from The Enlightenment on the other, is coming to a head in Europe. The demographic trends, and the inability of the European cultures to assimilate their immigrant Muslim populations (alternatively, those populations are disinterested in assimilating), cause concern that Europe's democratic institutions will be subverted as instruments in the religious colonization of those European countries that gave birth to the Enlightenment by Islam, and their eventual conversion to theocracies in fact, if not in name.

March 2006:
"If Europe continues as it is now, the rising Muslim tide will, one at a time, transform the members of the European Union into Islamic Republics under Islamic Shari'a law as Muslims become the majority population."

February 2008:
The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".

It has been suggested that this problem is exacerbated by limited economic opportunity for young people in these countries.
An Economist Considers the Riots in France (from 2005, there were more riots last spring, March 2007)

The non-political nature of the riots in France

if they could care less, then they care more than the minimum possible.
that opens the door to them caring care some, and possibly a lot, about consumer choice.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/care.html

Not necessarily. See Beginning a sentence with a conjunction.

But the use of apostrophes with initialisms like "learn your ABC's and "mind your P's and Q's" is now so universal as to be acceptable in almost any context.

the US has flaunted WTO rulings in the past just because it could

aged sharp cheddar

Just in case you think I'm being facetious: The best aged sharp cheddar in the US. Can you say "cheese buzz?"

Available by mail order.

/satisfied customer

Very possible, even likely. It might be that if China wants some of that gas and oil, they would have to go through us. But rest assured that the opium trade has a lot to do with it. Big business it is. And that is what's coming back to the west by the megaton. Production is so high now that we are probably having trouble maintaining the price. They are producing so much that we can't consume it all. The Taliban had a handle on it. Check this out. See that graph? Look at the 2001 levels. Very interesting. As soon as we stepped in, production was right back up to "normal". Here's a weird statement from the link: "No other country beside China in the 19th Century ever had such a large amount of land dedicated to illegal activities. Anybody familiar with any history at all would realize that was during the height and as a result of the opium wars. It's just more evidence that this whole "terrorism" thing is quite a ruse to cover up some very dirty business. Too bad there's so many poor saps who just won't hear it and continue to spew government propaganda while calling those with a different opinion a bunch of "nutjobs" while dragging the country to the depths of hell. He knows who I'm talking about You still there, boy?

I'm siding with Paul Brians on this one.
http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html

Raises the question != Begs the question.

Make fun of the horses all you want, their obviously smart enough.

No you haven't. You have seen a near hit. A collusion is a near miss.


A "near miss" is quite correct - it's a miss which was nearly a hit. See http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html#near , http://www.cjr.org/resources/lc/nearmiss.php .

I've also heard it described as meaning "near" as in "close in space" rather than "nearly", though I can't find a reference for that derivation off hand...

I suppose that raises the question, is a word used in multiple places the same word, or different?

They're separate instances, but the same thing lexically. Your quote above has 18 words, of which "word" and "the" each have two instances. You wouldn't say it only has 16 words in it, but you could say it has 16 unique words. Even if you think the two "word"s are the same word, I think there's a good argument that the words "up" (preposition) and "up" (adverb) are not the same, even though they're spelled and pronounced the same, and even have closely-related meanings, they fulfill different functions grammatically.

As for 'with,' the sentence we were looking for was 'Ending a sentence with a preposition is an outrage we won't put up with.' Winston Churchill coined the witticism . . .

The biggest reason to avoid separating a preposition from its object is that it forces mental effort to link the two back together. Rare is the case that a sentence can't be worded to avoid that separation.

I'm a firm believer that the Internet is GOOD for writers. . . . The Internet has blown open the market for myself, and the writers I've hired to "pen" articles.

Maybe you're a good editor when serving as that extra pair of eyes looking over someone else's work; we all tend to have that blind spot looking at our own writing.

https://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/moreso.html

Your still fucking sick.

I prefer to think of myself as "sociopathically open-minded"; putting it that way substantially increases my popularity at parties. =)

On the other hand, you have just demonstrated my earlier surmise was correct: you're merely ignorant.

True, but it's a rather bad rule. It adds no information, and generally is the reason the slower part of the population feels compelled to insert the infernal things into random plurals. See http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/apostrophes1.html/ for a more educated opinion.

In my neck of the woods, the current rule is that an apostrophe is required for words that end with 'day'. Every month, the secretary sends out "Birthday's and Anniversaries" (sic & sic) (I'll admit that English doesn't inspire much faith in consistency.). Managers routinely send emails referring to weekly reports due on "Tuesday's", "Monday's", etc.

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/perse.html

After all the publicity, we have 4 sororities already willing to participate.

http://lug.wsu.edu/~haven/WSULug-Fox-News.swf

Ok, being pedantic here but, not hung, you should use hanged. English grammar generally uses hung for things like paintings, and hanged for people who die by hanging.

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/tact.html

You live and you learn.

After all, if it wasn't important, half of the states wouldn't have tried to get out of the US in order to preserve it; and if it wasn't important, the other half of the states wouldn't have stopped them.

The US Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights. Southern states felt they had rights the federal government was denying them.

Along those same lines, it is more than ironic that you elevate Thomas Jefferson as the paragon of the kind of free-market libertarian capitalist virtue that you seem to be extolling. Just out of curiosity, were the people that Jefferson held in slavery engaged in a "free and voluntary exchange" of their labor with him? Because surely Jefferson would understand the importance of such a thing, because if he didn't, then that would mean that this whole "free and voluntary exchange" was dependent on -- like Jefferson -- on coercion in order to get off the ground...

You bring up a good point about Thomas Jefferson, he was a contradiction in terms. Though he owned slaves he was against slavery, the slaves he owned he inherited from his father and his father-in-law. In his lifetime he freed two, and two others ran away but he didn't chase them down. All seven members of the Hemming family, he had an affair and children with Sally Hemming, were freed. And all were craftsmen. He supported equal rights for all people. In early drafts of the Declaration Of Independence he included statements that held all people enjoyed the same rights including blacks and women. However because many others had to sign the DOI and they didn't approve of those statements he had to remove them. What he said on slavery:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivatng and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people for whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.]

On Charity Well, your example of Mother Teresa in NYC is quite easy to read another way: that regulation in capitalist societies is a balancing act designed to protect people from the most egregious conditions created by capitalism not in order to undo capitalism, but in order to preserve it.

In a truly capitalistic society Mother Teresa would of been able to build her shelter, government wouldn't of blocked her. What threat would allowing her to do so be to capitalism? I can't think of any but you might come up with something.

On the Environment Your embrace of the EPA and environmental regulations should clue you in to something: the kind of capitalist Utopia that you think you want is actually not something that you want at all. You say that you want capitalism; you say that where there is governmental interference there is no capitalism; yet now you say you want governmental interference. Well, what which is it? It seems that all that you have really shown is that 1. you are not consistent; and 2. the kind of free-market Utopia you embrace would look more like distopia.

I think you misunderstand me, or are engaging in purposely distortion. As I said earlier I don't believe in having no government, I'm not

If you're going to use a clichéd expression, at least try to use the correct tense.

cut and dry - wrong
cut and dried - correct

Please bitchslap the next person you encounter that writes the phrase "for all intensive purposes," thank you.

Not cut and dry.

-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien

Although this does beg an entertaining question:

No, it doesn't.

The Chinese handled problems with the opium trade by killing the addicts.

Ah, the old Texas way - "They needed killin'. Maybe I should spam governments with my "capital punishment" services, now with volume discounts. "Such a deal we have for you! Kill two, and get the third one FREE!"

The Brits wouldn't have it any other way

It should be "more so." Not that spell-check is ever to be trusted.

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/moreso.html

It has nothing to do with being a natural language.

Yes, it is syntactically perfectly valid. But it is semantically utterly and completely fucking wrong because it doesn't say what is meant. And, as I pointed out, there is a possibility to express what is meant in a way which is syntactically valid, too, so why not use it?

This is more like having an off-by-one or having the logic in a branch inverted: sure, one can compensate for it and attempt to find out what was really meant, but why make it that difficult?

Especially as it can seen that this isn't some isolated incident, but this mistaken positioning of negation is done by consistently ignoring the first "slot", thus reducing the expressiveness of the English language which I consider to be a bad thing.

Put differently: My parser fully supports English, but everyone else seems to have a botched version where two different statements can mean the same when they should not. So it may be obsolete, but it definitely is not incorrectly implemented:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/not.html

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/capital.html

As a matter of probability, as a matter of history, as a matter of precidence, ID is emminantly more probably than a Darwinian Evolution.

ID is not science and therefore should not be taught in science classes. Evolution on the other hand is science and belongs there. I wouldn't mind having ID taught in public schools however as part of a philosophy curriculum. If so though then other beliefs of the origin of life need to be taught as well. Such as the Apache Creation Story, Navajo Creation Story, and the Zuni Creation Cycle.

You mean "inconsistent", not "schizophrenic". You've committed one of Paul Brians' "Common Errors in English":
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/schizophrenic.ht ml

...it's not an altogether shut and dry decision.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/who's.html

...I think Sprawlmart and others, of course, has a lot to do with it. They're the ones who profit the most from trade with China.

When you think about it, Walmart is far from the first, and certainly not the last. And besides, there is no spoon! There are only trusts, and holding companie,s and banks, and wire transfers, and money laundering jewelery stores and casinos.

You are correct in the case of the parent post, and in the general case (though many scholars argue that apostrophes should never have been used as indication of possessiveness in the first place):

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/apostrophes1.html

You are incorrect in the scope of your statement. The use of apostrophes for plurals is considered universal and acceptable in some cases, such as acronyms:

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/acronyms.html

You are correct in the case of the parent post, and in the general case (though many scholars argue that apostrophes should never have been used as indication of possessiveness in the first place):

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/apostrophes1.html

You are incorrect in the scope of your statement. The use of apostrophes for plurals is considered universal and acceptable in some cases, such as acronyms:

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/acronyms.html

1) Windows security ain't so bad... if you have a firewall :)

So far, my windows xp (sp2) firewall has kept my machine free from viruses. That, and I don't download shady software from entertainment websites. I scan regularly my machine with Ad-Aware, Clamwin and once in a while Hijack this, or a rootkit finder, just to be sure. So far I haven't found any evil zombifying my PC, and I've been using it for years.

2) The problem with Linux is that the learning curve is too steep (or actually too shallow?) for Windows users. It's not that things are hard, just VERY DIFFERENT.

The problem is when Linux zealots or megalomaniac linux programmers refuse to accept the fact that many users DON'T WANT or DON'T HAVE TIME to relearn things.

For example: When selecting text, if you press shift and move the arrows, you select text. And if you press ctrl+shift+arrows, you select whole words. In Linux i try this and end up typing numbers. WTF?

Another example: For dialogs, OK is at the left and Cancel is at the right. But on some window managers (or whatever they're called), OK is at the right and Cancel is at the left, and there's no way to change that. Cutting and pasting in a shell window is so different from using a DOS prompt. And where the heck is Control panel?

In short, I want something that looks and feels IDENTICAL to Windows. Having to learn a different way to do what I was accustomed to do is so much annoying, and I don't have time for that. Hey! Haven't you heard the phrase "the customer is always right?" I'm sick tired of Linux brainiac overlords telling me how I should do things, instead of helping me do things MY WAY. If you want ME to use YOUR operating system, just stop lecturing me, k? And if I ever hear the phrase "RTFM" or "program it yourself" again, then screw you. It's not my obligation to use Linux. If *YOU* complain that *I* don't use it, that's *YOUR* problem. Capicci?

3) But the most important factor to consider is software that is Windows-only. I love winamp. I've grown accustomed to like its interface (the classic 2.0, not the new one), and I like the plugins to play other formats, for example, amiga mod files.

I tried XMMS and other alternatives. Sometimes I couldn't play at all (I know, i used an old distro, but anyway, it didn't "just work".

Another windows-only program I love is Irfanview. And virtualdub, and the list goes on and on. I have a full set of software that I've grown to like and feel comfortable with for doing my daily tasks. If I switch, it's starting all over again, and sometimes there isn't an equivalent software at all (For virtualdub, there's AVIDemux, but the last time i tried to use it, it crashed on me).

How to solve this? Cross-platform programs is IMO the best of both worlds. If I like a program, I can be 100% sure that when I switch, I can use it again and keep working on it. But it's so frustrating to find that some apps are Linux-only, or cross-platform attempts are done so bad that they mess up the whole interface (in my experience the best cross-platform apps are made with wxWidgets. They feel so natural on windows...)

So, why don't they make the apps cross-platform? Until I find myself comfortable enough, I won't be able to use them. And I really don't want to reboot every time i want to do something specific (If I have to reboot, what's the point of having a multitasking OS?). And I don't want to reformat my hard drive to use FAT32 because the Linux distro can't read NTFS drives.

And where the heck can I find a Gambas for Windows? So far I've seen NO open source alternatives to Visual Basic for Windows. No, I _HAVE_ to switch to Linux before GETTING STARTED with them! Nice move, eh?

My conclusion is that when Linux programmers are open-minded enough so that they build cross-pla

Instead of the past causing the future, the future causes the past.

This smells like Aristotle

Can I imply from this. . .

No, but you can infer it.

I'll let this guy explain it to you.

No, Afganistan is probably more about this. And if you'd bother to notice, production is back up to pre Taliban levels. Business is better than ever. But feel free to keep believing your little bedtime story about El queso, or whatever you call them. You'll sleep much more soundly that way. But it's a good idea to wake up and open your eyes occasionally. And have your mother wash out that potty mouth of yours. It's full of dirt. Please make sure to rinse and floss afterwords. I would never bring anyone home to meet my parents that talks like that. It's not very feminine. I hope you don't smoke, also. You probably taste like an ashtray. I don't like blind dates either, so you will need to post a picture. Love ya

• copywrite vt. to create (promotional text). See Copywriting on Wikipedia.
• copyright vt. to secure exclusive rights in the expression of (a work of authorship). See Copyright on Wikipedia.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/anhistoric.html

As such, most people consider both to be acceptable.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/jerry.html

Apparently "jerry-built" and "jury-rigged" are the correct phrases. Apparently the one you want is "jury-rigged."

It came as a surprise to me as well.

http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/hanged.html

I prefer lynched.

>That in five minutes you COULDN'T care less about. Don't use a phrase if you don't know how to use it.

You fail it.

If you don't understand the language completely, you don't get to complain.

Both are perfectly valid turns of phrase. One American, one British.

Could care less: I am so uninterested that while I could care less about the subject, I'm not even bothered to that point. Also, I am so interested that I care about the subject, therefore proving I could care less.

Couldn't care less: I am so uninterested that my caring level is at zero. Also, I am so interested that caring less would be physically impossible.

Both are correct and incorrect at the same time.

Yes, it's on the list of English errors. That in itself is an error, as the author is American. He needs to read up on his English history a bit, perhaps? alt.usage.english beat him to the punch on this one. Oddly enough, this clearly prescriptive English teacher is pro ending sentences in prepositions. How contradictory. He does agree he is fighting a losing battle on it (One he lost BEFORE he put up the website, ironically).

Irregardless, I ain't wrong. Here's some more references on the matter. Cheap at half the price, I tell you!

BTW: This topic truly is important to me, I couldn't care less about it, so don't ask me to. I could care less for rants about it, though, but sometimes I miss them. :-P

Teach, where's my gold star?

>That in five minutes you COULDN'T care less about. Don't use a phrase if you don't know how to use it.

You fail it.

If you don't understand the language completely, you don't get to complain.

Both are perfectly valid turns of phrase. One American, one British.

Could care less: I am so uninterested that while I could care less about the subject, I'm not even bothered to that point. Also, I am so interested that I care about the subject, therefore proving I could care less.

Couldn't care less: I am so uninterested that my caring level is at zero. Also, I am so interested that caring less would be physically impossible.

Both are correct and incorrect at the same time.

Yes, it's on the list of English errors. That in itself is an error, as the author is American. He needs to read up on his English history a bit, perhaps? alt.usage.english beat him to the punch on this one. Oddly enough, this clearly prescriptive English teacher is pro ending sentences in prepositions. How contradictory. He does agree he is fighting a losing battle on it (One he lost BEFORE he put up the website, ironically).

Irregardless, I ain't wrong. Here's some more references on the matter. Cheap at half the price, I tell you!

BTW: This topic truly is important to me, I couldn't care less about it, so don't ask me to. I could care less for rants about it, though, but sometimes I miss them. :-P

Teach, where's my gold star?

the verb-plus-adverb combination should not be hyphenated: "Before viewing the picture of Britney you'll need to log in."

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/care.html