The Unemployed Working on OSS Projects

Roger_Explosion writes "In Australia the unemployed have to fulfill a 'mutual obligation' requirement in order to receive welfare payments. What this means is that recipients of welfare payments have to be involved in some sort of activity that improves their chances of finding employment. Until now this has included various types of community service and training and education programs. Recently an organisation called CommunityCode has been established to allow recipients to fulfill this requirement by contributing to OSS projects."

Comments

Re:Bloody OSS Bludgers

[Trent05]

Dear Sir or Madam,

I realize the English might not be your first language and I'm kind of embarrassed that I have to point this out but USian is not a real word. Although at first it may sound correct, the preferred term of referring to a United States citizen is generally American. Please don't think of me as a grammar Nazi, I'm only pointing this out because /. is admittedly US centric.

While calling someone from Brazil, Panama, or Paraguay "American" would indeed be technically correct, citizens of those and other nations on the North & South American continents (in my personal experience) don't readily refer to themselves as "Americans", and you'd probably get strange looks naming them such.

I ask of you not to mistake the average United States citizen calling them self "American" (in the context of being from the US) as arrogance. It is a term that has been used by generations of people from all around the world. I often catch the BBC World News (A British Telecast) on a local channel here in the US. They regularly identify people from my country as "Americans". Another good example is the English language telecast of a Chinese news report that is occasionally on our C-SPAN (a US government public affairs cable channel) network. I guarantee you'll hear the term "American" being used here when titling US citizens. Please accept my apologies for the lack of a hyper-link, I've only caught the broadcast several times and I am unsure what the correct webpage to forward you to would be.

I hope this helps explain things. Using the correct term "American" should make your future posts on Slashdot more clear and meaningful to the other readers. This will ensure the information you are sharing....

...Oh, you're just being a dick.