So Microsoft's much-touted new openness turned out to be the emperor's new clothes. Scratch the surface and we find the same old MS beneath that shiny new coat of paint.
Imagine an incumbent politician telling every TV they can't run paid political ads for his opponent unless they provide him with equal airtime for free. That he happened to own the stations in questions wouldn't even slow the FTC's haste to prosecute.
They can't be expected to pay licencing or advertising costs to promote their own (other) products
Everybody else has to. Why should Microsoft get them for free?
And Microsoft calls AOL anti-competitive?!
they can't be expected to miss out on the most lucrative advertising medium, the Windows desktop, just because they happen to own it.
Of course they can. At least, that's what the court of appeals upheld. As an adjudicated monopolist, MS is no longer permitted to use its own desktop in ways that anti-competitively promote its own products -- especially products such as MSN, which even Microsoft can't "innovate" into the OS -- to the detriment of competitors.
If MS wants MSN's icon on the desktop, let it compete for space. Bid -- don't bully -- AOL out of the race. Now that's capitalism.
they STICK THE DAMNED LICENSE RIGHT ON THE CASE... So where is the problem?
There are at least three problems. 1) Until recently manufacturers didn't stick the licenses on the cases (many or most still do not. Personally, I don't like the practice; it makes licenses difficult to centrally track). What about all the machines in your corporation that don't have the stickers? 2) What about OS upgrades? Suddenly, I've got machines corporate-wide with Win3x stickers running 98 or NT. Now THAT's a licensing mess.
3) License transfers. If I purchase a machine preloaded with 98 (and with a 98 sticker on the case), but install OS/2 on the machine instead, can I transfer that license to a different machine instead? Do I have to physically move the sticker to the new machine?
Of course, since every machine shipped comes with a preinstalled Microsoft OS, the mere presence of that machine on a company desk ought to be sufficient proof-of-OS-purchase, whether or not we had a certificate of authenticity in hand (or on the case). In other words, we should have been able to subtract the number of PCs the company owned from the number of licenses MS said we had to produce. If only life were that simple.
I installed hundreds of OEM machines in the aforementioned organization; not a single one came with a license on the case. Usually, they came with a CD and a shrink-wrapped user's manual with a certificate of authenticity pasted to the cover.
But the whole preload question is moot. In not a single case did we ever use the preinstalled OS. The company had standardized software loads and configurations for each department, which meant that the first thing we did with any new machine was to wipe the hard drive and dump the company's configuration image onto it. Problem was, when Microsoft rode into town, they insisted licenses were non-transferrable; which meant that if we installed NT onto a machine that had been preloaded with 95 we had to purchase a new NT license; unused NT licenses were not applicable. After much arguing back and forth, it was eventually agreed that licenses were transferrable to machines with the same OS. But if a machine came preloaded with 95, and we dumped NT onto it, we ended up paying the difference in licensing price, any unused NT licenses we had lying around notwithstanding.
Of course, when we then requested refunds on all those unused licenses MS wouldn't let us transfer, I understand the Microsoft representative assigned to our case insisted that was the manufacturer's responsibility.
suppose you never... have any warranty work done, because you're too damned lazy to save the receipt.
Wrong analogy. This is more like the store accusing me of stealing the item and insisting I repurchase it simply because I didn't keep the receipt.
If you had always used only licensed software, you wouldn't have a problem now.
Not necessarily true. In the Microsoft anti-piracy campaign, the burden is on the customer to prove his software is legal. A couple of years back I worked at a rather large organization (5000+ seats) which was largely a Microsoft house (with scattered pockets of OS/2 users). All PCs company-wide were replaced on a three-year cycle; new purchases were from established companies (IBM, Toshiba or Dell) and came preinstalled with Windows OSes.
One day, Microsoft came knocking, and politely requested us to produce a license not just for each current seat, but retroactively for the past five years stretching back to Win3x days. In that period of time something like 25,000 PCs had moved through the company. As you can imagine, it was impossible for us to locate licenses for even half of them.
The result was that the company was forced to pay several hundred thousand dollars to Microsoft to repurchase licenses on machines that had been legal all along; this included something like 3500 Windows 3.1 licenses for machines that had been depreciated out of the organization years ago.
In addition, each new machine that came in was wiped clean and reconfigured with the company's standard configuration. In some cases, machines that preshipped with Windows 95 were reconfigured with NT, and vice-versa. In other cases, machines that had been upgraded over the years (from, say Win3x to Win95). In many of these cases, we were forced to pay for multiple licenses, often on machines that no longer existed, one for the original installed OS, despite that fact that it was A) already legal and B) never even used, and one for the upgrade or target OS.
In sum, despite the fact that, to my knowledge, there wasn't a single unlicensed OS in the entire organization, we ended up dumping hundreds of thousands of bucks into MS's coffers simply because we couldn't prove that we were innocent. So much for American justice.
claimed to be studying usability... but... were actually looking at transparency
While I agree that it can be important to make this distinction, I'm not sure confusion between them invalidates the Sun study. To an extent, I'd argue that say "useability" simply means how easy the UI is to use -- and this embraces both transparency and "useability" issues.
I'd say the Sun study is useful, such conceptual confusions notwithstanding.
Take WinCE for example; that UI definitely does not scale to under 800x600
Remembering that it always takes Redmond three versions to get it right, you should test drive PocketPC, aka Wince 3.0. It largely abandons the start menu approach, thereby increasing the OS's useability (and, ironically, simultaneously creating a cottage industry in third-party apps that add it back in). It's by no means up to the Palm standard, but the improvements are dramatic.
I have to agree here, too. Why should I be able to associate Word with files only if they end in.DOC? And why should.DOC file associations be restricted to a single application? Seems to me MS (or Gnome and KDE, for that matter) could have taken a lesson from OS/2's extended attributes.
dragging items in the Start menu to customize it. It's not as good as it ought to be, but it's a great idea at the core.
Also, not a Microsoft original idea. I clearly recall sitting down in front of the Win95 interface and clicking on the Start button for the first time. This was back in March or April of '95, I was in a Microsoft training lab in Redmond preparing to provide tech support for the 95 launch, and I was coming from an OS/2 background. My kneejerk reaction was "What a piece of junk!", which I must have voiced out loud, because I found myself on the receiving end of a lot of angry stares from the MS UI team.
But I still stand by my reaction. I wanted to be able to do all the same things with icons in the start menu that I could with icons on the desktop -- right click for context menus, drag and drop icons on and off the start menu; a whole range of expectations and useability issues that were "intuitive" to me were simply not addressed in the Win95 UI. The whole start menu did (and does) scream "kludge!" to anyone with real UI experience. While MS has made great strides in improving the 95 interface, seven years later it still has some catching up to do.
there are no natural interfaces, merely familiar ones
Not easy in practice to separate the two. If "intuitive" means you can easily guess what the interface wants, or where things are located, then of course there's a direct correlation between "familiarity" and "intuition". Auto manufacturers put the car horn in the middle of the steering wheel not because there's anything intrinsically intuitive about the location, but simply because everyone is accustomed through long familiarity to finding it there. So on the one hand, "intuitive" simply means fulfilling user expectations.
Conversely, when faced with new and unfamiliar tasks or concepts, there out to be something in the interface that guides me to the correct answer (such as highlighting the default button) and clear, straightforward online help should always be a click or a mouse hover away.
On the other hand, someone once defined intuitive as "the interface guessing what you want." There might be something to that.
creates a big conflict: the technical users who want configurability vs. studies like this one which show that for end users, it must be taken out.
No, not "taken out". One of the study participants pegged it: "This needs to be moved to an 'advanced' area." Sort of like the "click for details" approach used in Windows dialogs such as winipcfg.
The latest thing on the seamy side are banner ads with.WAV files attached.
Posh -- old stuff. The latest thing seems to be self-installing porn dialers -- the ones that specialize in disconnecting you from the Internet and call 900 numbers without warning. Just deleted another one a few days ago.
I'm sitting here with a fistful of plastic Aussie and Ozzie currency right now -- pretty impressive, for what it's worth. Problem is, who'd wanna counterfeit Australian currency? Don't the drug cartels require payment in American dollars?
The new Hitachi chip is a micro-transmitter, which broadcasts a serial number into the ether. Once the receptor network is in place not only your money, but the wallet you carry it in, the clothes you're wearing -- everything you own will be constantly broadcasting its location into gigantic databases. Not only will Big Brother know exactly which bill you spent, He'll know exactly which products you walked out of the store with, which of your friends you ran into in the parking lock (because you'll both be covered with micro-transmitters), which bar the two of you decided to stop at, whose car you took, what brand of beer you ordered (and how many), when you arrived, when you left, when you visited the bathroom and whether you took a dump or a leak.
When you arrive home, they'll know which family members were there to greet you, exactly what the wife has prepared for dinner, which CD you listened to, exactly which book or newspaper you relaxed with... the list is endless.
If these things are small and inexpensive enough to embed in cash, they can be embedded in everything. Proponents will push the benefits: Wallet got stolen? A quick stop at the local precinct and they'll tell you exactly where it is, within the accuracy limits of GPS. Worried about shoplifting? Not anymore. Everything in your store is tagged. Rape, assault, robbery, murder, stalking -- it'll be impossible to get away with any of it. Crime will be virtually a thing of the past.
It means that you'll be walking around with literally dozens of transmitters on your person at all times, embedded in your clothes, your wallet, your money, your watch. Literally every move you make, every purchase, every person you come in contact with is being recorded online in gigantic databases. Raid the fridge in the middle of the night and Big Brother knows what path you travelled through your house, which bottle of beer you grabbed, which underwear you were wearing at the time, right down to the brand of feminine hygiene product you use (if you happen to be of that persuasion) and exactly when and where you last changed it.
Think your new coworker is cute? Check out online who she hangs out with and where, what brand of breakfast cereal she likes, and the movies she sees. Even her bra size is just a few clicks away.
Your every movement will be constantly monitored -- not by other people, but by a new breed of profiling software that makes face recognition seem like a first programming excercise. Huge automated server farms will be profiling your habits, monitoring the people you associate with, your reading habits -- and at the first hint of digital suspicion sending out its police lackeys to haul you off to automated prisons, convicted by a computer program rather than a jury of your peers.
If you want to be free of the communists, go to Taiwan, which in contrast has a legitimate Chinese government chosen by Chinese people.
This is more or less finally true, since the lifting of martial law and the establishment of so-called free elections in 1987 -- and more particularly the latest elections last year when the Kuo Ming Tong finally lost control of the presidency. Prior to that, the ruling party in Taiwan was largely considered a foreign, invading body which usurped control of the island after they lost their war on the mainland (a war which little involved or concerned the people of Taiwan at the time), and was at times hardly less guilty of atrocities and oppression than the communists that had defeated them. The KMT had never been freely chosen by the people of Taiwan as its ruling party; it imposed itself as such by force.
So far I found two misconceptions here:
China is being ruled by communism.
Well, in fact, while China is currently ruled by something calling itself a "communist party", the style of governance bears far more similarity to socialism than anything Marx or Lenin ever envisaged.
Therefore, Hong Kong, a city of China, is also a communists city. Hong Kong... runs on capitalism.
Are we talking about communism as political system or communism as economic system? Being capitalist doesn't necessarily mean you're not communist.
Truly spoken like someone who has never been "out in the sticks" of China. Most rural Chinese don't much bother themselves about politics. Beijing is, literally, half a continent a way, and what happens there is largely irrelevant in their daily lives. And Lenin would never have been pleased with what passes for communism in China.
A person has as many rights as the law of the land grants him, no less and no more.
There's a famous document somewhere that says, "We are endowed by our government with certain inalienable rights". No, wait, that wasn't the quote.... ah, Creator -- yeah, that was it.
Executing people for committing terrible crimes is the only way of making sure they will never do it again.
And is also blatantly unconstitutional (if my understanding of the US Constitution is correct). Punishing the guilty for a crime the have already committed is justice. Executing someone because he may (no matter how likely) commit a crime in the future is not a direction I think you want to be moving in.
English phonetics is only "ridiculous" when it's learned with one eye on the written form. If English were written using, say, the IPA, the consistencies would be much more apparent; as it is, however, they're obscured by the massive kludge of historical accretions that passes for modern written English. How many vowels does English have, for example? Five? It's actually closer to twenty.
And there are obscure rules such as '"their" may be used in place of "his/her"
Not in my classes. Any student of mine who tries to use third person plural as a substitute for "he" or "she" once doesn't make the mistake a second time.
the difference between "lend" and "borrow"
This is no more difficult than the difference between "bring" and "take" or "come" and "go", and strikes me as inexcusably ignorant. If it's not a problem for my seven-year-olds, it shouldn't be a problem for the educational elite.
I know the notion of personal responsibility is somewhat passé these days
As, apparently, is the notion of community responsibility.
We do children a disservice when we overprotect them - it renders them incapable of dealing with the wider world when they are released into it
So perhaps Sesame Street should start introducing our three-year-olds to the joys of Debbie Does Dallas? In fact, everyone agrees that censorship is necessary at times, we just don't always agree on the details.
We are, IMO, far too fixated on "the children" these days. Society and civilization exist for the benefit of all their members, not solely the next generation.
You're attempting to paint a false dichotomy -- either us or them -- when in fact the issue is hardly black and white. In any disparate society -- such as the US -- there must be compromise on all sides. Men learn to share power with women; smokers accept restrictions to make life more pleasurable for non-smokers; the US welfare system takes money away from some in order to benefit of others; and adults must forego certain things for the benefit of children.
A "free society" does not mean my neighbors have the right to have sex in their front yard when my kids are walking to school. And should they try, I will request the police "censor" them appropriately. A "free society" does not mean you have the right to burn crosses on the front yard of the African-American family down the street (but shouldn't we be preparing our kids to deal with a world full of racism?)
And a"free society" society does not mean I have no responsibility to those around me -- be they children or adults. A "free society" consists of equal parts of freedom and responsibility. We cannot hide our responsibilities behind the veil of "freedom of expression".
Fun example: In the country where they try to hide sex from the kids as much as possible, teenage pregnancies are much higher than the rest of the rich world.
"In the country where they have the absolute right to bear arms, teenage pregnancies are much higher than the rest of the rich world."
"In the country where they consume the most pizza, teenage pregnancies are much higher than the rest of the rich world.
"In the country where they play the most GameBoys, teenage pregnancies are much higher than the rest of the rich world."
Sorry -- correlation does not prove causation.
"A and B" is not the same as "A therefore B". Punch "post hoc propter hoc" into your nearest search engine if you still think this guy's example says anything.
Perhaps it embodies something you're unable to grasp
If that "something" is a relationship between the original comments and the topic of this forum, then, yes, I confess to certain limits of discernment.
The issue is not in how well either of us expresses himself; the salient point is whether we do so on-topic. The moderators who +1'ed this guy should be happy I wasn't meta-mod'ing this forum when I saw this.
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Imagine an incumbent politician telling every TV they can't run paid political ads for his opponent unless they provide him with equal airtime for free. That he happened to own the stations in questions wouldn't even slow the FTC's haste to prosecute.
They can't be expected to pay licencing or advertising costs to promote their own (other) products
Everybody else has to. Why should Microsoft get them for free?
And Microsoft calls AOL anti-competitive?!
they can't be expected to miss out on the most lucrative advertising medium, the Windows desktop, just because they happen to own it.
Of course they can. At least, that's what the court of appeals upheld. As an adjudicated monopolist, MS is no longer permitted to use its own desktop in ways that anti-competitively promote its own products -- especially products such as MSN, which even Microsoft can't "innovate" into the OS -- to the detriment of competitors.
If MS wants MSN's icon on the desktop, let it compete for space. Bid -- don't bully -- AOL out of the race. Now that's capitalism.
There are at least three problems. 1) Until recently manufacturers didn't stick the licenses on the cases (many or most still do not. Personally, I don't like the practice; it makes licenses difficult to centrally track). What about all the machines in your corporation that don't have the stickers? 2) What about OS upgrades? Suddenly, I've got machines corporate-wide with Win3x stickers running 98 or NT. Now THAT's a licensing mess. 3) License transfers. If I purchase a machine preloaded with 98 (and with a 98 sticker on the case), but install OS/2 on the machine instead, can I transfer that license to a different machine instead? Do I have to physically move the sticker to the new machine? Of course, since every machine shipped comes with a preinstalled Microsoft OS, the mere presence of that machine on a company desk ought to be sufficient proof-of-OS-purchase, whether or not we had a certificate of authenticity in hand (or on the case). In other words, we should have been able to subtract the number of PCs the company owned from the number of licenses MS said we had to produce. If only life were that simple.
See my reply here.
I installed hundreds of OEM machines in the aforementioned organization; not a single one came with a license on the case. Usually, they came with a CD and a shrink-wrapped user's manual with a certificate of authenticity pasted to the cover.
But the whole preload question is moot. In not a single case did we ever use the preinstalled OS. The company had standardized software loads and configurations for each department, which meant that the first thing we did with any new machine was to wipe the hard drive and dump the company's configuration image onto it. Problem was, when Microsoft rode into town, they insisted licenses were non-transferrable; which meant that if we installed NT onto a machine that had been preloaded with 95 we had to purchase a new NT license; unused NT licenses were not applicable. After much arguing back and forth, it was eventually agreed that licenses were transferrable to machines with the same OS. But if a machine came preloaded with 95, and we dumped NT onto it, we ended up paying the difference in licensing price, any unused NT licenses we had lying around notwithstanding.
Of course, when we then requested refunds on all those unused licenses MS wouldn't let us transfer, I understand the Microsoft representative assigned to our case insisted that was the manufacturer's responsibility.
suppose you never ... have any warranty work done, because you're too damned lazy to save the receipt.
Wrong analogy. This is more like the store accusing me of stealing the item and insisting I repurchase it simply because I didn't keep the receipt.
Not necessarily true. In the Microsoft anti-piracy campaign, the burden is on the customer to prove his software is legal. A couple of years back I worked at a rather large organization (5000+ seats) which was largely a Microsoft house (with scattered pockets of OS/2 users). All PCs company-wide were replaced on a three-year cycle; new purchases were from established companies (IBM, Toshiba or Dell) and came preinstalled with Windows OSes.
One day, Microsoft came knocking, and politely requested us to produce a license not just for each current seat, but retroactively for the past five years stretching back to Win3x days. In that period of time something like 25,000 PCs had moved through the company. As you can imagine, it was impossible for us to locate licenses for even half of them.
The result was that the company was forced to pay several hundred thousand dollars to Microsoft to repurchase licenses on machines that had been legal all along; this included something like 3500 Windows 3.1 licenses for machines that had been depreciated out of the organization years ago.
In addition, each new machine that came in was wiped clean and reconfigured with the company's standard configuration. In some cases, machines that preshipped with Windows 95 were reconfigured with NT, and vice-versa. In other cases, machines that had been upgraded over the years (from, say Win3x to Win95). In many of these cases, we were forced to pay for multiple licenses, often on machines that no longer existed, one for the original installed OS, despite that fact that it was A) already legal and B) never even used, and one for the upgrade or target OS.
In sum, despite the fact that, to my knowledge, there wasn't a single unlicensed OS in the entire organization, we ended up dumping hundreds of thousands of bucks into MS's coffers simply because we couldn't prove that we were innocent. So much for American justice.
While I agree that it can be important to make this distinction, I'm not sure confusion between them invalidates the Sun study. To an extent, I'd argue that say "useability" simply means how easy the UI is to use -- and this embraces both transparency and "useability" issues.
I'd say the Sun study is useful, such conceptual confusions notwithstanding.
Remembering that it always takes Redmond three versions to get it right, you should test drive PocketPC, aka Wince 3.0. It largely abandons the start menu approach, thereby increasing the OS's useability (and, ironically, simultaneously creating a cottage industry in third-party apps that add it back in). It's by no means up to the Palm standard, but the improvements are dramatic.
I have to agree here, too. Why should I be able to associate Word with files only if they end in .DOC? And why should .DOC file associations be restricted to a single application? Seems to me MS (or Gnome and KDE, for that matter) could have taken a lesson from OS/2's extended attributes.
Also, not a Microsoft original idea. I clearly recall sitting down in front of the Win95 interface and clicking on the Start button for the first time. This was back in March or April of '95, I was in a Microsoft training lab in Redmond preparing to provide tech support for the 95 launch, and I was coming from an OS/2 background. My kneejerk reaction was "What a piece of junk!", which I must have voiced out loud, because I found myself on the receiving end of a lot of angry stares from the MS UI team. But I still stand by my reaction. I wanted to be able to do all the same things with icons in the start menu that I could with icons on the desktop -- right click for context menus, drag and drop icons on and off the start menu; a whole range of expectations and useability issues that were "intuitive" to me were simply not addressed in the Win95 UI. The whole start menu did (and does) scream "kludge!" to anyone with real UI experience. While MS has made great strides in improving the 95 interface, seven years later it still has some catching up to do.
Not easy in practice to separate the two. If "intuitive" means you can easily guess what the interface wants, or where things are located, then of course there's a direct correlation between "familiarity" and "intuition". Auto manufacturers put the car horn in the middle of the steering wheel not because there's anything intrinsically intuitive about the location, but simply because everyone is accustomed through long familiarity to finding it there. So on the one hand, "intuitive" simply means fulfilling user expectations.
Conversely, when faced with new and unfamiliar tasks or concepts, there out to be something in the interface that guides me to the correct answer (such as highlighting the default button) and clear, straightforward online help should always be a click or a mouse hover away.
On the other hand, someone once defined intuitive as "the interface guessing what you want." There might be something to that.
No, not "taken out". One of the study participants pegged it: "This needs to be moved to an 'advanced' area." Sort of like the "click for details" approach used in Windows dialogs such as winipcfg.
I once drove a car that had moved the horn from steering wheel center to the turn signal arm. Imagine trying to find that in a hurry.
Posh -- old stuff. The latest thing seems to be self-installing porn dialers -- the ones that specialize in disconnecting you from the Internet and call 900 numbers without warning. Just deleted another one a few days ago.
Here's a neat trick: try CLEANING your shower curtain.
I thought he meant the amount of scum on his skin. Which isn't a problem for those of us in the habit of using our showers on a regular basis.
I'm sitting here with a fistful of plastic Aussie and Ozzie currency right now -- pretty impressive, for what it's worth. Problem is, who'd wanna counterfeit Australian currency? Don't the drug cartels require payment in American dollars?
The new Hitachi chip is a micro-transmitter, which broadcasts a serial number into the ether. Once the receptor network is in place not only your money, but the wallet you carry it in, the clothes you're wearing -- everything you own will be constantly broadcasting its location into gigantic databases. Not only will Big Brother know exactly which bill you spent, He'll know exactly which products you walked out of the store with, which of your friends you ran into in the parking lock (because you'll both be covered with micro-transmitters), which bar the two of you decided to stop at, whose car you took, what brand of beer you ordered (and how many), when you arrived, when you left, when you visited the bathroom and whether you took a dump or a leak.
... the list is endless.
When you arrive home, they'll know which family members were there to greet you, exactly what the wife has prepared for dinner, which CD you listened to, exactly which book or newspaper you relaxed with
Worried yet? You should be.
Think about it a second:
If these things are small and inexpensive enough to embed in cash, they can be embedded in everything. Proponents will push the benefits: Wallet got stolen? A quick stop at the local precinct and they'll tell you exactly where it is, within the accuracy limits of GPS. Worried about shoplifting? Not anymore. Everything in your store is tagged. Rape, assault, robbery, murder, stalking -- it'll be impossible to get away with any of it. Crime will be virtually a thing of the past.
It means that you'll be walking around with literally dozens of transmitters on your person at all times, embedded in your clothes, your wallet, your money, your watch. Literally every move you make, every purchase, every person you come in contact with is being recorded online in gigantic databases. Raid the fridge in the middle of the night and Big Brother knows what path you travelled through your house, which bottle of beer you grabbed, which underwear you were wearing at the time, right down to the brand of feminine hygiene product you use (if you happen to be of that persuasion) and exactly when and where you last changed it.
Think your new coworker is cute? Check out online who she hangs out with and where, what brand of breakfast cereal she likes, and the movies she sees. Even her bra size is just a few clicks away.
Your every movement will be constantly monitored -- not by other people, but by a new breed of profiling software that makes face recognition seem like a first programming excercise. Huge automated server farms will be profiling your habits, monitoring the people you associate with, your reading habits -- and at the first hint of digital suspicion sending out its police lackeys to haul you off to automated prisons, convicted by a computer program rather than a jury of your peers.
Tracking cash is the least of your worries.
This is more or less finally true, since the lifting of martial law and the establishment of so-called free elections in 1987 -- and more particularly the latest elections last year when the Kuo Ming Tong finally lost control of the presidency. Prior to that, the ruling party in Taiwan was largely considered a foreign, invading body which usurped control of the island after they lost their war on the mainland (a war which little involved or concerned the people of Taiwan at the time), and was at times hardly less guilty of atrocities and oppression than the communists that had defeated them. The KMT had never been freely chosen by the people of Taiwan as its ruling party; it imposed itself as such by force.
Well, in fact, while China is currently ruled by something calling itself a "communist party", the style of governance bears far more similarity to socialism than anything Marx or Lenin ever envisaged.
Therefore, Hong Kong, a city of China, is also a communists city. Hong Kong ... runs on capitalism.
Are we talking about communism as political system or communism as economic system? Being capitalist doesn't necessarily mean you're not communist.
Truly spoken like someone who has never been "out in the sticks" of China. Most rural Chinese don't much bother themselves about politics. Beijing is, literally, half a continent a way, and what happens there is largely irrelevant in their daily lives. And Lenin would never have been pleased with what passes for communism in China.
There's a famous document somewhere that says, "We are endowed by our government with certain inalienable rights". No, wait, that wasn't the quote.... ah, Creator -- yeah, that was it.
Hmm, wonder why they said that?
And is also blatantly unconstitutional (if my understanding of the US Constitution is correct). Punishing the guilty for a crime the have already committed is justice. Executing someone because he may (no matter how likely) commit a crime in the future is not a direction I think you want to be moving in.
English phonetics is only "ridiculous" when it's learned with one eye on the written form. If English were written using, say, the IPA, the consistencies would be much more apparent; as it is, however, they're obscured by the massive kludge of historical accretions that passes for modern written English. How many vowels does English have, for example? Five? It's actually closer to twenty.
And there are obscure rules such as '"their" may be used in place of "his/her"
Not in my classes. Any student of mine who tries to use third person plural as a substitute for "he" or "she" once doesn't make the mistake a second time.
the difference between "lend" and "borrow"
This is no more difficult than the difference between "bring" and "take" or "come" and "go", and strikes me as inexcusably ignorant. If it's not a problem for my seven-year-olds, it shouldn't be a problem for the educational elite.
As I recall, the idea didn't work so well for the Packers. They had to extend the purchasing deadline at least once because the stocks weren't moving.
As, apparently, is the notion of community responsibility.
We do children a disservice when we overprotect them - it renders them incapable of dealing with the wider world when they are released into it
So perhaps Sesame Street should start introducing our three-year-olds to the joys of Debbie Does Dallas? In fact, everyone agrees that censorship is necessary at times, we just don't always agree on the details.
We are, IMO, far too fixated on "the children" these days. Society and civilization exist for the benefit of all their members, not solely the next generation.
You're attempting to paint a false dichotomy -- either us or them -- when in fact the issue is hardly black and white. In any disparate society -- such as the US -- there must be compromise on all sides. Men learn to share power with women; smokers accept restrictions to make life more pleasurable for non-smokers; the US welfare system takes money away from some in order to benefit of others; and adults must forego certain things for the benefit of children. A "free society" does not mean my neighbors have the right to have sex in their front yard when my kids are walking to school. And should they try, I will request the police "censor" them appropriately. A "free society" does not mean you have the right to burn crosses on the front yard of the African-American family down the street (but shouldn't we be preparing our kids to deal with a world full of racism?)
And a"free society" society does not mean I have no responsibility to those around me -- be they children or adults. A "free society" consists of equal parts of freedom and responsibility. We cannot hide our responsibilities behind the veil of "freedom of expression".
"In the country where they have the absolute right to bear arms, teenage pregnancies are much higher than the rest of the rich world."
"In the country where they consume the most pizza, teenage pregnancies are much higher than the rest of the rich world.
"In the country where they play the most GameBoys, teenage pregnancies are much higher than the rest of the rich world."
Sorry -- correlation does not prove causation. "A and B" is not the same as "A therefore B". Punch "post hoc propter hoc" into your nearest search engine if you still think this guy's example says anything.
If that "something" is a relationship between the original comments and the topic of this forum, then, yes, I confess to certain limits of discernment.
The issue is not in how well either of us expresses himself; the salient point is whether we do so on-topic. The moderators who +1'ed this guy should be happy I wasn't meta-mod'ing this forum when I saw this.