The attempt reveals something about the IRS' attitude. That problem still needs to be fixed.

They are a carbon sync, but no so much a carbon sink.

English has very little in the way of grammatical marking. Counter-intuitively (to English speakers), this makes English harder to learn, because the grammatical structure is just as complex as any other language, but it's not explicit.

In most European languages, children grow up with a good intuition about the grammar of their language, but some amount of formal instruction is very valuable so they can understand how to structure their communication with a minimum of ambiguity. In Canadian schools, for example, English (as a first language) is taught with relatively little formal grammar, but French with a great deal.

Also, although it's not really natural for a language community to have a high degree of uniformity artificially imposed on it, and each generation does speak it is slightly (or perhaps significantly) different from the previous, there is a practical value in having, and learning, an agreed-upon standard variation. In particular, for languages like English and German, which are widely spoken, it is enormously valuable to have access to the large numbers of speakers and the large bodies of fiction and non-fiction writing.

Not the whole world. Plenty of people knew he was bluffing.

It's not obvious that that's much different. It certainly sounds like one form of old-fashioned embezzlement or another.

Professional intelligent agents were not fooled. People who only heard what they wanted to hear do not count as professionals.

With enough people, there will be someone with insightful information, and probably a balance of opinions. Searching for bugs in open source works a little like that.

But in theory if a professional intelligence service had hard evidence that, for example, a politician is bluffing about something, then a policy can be adopted even if it goes against some conventional wisdom.

For example, the information that Saddam Hussein's WMD programme was a hoax prevented a rash invasion...., um, never mind.

A wonderful ideal, but it did break down when a smuggler was tried with a jury of other smugglers.

But 2-minute videos explaining the Schrödinger's cat paradox from the cat's perspective.

"Just one catch: he's a lame duck, and will be out of office in January."

Feature, not a bug.

Pretending the handicapped are just "differently-abled" is perhaps the cruellest form of bigotry by low expectations. People who have disadvantages that are not of their choosing deserve sympathy and support, but celebrating disability is condescending to the point of madness.

Ordinary people are very mistaken but sadly, yes, this is the way they think.

Is this supposed to be about a metaphorical grenade? Because I'm pretty sure just showing up to work with a grenade will get you fired for cause.

The headline was confusing enough that after

"What advice would you give someone who just bought a new..."

I was expecting 'judge'.

Many local governments invest in attracting tourists. Hotels benefit, so they should pay a share.