That only becomes in issue of French gets somehow wiped out in Canada. While, as you say, language evolves with culture to develop ways of expressing things that are important in that culture, now that the culture is already there, it isn't at risk of dying due to changes in language. In the "worst case" scenario of everyone in Quebec becoming unilingual anglophones, words would be created or held over from French to express the things that were important to the people there and not available in English.

I have two replies to this. First, the Canadian association of video games is comprised of game developers. It is in no way representative of Canadians and they were responding to the Quebec government in the way that made the most financial sense to them.

Second, I think the GP was slightly exaggerating, or doesn't know much beyond his small area of Canada. The problem isn't with those who consider themselves Quebecois, since that would be both unreasonable and, in many cases, hypocritical. The problem is with those who consider themselves Quebecois as opposed to Canadian, and don't believe/recognize that they can be both.

You laugh, but I've got a degree in Alchemy. I turn rocks into gold!!

Whether it's deserved is the principle.

"Everything comes at a price" is a consequence of capitalism, not the goal. The principle is that if I value your skills more than I value X dollars per year, then that's what I'll be willing to pay you. If you won't work for less than X + 10000 dollars per year and that's more than I value your skills, we don't have a deal and I'll keep my money.

If you want something without giving anything in return, what you are talking about isn't capitalism.

Note: By you, I don't mean you, I mean them.

I don't think that's really true. If you were looking at a good map you might be able to guess how much of the Earth is covered in water, but just because you've seen one doesn't mean you can infer it. Even though I know the answer, if I close my eyes and imagine a map of the earth, it looks like it's mostly land mass to me, because whenever I've seen maps, that's what I've focused on. The water is just the background. Someone who doesn't know the answer and just tries to guess from their mental image of a map would not stand a chance, I'd wager.

Sure it does. The kid was probably learning in school to write formally, which involves plenty of verb conjugations, so it would be fresh in her mind. The father was presumably long out of school, so he would be in the habit of speaking informally, where the Subjunctive is used less frequently. Plenty of English speakers are informal and technically wrong, even though they learned how to speak properly in school, and are in a position to be corrected by their kids who are thinking about the rules.

I think that what you are noticing isn't the difference between English and other languages, but between mother tongue and second (or third or whatever) languages. I studied French as a second language when I was in school, and we spent much more time learning the technical rules of French than we did English, where we generally learned about creative writing and things. It was pretty much assumed that we would be able to put sentences together on our own. Friends of mine who learned English as a second language in Quebec generally report the opposite, that they learned technical language skills in English while it was assumed that they could express themselves in French. I suspect it has more to do with the expectation that people have a basic proficiency in their mother tongue by virtue of the environment they live in but they need to be taught a second language completely.

Note: When I say I took French as a second language, I mean that starting at 6 years old, all classes were in French, so I "know" more about French than I do about English, even though I speak better English.

That's just not true. Accountants, lawyers and engineers are expected to work unpaid overtime if there is work that needs to be done. That's part of being a "professional" is that you do what needs to be done and you get paid by the year, not the hour.

I was thinking more that non-programmers/general computer users would be atheists. As far as they're concerned, computers exist and work, and software just sort of comes about on its own. All that talk of programming languages is just the socially awkward trying to develop some kind of relevance for themselves.

My favourite part of this post is "Without evidence". This is not Nature, it's a joke. References will not be checked and there's no peer review before you can publish it. That being said, isn't there a history of fundamentalist Christians literally burning people at the stake? The other stuff you're complaining about are hyperbole, not bigotry.

Or a search can return a list of results based solely on what I typed in, and I can go through them and decide which are appropriate for me.

Being redneck and xenophobic has nothing to do with what language you speak. There are plenty of parts of Quebec and the rest of the world where people who don't speak a word of English fit both those descriptions perfectly.

I would imagine it's much less painful and leaves less of a scar.

Unless they're trying to wrestle said leviathan anyway, but using under-powered machines to do it.

That's because they have more important things to do, like bashing people on internet forums.

1. http://www.google.com.au/

2. 'Australia internet filter bypass'

3. 95% of the population can bypass the filter.