Apple has patented round corners. Apple has patented the double click. Apple has patented the scrollbar. Apple has patented speakers, but only for non-computers.

I'm so tired of this "I can piss while lumping at the same time. Even if you can do it I have patented it so you have to pay me." Fuck these idiots till they die. (Is fuck-till-death patented, by the way?)

Grammar does matter.

It shows quite a lot in general about the writer of any message. Good grammar put into something written shows also the clarity of the idea that needs to be conveyed by the written piece. You can possibly understand that "Me now go home it now is very late" really means "I have to go home now as it is very late for me", but if I saw any of the two on a CV for employee selection, I would definitely consider the later one first.

In japan the importance of language education is on yet another higher level. They use 3 different alphabets there, hiragana, katagana and kanji. The exact same pasage can be written by using hiragana and katagana alone, but also by using all three. The more kanji you throw in, the more it is considered that you are well learned and educated, the more everyone will grant you respect-points.

It is not a matter of feeding your written piece to a spell checker or grammar corrector. This is what this process has succumbed to. The importance of grammar is really what you put into written pieces immediately as you think about it. Correcting yourself with those is always a good thing, but relying on those to fix and covers errors which you know you have in your written piece, that's what will keep you going in the short term of course, but sooner or later your inability to articulate will be discovered. That moment is usually not a very comfortable one.

I really don't understand why there always has to be a mentality of racing, someone has to win, the need for a looser whom the winner can bully and exploit.

Many have pointed out that this "space race" term is a coined one. And even the title of this submission, suggesting that some long asleep 'debates' have now reawakened: "OMG, my moment has come. You shunned me when the cold war was over, but now there's a new enemy/risk and my arguments breathe a new life on your face again".
Call me what you will, but I honestly think that some undertakes are beyond the scope and mentality and benefit of private sectors, or free market sort-of-BS. One of these undertakes is the space programs and missions. Another one is healthcare and most of what goes on in medicinal research.
Space exploration, currently, is in its infancy, and so it will remain even for the next 100 years. Whatever is achieved today, regardless of who does it, is bound to benefit the entire Earth population as a whole. Having these debates on who is first and inventing races and yacking about privatizing space. And there comes this moment when there comes a nation other than corporate America, which sees things in a completely different view which could be anything else but corporate. I'm not saying whether it is better or worse, but just different. And when this yields results, all of a sudden there emerges the "racing challenger".

It's a shame that a country like the US is more and more falling to the "four legs good, two legs bad" mentality. Win-Win situations are much more feasible and real than many are willing to admit.