We all know that "hands up don't shoot" was a total lie, right?

And yet, strangely enough, millions of people each day arrive at their destinations unscathed. Really really bad at driving? Collisions would be daily or monthly events, instead of rare. My grandmother drove her entire life without a single incident. Even in countries where people really are bad at driving, still to be in a collision is a noteworthy event.

...and of course leaving out all the times the person does, in fact, avoid a wreck, because these by definition do not make the statistics.

I have lived in China for quite some time, and just thinking about it, I do not think I have ever seen a Chinese desktop computer running anything but XP. You can relax and stop throwing sales figures at me, Mr. Paid Microsoft Shill/Social Media Consultant who is surely monitoring this thread, I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying I've never seen it. Oh, wait, once, I remember it was at someone's house and I was surprised to see Vista running. But business/office desktops? All XP. I keep a directory on my USB stick full of programs to make XP less painful.

You have to realize, there are people out there whose first computer ran XP, and who are 30 years old now and it's all they've ever used. How is someone like this going to react to this new version of Windows? Will there be free training courses to go along with the free licenses?

I'm bilingual, dumbass. I understand the benefits of speaking a second language, and I understand quite well the benefits of an entire country being able to talk to each other. The country I live in has horrible problems because there are too many languages and people can't communicate.

A country the size of America where everyone speaks the same language? What a huge advantage. There are hundreds of millions of Chinese people who don't speak the official language. How many wars did Europe have because they couldn't communicate with each other?

A lot of Americans have some sort of awe for people who can speak two languages. My experience? Who cares! Speaking another language means...you can speak another language. It says nothing about your character, worldliness, sophistication, or other characteristics commonly attributed by Americans to bilingual people.

I used to interview people whose sole qualification for the job was that they could speak English. Well, what else have you got? Yeah, exactly. I have also seen the reverse, Americans who show up speaking the local language and expect to be employed immediately. Uh-huh, it doesn't work like that. You should hear the butthurt, too, these people spent years learning, planning on living the rest of their lives abroad, and they neglected to learn any marketable skills.

One of the worst pieces of human trash I ever met was a Swiss who spoke seven languages. You know what? Who cares! Language ability has absolutely nothing to do with what kind of person you are. It just means you can speak another language. Yay, I guess. A skill increasingly irrelevant as Google Translate marches on. In another 5-10 years there will be immediate simultaneous translation, and there will be even less need to learn other languages. This makes me sad because I myself spent an enormous amount of time studying, and GT will likely do a better job expressing my thoughts than I ever could with my old-fashioned biological brain.

The voting system just doesn't work. We need to move to a Chinese-style system where there is only one party, and that party only admits intelligent people. Too dumb? Sorry, can't join. Of course, there would be exceptions made for minorities, but the general gist is that rednecks who cause so much trouble would be disenfranchised and shit-out-of-luck. The government would actually be able to get things done instead of being mired in gridlock.

I had heard that mocking the powerless wasn't funny. The people that do this need to apologize and pay fines (contributions to political funds that oppose their views). So, what changed here? Mocking the powerless is OK now?

American and European education systems are admired all over the world. People send their children to be educated in the West all the time. Who sends their kids to Africa for school?

These knee-jerk anti-Western attitudes need to go. They're not based in any kind of reality.

...and yet if he were an (R) instead of a (D), you'd shit all over him even though he held the exact same opinions.

Also, doesn't it feel dirty cheering for a career politician? Ugh. He is a 65 year old white male, which should be proof enough that he doesn't deserve political power. The man has never held a straight job in his life, it's all been in academia or politics. Funny how all of these criteria - ones that would eliminate "lesser" people - are suddenly not a problem when the man (why not elect a woman?) has a D next to his name.

But this generation has interpreted Godwin's Law differently. It's a living law, you can't hold it to the interpretation that old white males originally thought.

Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.

PS it turns out that ISIS is actually implementing Islamic law as it was actually written. So, it's not just justified, it's just.

You're a developer of open source software, aren't you? You know how I can tell? The way you expect users to be able to explain bugs in technical terms and how you disregard any bug reports that don't match your mental template. "It doesn't print" IS a bug report. If I buy a blender and it doesn't turn on, the end user doesn't bring out a logic diagram and begin tracing the leads.

Ah, yes, the lighthearted story about a bit of amusing geek-friendly numerology is visited by the unsmiling European who - as always - delivers a stern lecture about How You Americans Are Always Wrong.

It never gets old I tell ya, humorless jerks coming into a thread and crapping in the punch bowl.