Yeah, I learned it as a pondian difference -- UK uses the plural noun form for organization names and usually for collective nouns (though suddenly I'm thinking maybe I misunderstood about collective nouns? Organizations are definitely treated as plurals, as is easily confirmed in media headlines...), US uses the singular forms for organization names and usually for collective nouns. Part of it too might be where the semantic emphasis lies -- whether one is talking about a collective as a whole, or as a bunch of individual constituent members.

As a quick PS, I think the British use of plurals for organizations comes from the idea (logical enough, I suppose) that an organization comprises a plurality of people. Personally, I think it sounds about as off as saying "the group have done something", rather than treating the collective noun "group" (or rather the organization name itself) as a singular noun in its own right, where "the group has done something" would be more correct.

Cheers,

I mostly agree with your post, except for that bit at the end there -- the only hardware that MS seems to be good at is commodity hardware that's hard to get wrong. Anything really new that they have to invent and develop seems to be a colossal screw-up -- c.f. the RROD, "squirting", or that Kin thing that vanished after months of hype.

Keyboards, sure, but new stuff? They can't seem to handle it.

Cheers,

My reading of this thread suggests that the GP's logic is more that Ballmer has zeroed in on an area where Microsoft has made considerably less money, and has lost considerably more money, than in the company's core business of software.

From the things I've read as a casual follower of MS's progress, the Zune lost a ton of money, Windows Phone hasn't done all that well (the Kin vanished after months of hype, for instance), and I don't think the XBox has broken even when viewed over the whole history of the console rather than just in any one fiscal year.

Meanwhile, the Windows OS and Microsoft Office software businesses have been moneymakers for decades now.

So the logic appears to be not that "some of Microsoft's operations aren't successful, ergo the company as a whole is unsuccessful" -- instead, it's that "Microsoft is focusing more and more on its lossmaking operations, ergo the company as a whole will be increasingly unsuccessful."

Considering that this move directly threatens partners such as HP and Dell, we could wind up seeing more support from such companies for Linux as they seek to hedge their bets against Microsoft's incursion into the hardware market. I think the software and computer industry could be on the verge of becoming much more interesting.

Cheers,

Interesting, thank you. I wonder if that particular usage of "they" has to do with the feminism and political correctness movements in the US, and the resulting social focus on gender in language. Given the lack of any neuter third-person singular pronoun in English other than the overly impersonal "it", "they" seems to have been pressed into service instead.

Cheers,

... Unless you go to Catholic school, in which case the nuns may well whack you in the knuckles with a ruler if you use a word wrong^Wincorrectly.

:-P

Cheers,

I thought the whole point of this sub-thread was pedantry? :) If so, linguistic conservativism is more the rule than vernacular use.

As a simple rule of thumb for who / whom, consider he / him or they / them. This may sound a bit tortured in question syntax such as in the corrected example in my previous post, but it still provides a useful and quick-and-easy guide to when to put the "m" on the end of "whom".

Pedantry aside, yes, in the daily vernacular, many (most?) Americans that I've spoken with don't consistently use "whom" correctly, suggesting that this usage is indeed deprecated and on the way out. I have no idea if this is a pondian phenomenon, where perhaps UK or Australian or NZ English speakers might use "whom" more often; I am likewise ignorant of the frequency of usage by Canadian or Indian speakers of English. Such a difference, if present, might indicate laxer grammar education in the US.

Cheers,

Your second example is incorrect -- since "who" is the indirect object of the preposition "to", even if that "to" comes at the end of the sentence, it would again have to be "whom" to be correct:

Cheers,

The names for that erectile dysfunction drug aren't all that bad:

• Chemical name:
  1-[4-ethoxy-3-(6,7-dihydro-1-methyl- 7-oxo-3-propyl-1H-pyrazolo[4,3-d]pyrimidin-5-yl) phenylsulfonyl]-4-methylpiperazine
• Brand name:
  Viagra
• Generic name:
  Mycoxaphlopin

...

I'm here all week. Try the veal!

I formatted my post above using generic <ol> and <li> tags, but it appears that Slashdot's code is so broken that these don't format correctly -- using Chrome on Win 7, I see no numbers; the two blocks of text are slightly indented and separated as if by a <br/> tag.

C'mon, guys. CSS shouldn't be that difficult.

1. I was responding to the previous poster's complaint that Muslims are "trying to convert their new country to be run the same way" as the country they emigrated from, which is ultimately something that all immigrants do to a certain extent.
2. I don't know what the Atomium is, but assuming that this is a reference to 9/11, your argument here is unrelated to my previous post about immigrants, as the 9/11 attackers explicitly did not have the goal of making the US similar to their originating country of Saudi Arabia.

Cheers,

Last I knew, Android runs on a version of the Linux kernel. So saying that Android can't run on a given chip does at least imply that other versions of the Linux kernel might not run either.

Cheers,

It is interesting to note, however, that complaining about how one's new country is not like one's old country is a common staple in *any* immigrant community. I spent years living in Japan, and one sliver of the gaijin community there loved to complain that Japan wasn't the UK/US/Australia etc, and go on and on about how XYZ thing about Japan should be just like it is in the UK/US/Australia etc, and then everything would be so much better.

So there's a certain amount of what the GP says here that rings true. But with their blinders so firmly in place, they probably haven't noticed that this is something that all humans do, to some extent, when transplanted to a new country and culture.

Cheers,