I do research in computational linguistics, and I've done work at a major machine translation (MT) provider, and I can state with some certainty that we will NOT have perfected translation software in 10 years, if ever. MT is about as old as artificial intelligence itself, and it's still struggling. Researchers can get their work published if they improve BLEU scores (an MT evaluation metric) even by less than a point (on a 100-point scale). Statistical MT is reaching the limits of what it can do by simply adding more training data, and hand-built grammars never really took off as they've not yet proven to be feasible in terms of time and memory complexity. The dream of having instantaneous, accurate, speech-to-speech (or even text-to-text) translation is as far fetched as time travel and deep-space colonization.

It will, and does, help people understand documents written in other languages, but it will be a long time until computers can translate (or understand or generate language) as well as humans.

Joking aside, you're exactly right. Cupertinos could be more damaging than actual typos, since a proof-reader should know "axcept", as a typo, is closer to "accept" than "except" ("x" is right next to "c" on a QWERTY keyboard, but "a" is an extra key-length from "e" (or two more in manhattan distance), but a spell checker might suggest "except" first.

Is it just me, or does the piracy thing sound like a cover? It seems the gov are trying to prevent access to the Wikileaks release. Or perhaps it's time I got me a tinfoil hat.

Using only your mouse? Consider the folk who, after 20 years of using a computer, still hunt-and-peck the keys and use the mouse for nearly everything.

Meanwhile, the arms were nowhere to be found.

Ignore, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... so THIS is what IEEE stands for?

Who says the must assimilate culturally or linguistically as well as economically/politically/etc? That sounds a lot like the mentality of Soviet Russia's and Communist China's cultural revolutions? Are you suggesting we should demolish all China towns, little Italys (Italies?), etc?

It gives many people a source of pride and community to have their own linguistic and cultural norms. Consider even the difference between British, American, Australian, etc. Englishes. Or more minutely, the style of your grandparents and teenagers today, or even the difference between chatting with your buddies and asking your boss for a raise. Language variation exists for many reasons.

If you're interested, there's a whole wealth of literature available. Just search for "sociolinguistics".

For starters, refrain from calling us "techies" if you want less rolling of the eyes. Similarly, don't say "I'm computer illiterate!" and then laugh as though it were a clever joke. That being said, you're forgiven because of "studs and studdettes". That made me smile :) Though I would've also liked "studs and mares".

We already settled this. The Western board members aren't real; they're rented.

It's more like the delay that comes along with code switching. I haven't forgotten how to use qwerty, but it takes me a few minutes to warm up to it again

My hobby: looking for opportunities to use low-frequency adjectives in bad puns:

• That's a tubular pneumatic delivery system, man!
• Dude, that's a wicked candle!
• That flipping gymnast from China won gold.

Is "steal" even the right word? The original code still exists whence MS got it, and last time I checked, it's A-OK to use GPL code (it just makes the licensing situation of the code using it a little hairier). I'd say "copy" or "use". Otherwise, if they fix some bugs in the code and send the patch upstream (*insert canned laughter*), does that mean they returned the borrowed code?

Regarding tones, I recently read that they came about with the loss of final consonants. When a word ended in a voiced consonant, the consonant was dropped and the word took on a lower tone. Similarly, voiceless consonants became higher tones. Now Mandarin only has (I think) the /n/ and /ng/ final consonants (I guess maybe also the retroflexed /r/). The Wikipedia article on tone covers tone history pretty well.

I also read a paper by Olle Kjellin which discussed tones in Tibetan, which, he argues, is at a different (earlier) stage of this transition. Tibetan has both final consonants and tone, and the tone is entirely predictable only using phonological rules given the words (with their consonants, which are not always pronounced). Interesting read.

Common and proper nouns* take 's as the possessive affix, but pronouns do not. It just so happens that the plural form of the pronoun it is the same as if it were a common noun. Similarly, the possessive of "who" is homophonous with the contraction of "who is". Compare:

• I, me, my, mine
• you, you, your, yours
• he, him, his, his
• she, her, hers, hers
• it, it, its, its
• who, who(m), whose, whose

I don't see any apostrophes in that list. So I believe it is logical for the correct spelling of the possessive of "it" to be "its".

* interesting note: it's not just nouns, but noun phrases. Thus we can say "The CEO of Reynholm Industries' office" and mean the office belonging to the CEO, not to "Industries" or to "Reynholm Industries"

"kankoku de ha, sobieto roshia no jyooku ga rojin dake no mono da"

I'm not a native speaker, but that doesn't sound quite so cool. But if you're interested in Soviet Russia jokes in Japanese, this is invaluable. It even has some C code to make Hello World into a Soviet Russia joke.