Comment Re:More and more powerful... (Score 1) 238
I call them 'knee-tops', but it has not caught on. :-/
If you like the idea of a text editor that takes a lifetime to master, emacs might be for you.
Ah yes, the Way Of The Emacs. Kidding - I love it.
Sorry to break the news to everybody but online voting in one form or another is the future.
So logically Canada would be the perfect country to adopt online voting because we are small (population) and have done so well in the past. What better a voting system to do comparison to then the Canadian. If we can't pull it off well then.......
Estonia already does this - so it it not 'the future'. The population of Estonia is even smaller than Canada. I have my own thoughts about online voting (*especially* in Estonia) but online voting is already happening.
Maybe I picked a bad country for the scenario. Replace Libya with Russia, China, or North Korea.
Libya and Russia/China are worlds apart. There are only three blocs which could hope to compete against the US in a modern face-off; Russia, China and the EU (and in the latter case, only after a lot of upgrading).
It would be difficult to make sure the respective countries had removed all their nukes. And all it would take is one threatening to use it against us. We may not be able to stop them.
I think you are missing my point here- that nukes will not stop a middle or lower ranking power from making an attack. Given the huge conventional forces advantage the US has over these guys the US does not need nukes to take them out.
Nukes are only a deterrent against other multiple-warhead-ballistic-missile countries - ie Russia and China (and potentially the EU).
Indeed, looking at it from the other guys point of view, they are probably hoping to gain a nuclear bomb to make any US aggression/interference more painful. This is why I think Iran seems to want a nuclear capability. They are not hoping to take out Washington, but to threaten to take out Tel Aviv if the US attacks.
Our retaliatory efforts could be significantly impacted by a small number of nukes.
I guess if means by what you mean by 'small number'. In principle I agree.
Right now, it would take roughly the same amount of time for Russia to hit us as it would for the US to hit them--and we both know it would be suicide to launch because of roughly equal outcomes on both sides.
Well yes, this is the MAD principle.
[invading]
Oh, but they do; they just annex the territory first, and then claim that the nationals are "theirs", and the whole mess is their "internal affairs".
Good point.
The degree of human rights violations is not simply defined by number of people killed. For one thing, this doesn't account for lawful killings of enemy combatants.
Tricky, the whole world knows the Iraq war was prosecuted on a pretext; and lots of people think it was illegal. So it is quite easy for someone to make the case that all the dead in Iraq were unlawfully killed. This may not hold for the letter of the law, but I'm talking about the 'moral high ground', not legal loop-holes.
For another, it doesn't account for intent (shelling a position of your enemy, missing, and hitting a civilian structure is one thing; deliberately targeting civilians is another; and torturing POWs and civilians is yet another).
However, how does one prove the intent? Would *you* believe if Russia or China accidentally bombed a US embassy? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade)
And also, it seems ok for the Israelis to target civilians and not get any sanctions...
We already know that the US tortures people.
Also, human rights transcend national boundaries. It's not somehow okay to mass murder your own population by any means, including deliberate actions that lead to famines and starvation (speaking of NK...).
I quite agree.
You can open the text of UDHR, and go one by one, marking them as they apply to Cuba (or any other country).
Thanks for the link; I'll take a look. I don't know enough about Cuba to be able to make any informed decisions on whether they are breaking lots of human rights. But I'll do some research.
It's okay for the western countries to criticize the U.S. for its human rights violations in the "war on terror"; but the likes of Iran, Cuba, North Korea or China would better shut up and deal with their own, much bigger, mess first. The high ground is still occupied.
I contend that people don't think like that. It is far harder for an American or Brit diplomat to scold a Chinese minister after Gitmo. It's not the Chinese who are stomping all over the world killing other nationals. How many Iraqis have been killed by direct action of the US/UK forces? If you're going to add up numbers of individual human rights violations, I'd be interested to know how many people the Chinese and NK are supposed to have killed.
BTW, what is it that Cuba is supposed to have done against human rights?
I still think the parent poster above is exaggerating the difference. Are people really having issues learning English from an American rather than a UK person??
Regardless of the reason why, a person speaking like a cast member of Friends is going to be understood by anyone fluent in English.
(A small query - is 'scone' an American term for you?)
One facet of Webster's importance was his willingness to innovate when he thought innovation meant improvement. He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial and needlessly confusing, he urged altering many words: musick to music, centre to center, and plough to plow, for example. (Other attempts at reform met with less acceptance, however, such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmenâ"the latter of which he argued was "the old and true spelling" and the one that most accurately indicated its pronunciation.)
Wikipedia does not support your claim either:
After the Norman Conquest, the termination became -our in Anglo-French in an attempt to represent the Old French pronunciation of words ending in -or,[22] though color has been used occasionally in English since the fifteenth century.[23] The -our ending was not only retained in English borrowings from Anglo-French, but also applied to earlier French borrowings.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-our.2C_-or
In case you missed it, the Norman Conquest was in 1066, but the American continent was reached by Columbus over 4 hundred years later, so "the US retained the original form" does not compute!
If you look for a language similar to finnish, try hungarian
Estonian is even closer - and the nations are quite close geographically too. A lot of the words are very similar, although I think Estonian sounds much prettier!
Oh, and I concur that Finnish (and the other languages in the Finno-Ugric language group) are very different grammatically from English -- and most other European languages.
In Estonian nouns can take 14 forms (or 28 including plurals). So where in English you might say "on the table", in Estonian you would change the ending of the noun for 'table', "laud", (but the genetive form to which endings are added is "laua") to "laual". "off the table" would be "laualt". Try doing that in real-time as you are speaking!
I think of it as the 'polish notation' for grammar. Disclaimer: I am not a native Estonian (or Finnish) speaker, I am only trying to learn this crazy stuff!
So I don't feel confident when I speak it. Add the finnish shyness to that and you have people who avoid starting a conversation in english or engaging one. I am sure that they could converse better if they absolutely needed to, if it was written or if you happened to be really nice young woman who they wanted to make a contact to...
I've been a Finland a fair number of times, and I think this lack of confidence is quite common. I took a tour of a castle, and I was the only native English speaker in the group - the tour was advertised as being in English. The guide spoke wonderful English, and the whole group, (including some Spanish, German, Italian and a Finn) could all understand it. But she kept looking over to me asking me to correct her or supply a better word.
I think that although the Finns can understand English very well (because of the TV and movies already mentioned) outside of the big cities they don't get much practise to speak it. And, this is key, they don't realise how globalised English is these days; a typical native English speaker hears English in a wide variety of accents, and so is used to non-perfect English. But I think minority languages (Including French!
As a good friend of mine (who is a linguist and speaks 4 languages fluently and several others enough to be able to struggle through a novel) put it: "The French language is always spoken perfectly, but the English people need to suffer people torturing their language".
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
