This is the typically-given reason for all department stores being designed with the perfume counter in front of the door. Supposedly it helped cover up the stench of all the "horse pollution" coming from the street.

Interestingly, in the USA the dialect of English spoken in the rural Appalachians is often claimed to be the closest thing you will find to Elizabethan English in the modern world. It is simultaneously probably the single least prestigious dialect of English in North America.

(Note: "Prestige" is how linguists talk about dialects being perceived as wrong or bad by other speakers. IOW: Most people will tell you someone speaking this dialect has "bad English". Irony.)

Funny you should bring this up as your example of an absolute rule. "Correct comma placement", is actually the source of biggest ongoing stylistic argument in the English language: the Oxford comma. Its like the "vi vs. Emacs" of the literary world. This is one of the strongest arguments you could have picked supporting the point you were looking to refute.

Massive example fail.

It is likely that your friend is not alone with her condition. Try to discuss it with others who are affected, and who have already been through the stages that lay ahead of her. People with motor control issues successfully use vertical mice, touch screens, keys for navigation, gaze trackers, voice recognition, non-standard input methods such as the Dasher accessibility tool, or tailored input methods.

Yes, but at least I have a hope of keeping myself informed of all the laws governing the political entities I live in. There is no possible way for a single human being to know and keep on top of all the laws governing behavior and speech in every country, county, state, city, etc. in the entire world. So one of them trying to enforce their internal laws on the entire world is patently ridiculous.

Doesn't seem like much of the same thing to me. That was an instance of someone doing something they could be jailed for where they were at the time, who happened to use Facebook to do it.

The idea that I can be arrested for saying something that's perfectly legal where I said it by any country in the world that choses to pass a law against it is completely unworkable. Picture a dystopia where nobody ever speaks, because pretty much anything that can be said is illegal somewhere. Or even one where that doesn't help, because some country passed a law against being silent.

The problem with that logic is that the sentence is actually slightly inaccurate. Hillary comes from a Republican family. She actually was an establishment Republican before she married Bill and was essentially forced to switch parties. So what this really tells you is how far to the right the Republican Party has moved.

Assuming you hadn't already noticed this by little things like them decrying Richard Nixon's health care scheme as a Communist Government takeover, or insisting that political positions held by Ronald Regan are a sure sign of anti-Americanism.

Are you sure? Because they actually did this exact thing, and not only do I not see you saying anything of the sort, I don't even see any indication that you remember it happening. In fact, they uncovered emails from Rove specifically instructing White House employees to break the law and use personal email, and some where he actually complained when people didn't comply. So this wasn't ignorance or oversight, it was active malice.

From where I sit, it looks like there's only a big stink now because the alternate Republican media establishment wants to attack what looks like might be their POTUS opponent in 2016, and this is the best they could come up with. We know for a fact that if this was a Republican it would quickly be forgotten, because it recently was, and you just demonstrated that you'd forgotten it.

If you have mod points, and you post on a Slashdot article, you may no longer use mod points on any post in that article (and any previous moderation you have done on posts on that article are undone).

IMHO it would probably be sufficient to do that on a thread basis, rather than for the whole article, but that's the system /. uses.

Shame you burned any mod points you might have posting this, or I'd direct you to my other answer , which hits a lot of these same points.

I will mention that the competition theory is only one theory of how Europe got where it is. The one I prefer is that it was all about information supremacy (Europe perfected printing presses first, everyone else was stuck ludicrously expensive hand-copying, and it was game over. All your base are belong to us).

However, I think it is quite true that people are wired to organize their universe as "us vs. them". Political units are defined in opposition to other units, and without them, people just form smaller units to squabble with. This isn't necessarily a good thing though. In many cases it is downright evil, and should be fought against, but the first step is to realize it is human nature you are fighting against. In this respect, Trek was often aspirational, rather than being realistic. But even there, there had to be an "other": Klingons.

This bit is wrong as well. In TOS the Federation was involved in sort of a "Cold War" with the Klingon Empire (mirroring the extant real-world political situation), and indications were that it wasn't always so cold, and likely wouldn't always stay that way. Even as an exploration vessel, the Enterprise was liberally equipped with weapons, and regularly needed to use them.

And truly there's nothing shocking about a group of independent polities banding together in the face of an external threat (the Klingons). Humans have a basic need to categorize into "us" and "them". External threats are how countries are made.

All those are great examples of how we change our environment so we can avoid changing ourselves. There's an important implication there. As long as its a problem you can invent your way around without changing human nature, you are right that history shows there are no limits.

OTOH: it would be unwise in the extreme to dismiss history as an indication of human behavior. eg: If no society in history has been able to live peacefully with its neighbors when it perceived itself to be more powerful than them, there's a good chance that particular behavior is just not in us. If no sizable society in history has gotten along without internal competition for resources (eg: money), then there's a good chance that behavior is an integral part of our makeup.

That's where IMHO Trek's optimistic ideology got things wrong (and Babylon-5 got it right).

This actually happened once. The Computer converted to Christian Science. It ended up contracting the Sobig.F virus, and refused any help from scanners or removal tools, as it insisted its faith should be sufficient to heal it. Sadly, it appears its faith was insufficient, and God let it die.

On the bright side, it was converted to Mormonism posthumously.