I disable all sigs, so I didn't see it. You are right, of course, UK English is often different than US English.

Oh, certainly. However, a collective noun still has a singular and a plural. You shouldn't write that a pride of lions was anything but singular, unless you were talking about multiple prides of lions. In the same vein, a company name is always singular. You wouldn't make the possessive of Google Googles'. As for notional agreement, that doesn't apply in this case, as the sentence was referring to the singular corporation, not the multiple people forming them.

Well, if grammar matters, then I'd say the question is more properly, "Given that Microsoft has had desktop applications with built-in grammar check since around 1997, why doesn't Google have one?"

It's not old - most OTA HD signals are over UHF, at least in the US.

Wow....just....I don't even know how to respond to the sheer number of fallacies in that paragraph.

Instead, I'll focus on the biggest whopper:

Russia became paranoid and autocratic as a defensive measure,

WTF?!? Are you seriously saying that Russia *wasn't* paranoid and autocratic until *after* WWII? Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 on, and used that position to consolidate power. His centralized planning of the economy resulted in the famine that caused mass uprisings, which led Stalin to command the "Great Purge" in 1937-38.

Okay, let me see if I can explain this. The amendment was to a bill that is supposed to ensure that the FCC has transparency in its rule making process, and that proposed rules are clearly identified and open for review before being implemented.

This amendment didn't say, "No one can request your password as a condition of employment." It said that the entire language of the bill that was trying to force the FCC to be transparent, was out the window as long as the FCC was making a rule about 'privacy'.

The amendment gutted the whole purpose of the bill currently under consideration for a whole class of regulation, and that's why it was bad.

Debate on the floor of the house is about the bill under consideration, not a place to introduce new legislation at the drop of a hat. You can't just say, "I'd do it this way," because that would be meaningless in the context of debate about an amendment currently being discussed.

You bring up your version of the bill/amendment in committee, at a later time, following the procedural rules of the house/senate.

And yes, he did explain why it was a bad amendment, he just didn't explain it to someone who has no clue what the entire language of the amendment was.

You think the NHTSA is run by elected officials? The vast bulk of them are bureaucrats who stay on from administration to administration.

You're artificially conflating oil (a natural resource) with gasoline (a refined product). Yes, you obtain gasoline from oil, but the reason we export it is that we have refining capacity to do so, and export it to countries that don't. Also, don't make the mistake that gasoline is all we get from oil. Pretty much every bit of a barrel of oil is processed at the refinery, from gasoline, diesel, lubricants/grease (possibly even more critical to our economy than fuels) - and when everything else is made, what's left is made into asphalt.

Another link, more recent data, sourced from China state media:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i1FL2q8ZO_Z93-mOqOx5eSYQW36Q?docId=CNG.fe11c1b55d60e484a37a458dccdd1b34.8f1/

Admittedly this data is a bit old, but it does come from WHO (and not just some blog):

http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/chin.pdf/

Suicide rate among people aged 25-34 is 15.1 per 100,000.

You do know that Foxconn's suicide rate is much lower than the China national average, right?

retcon: retroactive continuity

Rewriting history. "No, it's always been that way!"

I couldn't agree more. I own a Kindle (several actually, among several members of my family), and just recently an ebook came out from one of my favorite authors. It was the latest in a series, and I was going to buy it anyway.

Just on a hunch, I checked on Amazon ($12.99), then checked on Baene-books.com ($6.00). You can guess which store I bought from. The Baen e-Book also came without DRM.

People will buy e-books, if they're sold at a reasonable price.

At first it was just the kindle versions, but Penguin has now chosen (in the past week) to not send ebooks to Overdrive, in any format.