I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.
Why exactly? "Error logging" is mentioned there as an alternative. I would have thought that if you can do telemetry you ought to be able to generate a local log file that is readable enough for the customer to feel confident about sending part of it back to you without breaking the law or their contracts with other parties.
I used to have a device with a physical button which, when you pressed it, would beep and add 30 seconds to the time. However, sometimes it would beep and not add 30 seconds, and sometimes it would add 30 seconds without beeping, so you always had to squint at the dim display to discover whether it had worked or not. I thought this must be a peculiarly bad design ... but since then I have lost count of the number of purely software buttons that somehow seem to replicate this broken behaviour: whether the button changes colour on the screen is somehow only loosely correlated with whether the action requested will take place. Why? How, even, have they implemented this?
Not necessarily. Which country were you in and when was this?
(I don't much like this Internet confusion where half the time people don't know what country they're reading about. At least this article has "Canadian" as the first word of the title. Here in Britain I think rabies in bats is a recent thing and even today rabies is very rare in bats.)
I think the problem with Russian names in particular is that a Russian name has three parts (e.g. Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky) and different parts get used in different contexts, depending on who's speaking, level of familiarity and so on. So it's like in an English novel where someone might be referred to as Smith by the narrator but John in dialogue, but with an extra 50%, at least, of confusion.
Yes, I agree, but really we shouldn't even be comparing "arrests" and "fine". The latter is a punishment, and the former is a practical measure to prevent a future crime (such as destruction of evidence) or to prevent someone from evading justice (by destroying evidence, hiding or leaving the country, for example). Obviously some police forces do use arrests and searches and confiscation of "evidence" as a form of extrajudicial punishment but that shouldn't be allowed.
(I've not read it, of course, and don't know whether I'd consider it inappropriate for school libraries. However, it sounds like it was not intended as pornography and therefore isn't pornography according to some narrow definitions of that term. In any case, school libraries have such tiny budgets and there are so many uncontroversial good books in the world I can see why they might want to give this one a miss.)
To be fair, pointy knives are unnecessary. At least I haven't found a use for them, though I stab myself with them occasionally when unloading the dishwasher.
Some people will tell you that they need a pointy knife for cutting tomatoes but they should try using a serrated knife instead: it's much better.
Someone should make a list of all these weird overreactions. Didn't they turn one flight around because a passenger found something scribbled in Arabic script inside the inflight magazine (I think a previous passenger had written out a prayer)? And another one because there was an abandoned mobile phone that had presumably dropped out of someone's pocket?
"Of the five pay-checks I mentioned above, no less than three are rubber-stamped with the words 'death stoppage'. When a miner is killed at work it is usual for the other miners to make up a subscription, generally of a shilling each, for his widow, and this is collected by the colliery company and automatically deducted from their wages. The significant detail here is the rubber stamp."
Apart from The Economist, I don't know anyone who says "the Americas".
If you asked a random person what Columbus discovered, what would they answer? Round here I think most people would say that Columbus discovered America. By landing in San Salvador and then Cuba.
By the way, I don't strongly object to people using "America" as an abbreviation for "The United States of America" in contexts in which it is obvious that a country is being referred to, and "American" is even less objectionable in an appropriate context. At the same time, "American" obviously doesn't mean "of or pertaining to the USA" if someone is talking about "American species of conifer" or "American dialects of Spanish" or "American tortilla recipes".
I have personally been baffled by some Scottish and Indian speakers of English, particularly when I was younger and less experienced. And Singapore English is said to be particularly hard for someone with no previous experience. And I know of a case in which someone from London sat at a table with some in-laws who were speaking a traditional native dialect of southern England to each other and found they understand almost nothing, though that was a few decades ago and the dialect in question is perhaps only spoken by old people today.
When you say you "never had a serious problem understanding people", do you mean you could understand them when you overheard them speaking to each other? Because that, of course, is the real test of how intelligible their language is to you. They may well speak a bit differently when speaking to an outsider. Also, you may be particularly skillful at understanding spoken English. I feel I have got better at understanding British dialects as I got older and gained experience of them. I was terribly confused by some dialects as a child.
With compulsory education almost everyone today has some knowledge of a standard language besides whatever dialects they have learnt. If you want to find someone who only speaks dialect X of language Y you might have to look in places where Y is neither official nor widely taught, or among very old people who never went to school.
We have a similar thing on this side of the Atlantic where people argue about whether it is acceptable to refer to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as "Britain". I feel it is, as an abbreviation, and it is my preferred abbreviation, along with "GB", because I like to look forward to the time when we won't have a monarchy any more and I therefore don't like the abbreviation "UK", and also, despite not having any strong Irish connections, I tend to feel that Ireland ought to be reunited. This may seem like the opposite of my opinion on the US/America question, where I prefer "US", and I suppose it is, but I have my reasons!
Cantonese is a language, yes, but mutual intelligibility and similarity to other languages is hardly relevant unless the languages are very similar indeed.
For example, there are spoken varieties of English that are mutually unintelligible, while speakers of different Slavic languages are often capable of having a good conversation by speaking slowly and listening carefully.
In practice the main criterion for being a language as opposed to a continuum of dialects is the degree of standardisation. So an example of something that may or may not be a language might be something like Swiss German (but I'm not an expert so I can't guarantee that's a good example). Another type of borderline case is when you have two standardised languages which differ only slightly, for example US English and GB English, or DE German and AT German.
The thing you're complaining about doesn't even mention the word "dialect" and it says underneath: "Some Census categories combine multiple languages or language groups". So they're probably just doing the best they can with the data that is available to them.
I think you're right that Cantonese should be (and usually is) referred to as a "language" but the categories "dialect" and "language" are not mutually exclusive. For example, Dutch is both a language (for most purposes) and a dialect of West Continental Germanic (for some linguistic purposes).
I am so confused by the categorisation of cars: BEV, HEV, PHEV and so on. I think the industry insiders who write some of these articles don't realise how hard it is for some of their readers to keep track.
It seems that he wrote that in a book published in 1953, but it's weird, I find, that he was imagining a robot driving a car. I would have thought he would have imagined that cars would become robots well before there would be humanoid robots wanting to drive them. So by the time you have a humanoid robot wanting to drive a car it's just one robot talking to another robot, electronically. And knives and forks are for eating, which humanoid robots presumably don't need to do, and is it likely that humanoid robots will need chairs in the same way that humans do? Altogether, a bad set of examples, I find. Perhaps the thesis would be more convincing with some better examples.
