Dear all,
The following excerpt comes from a November 19, 2003 Yahoo News article titled:
They don’t really talk about what they’re measuring; odds are, since it’s the U.N., it’s pretty worthless. Even the homeless in America have access to the Internet in community centers and libraries.
When anyone in these non-English-speaking countries wants to communicate with the rest of the world, though, what language do they write their webpages in? From Asus to Zalman, I haven’t noticed them writing much, if anything, in Finnish. Or Canadian for that matter, eh?
Ok, just looked at Asus’ main site again. No Finnish, but they do have Russian and Polish, as well as several others. Still, if your translation budget is limited, what one alternate language do you pick? English. Or, in the U.S., Spanish.
The goofy stuff economists come up with when they’re bored.
economist.com/finance/displa … id=2208914
In both cases demonstrated in this thread, the so-called experts display a laughable ignorance of the fact that A does not necessarily lead to B. It’s been a while since I took Logic 101, what’s the name for this mistake? Teological fallacy or something like that?
The conclusion that English is not needed is extremely misleading. English may not be needed for access to the Internet 
, but it certainly is needed if you want to surf areas of the net which provide English-only content.
When you read the article you get the feeling that the author was keen to grab a headline for his unremarkable study.
Mod Lang - perhaps you’re thinking of the Latin phrase reductio ad absurdum? An instance in which the logical consequence of a premise is absurd and therefore false.