I had a Japanese teacher (I am a native English speaker; she was Japanese teaching Japanese) who made me rethink words and especially names taken from other languages. For instance, she said it was wrong to call San Francisco's Japanese section "Nihonmachi" because it is known as "Japan Town", and that is what the Japanese tourists call it too. She also thought that my writing the city of Chico as (in Japanese syllables) "chi ko" was wrong; the Spanish may well be pronounced with a sort "i", but the American city is pronounced by its natives with a long "i" as "chi i ko". It may be confused, but her bigger argument was that names take on new pronunciations when they move to other languages.

Look at what happens to country names. We call the country "Japan" but that is because we got it roundabout from several other languages referring to a lacquer process, I believe. Their name is "Nippon" or "Nihon" depending on what other words are used with it phonetically. The country to the south of the US is pronounced "MAY hee ko" by them and "MEK sih ko" by us. When the Japanese made a name for it, they took it from the US pronunciation and call it the twisted "may kee shee ko" when the native pronunciation would work perfectly well in Japanese.

Japanese syllables end with vowels or are vowels alone, mostly, so you go to "mah koo doh nah roo doh" and order "bee goo mah koo" and "foo ray unn choo foo ri zu".

So if Lufthansa changes pronunciation here, well, so do Paris, Tokyo, Rome probably just about every Central and Eastern European name, in fact, probably just about every name in every language changes when pronounced in a different language.

I side with Lift-hann-zer or however Bostonians want to mangle it, whatever doppleganger Dixie denizens want to twist it into, and just about every other variation which goes into the recipe for the spice of life.

The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, are there to list the inalienable rights that arise simply from being human. They do not list rights granted by a benevolent government. The prime motive for listing them is to make sure the government doesn't try to violate people's natural rights, what we today might call human rights.

The idea the the second amendment alone is a collective right is bizarre. Collective means as represented by the state -- the government. Why on earth would the founding fathers think it possible that any government had any kind of inalienable right? It simply makes no sense.

Even liberals on the Supreme Court have said that introductory clauses don't affect the amendment. Get beyond the words you don't understand because of the changes in English over the last 200+ years -- "well regulated militia" does NOT mean the National Guard, which wasn't even invented until around 1900.

"The right to keep and bear arms" was well understood in its day to mean self defense -- from both crime and government -- as well as hunting or any other use. No one in their right mind can argue that self defense is not an inalienable right of being a human being.

To argue that the second amendment, alone of all the bill of rights, is not an individual right but a collective, ie government, right is simply bizarre beyond belief.

Right. Management tells Congress to not increase the mandatory gas mileage, and you blame the government? Maybe for being patsies, but that is nothing unusual.

Government won't come up with nationalized health care? Odd, seems other businesses are coping just fine. And like you say, Detroit was coping a few years ago.

You have your priorities wrong. This is 90% management's screwup. I give the other 10% to the UAW only because they have been as shortsighted and pigheaded as management, but they don't make the decisions, management does, and they have been wrong wrong wrong. SUVs when any bozo could see the imports were cleaning up with small cars. Unreliable unimaginative claptrap when the imports were getting better and better.

Management deserves to be thrown out on their keister. The UAW bosses deserve to earn minimum wage from here on. Unfortunately, it will be the workers who get the shaft while the bosses go on to bigger and better screwups.

The program queries the web site and makes random guesses for questions it hasn't seen before. This is multiple choice, right? Presumably there can be one wrong among five questions. When a page is accepted, it will know that most of the answers are right, maybe all. Do this often enough and it will learn which answers are right and wrong.

This sounds like a one hour program plus some trial and error testing. A day tops.