Posted on 07/02/2009 8:36:05 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Quite right — each country (or even each region/state/county) has it’s own slang words, lingo, metaphors. For example, when I lived in Sussex, England, for a long time I had no idea when someone said “I don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.” — I bet you’re equally puzzled by that! And, it’s a common English expression like knackered or snogged.
Sorry for the 4 day weekend slow response. I had my first AppleCare call this weekend in fact. It went well. They were incredibly helpful. More helpful than they needed to be in fact. They identified one problem with third-party software and helped me fix it anyway and then taught me how to avoid it in the future. He sounded Welsh. I’m not sure that the call wasn’t routed to a British call centre or some such for our holiday weekend.
The state of the art in speech recognition and AI is that technology could be used as a force multiplier. If it wasn't for the cheap third world labor, more Americans would have high paying/highly taxed jobs designing, building, and maintaining robotic systems. I don't want to answer calls or pick lettuce myself, but I would love a job automating those jobs. Increasing worker productivity, a euphemism for increasing automation, is held back by anti-American policies and attitudes.
A while ago, there was actually a TV news show that interviewed Indians who were doing support work for welfare centers.
The general tenor was how unbelievable they found the fact that so many people were essentially getting free money.
Ok, so big deal, a couple of contracts were dropped, happens all the time in corporate interactions.
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