My daughter disagrees with this conformist pap

Settling grammar disputes with spam: "Cory Doctorow:
A group of English teachers in Hong Kong have a dispute with a standard grammar text. To settle it, they've sent out spam to millions of Intenret users asking for opinions on correct English usage. Seth has written a long, thoughtful answer to their question:

I've gotten a couple of spam messages in the past month from some English teachers in Hong Kong. They're asking for people in the West to help back them up on a point about English grammar. Apparently, English grammar books available in Hong Kong misrepresent the rule about when you should use the present perfect and when you should use the simple past. The teachers sending the spam know the rule, but their students seem to consider the textbooks better authority than the teachers -- and won't listen when the teachers try to teach the correct rule. So the teachers decided to send out a spam appeal for native English speakers to try to get the correct rule into a publication so it would be persuasive to Hong Kong students learning English as a second language.

In my view, the present perfect is forbidden when the verb is qualified by an adverbial referring to a time period, except if the time period includes the present.

Link"

(Via Boing Boing.)