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The Open SOurce/Linux community invented the term and the tactic...

Did they, or did it originally apply to IBM?

BASIC /bay'-sic/ n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.

[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]

Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, but this is a backronym. BASIC was originally named Basic, simply because it was a simple and basic programming language. Because most programming language names were in fact acronyms, BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or to be silly. No acronym for BASIC originally existed or was intended (as one can verify by reading texts through the early 1970s). Later, around the mid-1970s, people began to make up backronyms for BASIC because they weren't sure. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is the one that caught on.

The Jargon Dictionary

You can find most internet/tech related jargon on one of the various Jargon File Nodes floating about the net.

http://info.astrian.net/jargon/ for the to lazy to google. :)

Please stop astroturfing.

And once again, the great Wheel of Reincarnation comes full circle. Nice to have seen it happen twice in my lifetime.

What does OGG stand for?

A suicide bombing.

The Jargon Dictionary makes mention of such predictions as far back as 1983 on Usenet. It doesn't provide any documentation on who might've been first to say it, but it does sound a lot like what Lessig is spouting now.

Well, ok, you are probably just misinformed.

Yay! Godwin's Law!

Yay! I was waiting for Godwin's Law, and YOU FILLED MY NEED!

Its a Dilbertism.

First let's look at the history of the term killer app in The Jargon Dictionary.

Next (w.r.t. "killer app") we look at the artificial Mind-1.1 as the emerging "killer app" par excellance.

Technological Singularity explains in chilling detail why AI [Mind-1.1] is the next killer app.

Thanks for sorting that out... Now nobody will be confused by my typo and think I was talking about commas.

I didn't think anyone was confused. Did I give you that impression? Rather, I simply find it interesting to note the general rule of thumb -- that posts designed to correct grammatical errors tend to have a higher than normal probability of having grammatical errors themselves.

I'm certainly not the first person to note this, see here, here, and here. Nor, unfortunately, will I be the last.

If somehow you got out of my comment that I was looking to make an example specifically of you, or to expose you to ridicule, well, that wasn't the case. Actually, your post was both informative and interesting, and by virtue of the typo, funny to boot.

And I do feel better now, thanks for asking!

My favorite is the 1982 Havard/Yale/MIT football game. My second favorite was the police car on top of the dome, including donut.

I wonder if we'll see a derivative of Godwin's Law pop up anytime soon . . .

How about when the government turned on you

As if they had ever been friendly? Every time you saw them throughout the game they were enemies. They moved, they weren't Barney or Doc, so they had to be killed.

"Government turns on you" barely qualifies as storyline. Although if you decide to grant it that description, it's still not a good storyline. This is evidenced by the fact that from the point-of-view of a GI infantryman, murdering scientists on sight doesn't make any sense. In the follow-on HalfLife: OpFor, they had to retcon that part of the story, because it was silly.

when it was really a series of missions and objectives

A virtue of Half-Life is that it was not a series of missions. It was a continuous environment you moved through, and your only objective was to move (or overcome short-range obstacles to such movement). Unlikely weaker games such as Quake2, there was no silly sequence of "missions" to assign you dumb jobs everyplace.

decided to nuke the facilities?

There was no use or mention of nuculear weapons in Half-Life. Prehaps you're thinking of a follow-up.

Or when the scientists decided you were to go to Xen?

That was exactly when the game started to get really, really bad. So I don't call it "good". And again, I'd still barely call that a story. He's continuing to kill things that threaten him.

You're trying to lie and say Half-Life had a static storyline

No, I'm just pointing out that Half-Life had the same puny storyline as the most popular FPS (Quake and Doom): "scientists unleash monsters". The story was presented better than in Doom- the pacing, acting, scenary, props, and makeup were all superior. But it's the same story.

Is that a static storyline? Yes, absolutely. Simply by scaling the threat level of the monsters up or down, the missions from the game could be rearranged in any order with hardly any confusion. That is a "static" storyline in the same way that StarTrek's is.

Mike Godwin, of EFF fame, has looked into this subject a bit deeper, and makes a frightening observation.

He didn't compare the laws to the Nazis, did he?

Wheel mice are great, only Solaris users really need three and even then wheels are usable under Solaris. Considering I am looking at a banner ad for mice I can only think this is astroturfing. Next we'll see you spouting off about the joys of using a one button mouse. Be gone ye layer of phony shrubbery.

They could even actually ban telnet, http, and ftp, too.

Read about The September that never ended !

Well, it doesn't rhyme with Troll...

But you're talking about Jabber.

I can boil my response to this rant into a single Jargon entry:
Sturgeon's Law - "Ninety percent of everything is crap."

Ya mean, September has ended? I haven't noticed! (A fitting analogy though: the hypernova is the signal, the sun is the noise...)

Debugging quantum programs is going to be a real pain. This will allow a whole new type of bug. Before, people blamed bugs on faulty software, non-compliant compilers, and bad hardware. Soon they can blame their bugs on physics itself.

heisenbug: /hi:'zen-buhg/ n. [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto variables, fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc arena) or errors that smash the stack.

A kid who can write 5 lines of perl, or a tech support person can call themselves an engineer if they like, but we'll laugh at them when we hear how their script wiped out their partition. It's like my martial arts teacher said, in ancient China they didn't have belts - one was judged by their ability to fight.

Let's separate the wheat from the chaff on the battlefield. There's some truly incompetent people who are qualified, just like the reverse exists. As they say in the hacker's portrait, the self taught hacker is often more motivated and more respected.

Wow. I don't like "trusted computing" much either, but equating MS to Nazi Germany is a stretch. I call Godwin's Law on you.

Furthermore, it's not even a late-90s expression to start with. I remember using it long before the internet.

It is a 'well known fact' (whatever that means) that the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the effort.

Unfortunately, the first 90% of the project also takes 90% of the effort.

To say that AOL has outlived its usefulness is to imply that it was useful at one time. For what? Its only purpose is to allow inarticulate morons to access the internet, completely ignorant about net etiquette and with no desire to learn to behave properly. The September of 1993 is marking its 10th anniversary this year.

That is so witty. I never get tired of seeing someone write *nix. It never ceases to amuse me. I just love it ever so much. Please continue doing this. Thank you.

I've always used *NIX to mean every OS that is UNIX related (as in * is a wildcard). Since Linux is not UNIX, but is UNIX-like, a lot of people will flame you for implying Linux is UNIX. So *NIX includes Linux. It includes *BSD (notice the wildcard) and OS X. It might even include Minix if you wanted it to. IIRC, UN*X was used to avoid the trademark issue. However, *NIX just means UNIX-like, and may or may not have anything to do with the trademark issue.

WordSpy is simply recording the usage, much like Wired's Jargon section does, or like ESR's Jargon File, or like OED always has.

Back in 1999 we got a threatening letter from a Binney & Smith lawyer (Kevin S. Cavanaugh, who was apparently a busy boy at the time) about an HTML-ized copy of the Jargon File we have (because of the crayola books and crayola entries. IIRC, he also highlighted the mention of Crayola in the crayon entry). The letter claimed that the "use of Binney & Smith's intellectual property in your web site" is "likely to confuse consumers as to the source or sponsorship of your products/services." It further stated that "your use also violates unfair trade practice laws." (they would have to be very unfair laws, indeed ;-) )

Of course, we weren't using the term "crayola" in connection with any of our "products/services", so there was no opportunity for confusion on the part of consumers. On top of that, the terms had been part of the Jargon File for over 10 years prior to that (and, I would imagine, in the three printed editions of the Jargon File that were published during that time). And, surprise surprise, they still are part of the Jargon File today.

I dunno why companies let their lawyers loose on search engines... it only makes the company look like clueless idiots on the net. What is especially surprising, in this case, is that it shows that even Google has left themselves open to the typical PR damage that a "googling" lawyer can inflict on his employers.

WordSpy is simply recording the usage, much like Wired's Jargon section does, or like ESR's Jargon File, or like OED always has.

Back in 1999 we got a threatening letter from a Binney & Smith lawyer (Kevin S. Cavanaugh, who was apparently a busy boy at the time) about an HTML-ized copy of the Jargon File we have (because of the crayola books and crayola entries. IIRC, he also highlighted the mention of Crayola in the crayon entry). The letter claimed that the "use of Binney & Smith's intellectual property in your web site" is "likely to confuse consumers as to the source or sponsorship of your products/services." It further stated that "your use also violates unfair trade practice laws." (they would have to be very unfair laws, indeed ;-) )

Of course, we weren't using the term "crayola" in connection with any of our "products/services", so there was no opportunity for confusion on the part of consumers. On top of that, the terms had been part of the Jargon File for over 10 years prior to that (and, I would imagine, in the three printed editions of the Jargon File that were published during that time). And, surprise surprise, they still are part of the Jargon File today.

I dunno why companies let their lawyers loose on search engines... it only makes the company look like clueless idiots on the net. What is especially surprising, in this case, is that it shows that even Google has left themselves open to the typical PR damage that a "googling" lawyer can inflict on his employers.

WordSpy is simply recording the usage, much like Wired's Jargon section does, or like ESR's Jargon File, or like OED always has.

Back in 1999 we got a threatening letter from a Binney & Smith lawyer (Kevin S. Cavanaugh, who was apparently a busy boy at the time) about an HTML-ized copy of the Jargon File we have (because of the crayola books and crayola entries. IIRC, he also highlighted the mention of Crayola in the crayon entry). The letter claimed that the "use of Binney & Smith's intellectual property in your web site" is "likely to confuse consumers as to the source or sponsorship of your products/services." It further stated that "your use also violates unfair trade practice laws." (they would have to be very unfair laws, indeed ;-) )

Of course, we weren't using the term "crayola" in connection with any of our "products/services", so there was no opportunity for confusion on the part of consumers. On top of that, the terms had been part of the Jargon File for over 10 years prior to that (and, I would imagine, in the three printed editions of the Jargon File that were published during that time). And, surprise surprise, they still are part of the Jargon File today.

I dunno why companies let their lawyers loose on search engines... it only makes the company look like clueless idiots on the net. What is especially surprising, in this case, is that it shows that even Google has left themselves open to the typical PR damage that a "googling" lawyer can inflict on his employers.

It's called the Lumber Cartel [TINLC]. See:
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/l/Lumber_Cart el.html

Not all geeks are only computer nerds. Most of the friends I know from my computer science classes also do many other things.

Indeed, I just got back from performing music and poetry at a great open-mic.

"It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent." - The Jargon File

I've recently put together three boxen for family and friends from my spares pile. We're talking 120-150Mhz PIs, 48-64MB SIMM RAM, 1GB drives, quad speed CD-ROMs, 56K modems and 1MB S3 cards, with Win98SE, Word 97, Outlook Express and not much else.

Now, to me and thee, that spec sucks, but to someone that just wants a box for email, browsing and word processing, it does everything that they need to do, as fast as they need to do it.

Sure, I like being able to buy 3Ghz monsters, but you need to sell a lot of systems to make back the the cost of the R&D for them. And given that we should all be aware by now of the environmental cost of computer systems, I'm going to be keeping "obsolete" hardware in service just as long as I can, and thumb my nose at the marketeers who tell me that there are compelling reasons to upgrade other than the magic smoke getting out.

I've recently put together three boxen for family and friends from my spares pile. We're talking 120-150Mhz PIs, 48-64MB SIMM RAM, 1GB drives, quad speed CD-ROMs, 56K modems and 1MB S3 cards, with Win98SE, Word 97, Outlook Express and not much else.

Now, to me and thee, that spec sucks, but to someone that just wants a box for email, browsing and word processing, it does everything that they need to do, as fast as they need to do it.

Sure, I like being able to buy 3Ghz monsters, but you need to sell a lot of systems to make back the the cost of the R&D for them. And given that we should all be aware by now of the environmental cost of computer systems, I'm going to be keeping "obsolete" hardware in service just as long as I can, and thumb my nose at the marketeers who tell me that there are compelling reasons to upgrade other than the magic smoke getting out.

I've recently put together three boxen for family and friends from my spares pile. We're talking 120-150Mhz PIs, 48-64MB SIMM RAM, 1GB drives, quad speed CD-ROMs, 56K modems and 1MB S3 cards, with Win98SE, Word 97, Outlook Express and not much else.

Now, to me and thee, that spec sucks, but to someone that just wants a box for email, browsing and word processing, it does everything that they need to do, as fast as they need to do it.

Sure, I like being able to buy 3Ghz monsters, but you need to sell a lot of systems to make back the the cost of the R&D for them. And given that we should all be aware by now of the environmental cost of computer systems, I'm going to be keeping "obsolete" hardware in service just as long as I can, and thumb my nose at the marketeers who tell me that there are compelling reasons to upgrade other than the magic smoke getting out.

Actually. Yes the concept of intellectual properry is bogus by all reasonable means. Especially if copying digital media-files is to be treated as theft of actual, physical property.

Anyway I am not opposed to copyright itself. Not at all. I find it reasonable. Perpetual copyright however, and the nazis ( Godwin's law :) who are fighting their own customers, that's another story.

Check it out:

The Infamous Space Cadet Keyboard

Wow. Press [Super][Meta][Shift][Control][Alt][X] to continue... Imagine a Beo^H^H^H one of these puppies!

This is not a kluge. (For spelling, see link below.) A kluge is a "rickety," unstable bubblegum MacGuyver-with-a-ballpoint-pen type fix, temporary until real time can be devoted to obtaining the intended result properly. Data over powerlines can hardly be considered a fix or repair to an existing system, let alone a temporary one, so it cannot be a kluge.

Besides, who in their right mind would link to any dictionary but the Jargon File for a computer term?? See kluge there. (Not kludge.)

P.S. WTF happened to www.tuxedo.org 's jargon file?? WTF?!

This is not a kluge. (For spelling, see link below.) A kluge is a "rickety," unstable bubblegum MacGuyver-with-a-ballpoint-pen type fix, temporary until real time can be devoted to obtaining the intended result properly. Data over powerlines can hardly be considered a fix or repair to an existing system, let alone a temporary one, so it cannot be a kluge.

Besides, who in their right mind would link to any dictionary but the Jargon File for a computer term?? See kluge there. (Not kludge.)

P.S. WTF happened to www.tuxedo.org 's jargon file?? WTF?!

This is not a kluge. (For spelling, see link below.) A kluge is a "rickety," unstable bubblegum MacGuyver-with-a-ballpoint-pen type fix, temporary until real time can be devoted to obtaining the intended result properly. Data over powerlines can hardly be considered a fix or repair to an existing system, let alone a temporary one, so it cannot be a kluge.

Besides, who in their right mind would link to any dictionary but the Jargon File for a computer term?? See kluge there. (Not kludge.)

P.S. WTF happened to www.tuxedo.org 's jargon file?? WTF?!

Maybe she is astroturfing.

She is paid to get an idea into areas of public debate. A few months ago, she was hanging around in bars, railway stations, shopping centres, talking into her mobile phone and saying "just take a look at the picture I'm sending you now, I just took it on my new mobile phone"...

This month, her job is te get us all to believe that PowerBooks are so robust, you can really mistreat them, and they still work.

She almost got the job of promoting Oracle's "unbreakable" slogan... Hey, maybe that could be given to the "crack a Mac" focus group...

According to The Jargon Dictionary wetware is:

wetware /wet'weir/ n. [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.

I didn't know what it meant... figured other people may not either.

According to The Jargon Dictionary wetware is:

wetware /wet'weir/ n. [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.

I didn't know what it meant... figured other people may not either.

According to The Jargon Dictionary wetware is:

wetware /wet'weir/ n. [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.

I didn't know what it meant... figured other people may not either.

According to The Jargon Dictionary wetware is:

wetware /wet'weir/ n. [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.

I didn't know what it meant... figured other people may not either.

My hacking career started when I was in high school. Back then we used the term hacker to mean a person who spent a great deal of time tinkering with hardware and software, either to develop more efficient programs or to bypass unnecessary steps and get the job done more quickly. The term has now become a pejorative, carrying the meaning of "malicious criminal." In these pages I use the term the way I have always used it--in its earlier, more benign sense. In late 1979, a group of fellow hacker types who worked for the Los Angeles Unified School District dared me to try hacking into The Ark, the computer system at Digital Equipment Corporation used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software.

I wish to invoke Godwin's Law here.
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/g/godwin_s_la w.html