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Sorry, cowardly internet troll, it looks like the Theory wins.

I'm loath to agree with drinkypoo on much of anything, but he's spot on with this one. I've been hearing that usage since the 60s. It's also one of the reasons I drive a 6.4 liter, 470hp, gas hog...I can see the climate changing in my rear view mirror.

googlefight gives it a 100 vs. 2
http://www.googlefight.com/no+...

Common where? I;ve never heard either term. I searched Google for both "Siri dial" and "Google dial" and neither shows much in reference to butt or pocket dilaing.

Even Google fight barely registers "Siri dial"
http://www.googlefight.com/%22...

Wrong terms used. Lush Band wins hands down! http://www.googlefight.com/lus...

How did you reach that conclusion? Genuinely curious.

Google Fight: "Lush band" vs. "Lush Cosmetics"

You were saying...?

Shit, reading these comments, you'd think Slashdot would take Tesla over Chuck Norris in a fight

Probably not a good idea, as here are
the results of said competition.

This isn't the academic world. This is the real world where "angry black man" is about 5x more common, despite white men making up about 5x more of the population.

Are you referring to the (admittedly somewhat common) misspelling of "gallery," or do you not know what a crankcase is?

The crowd has spoken

Which 'splodes first: RMS, or MS?

Multiple Sclerosis wins!

Most people aren't like you, they take it with a grain of salt.
Google Fight agrees, and "pinch" was probably assisted by recipes.

Yes, some stuff was almost definitely rigged. It shouldn't have been so close that the rigging mattered.

For example, if the voters in 2000 had weighed the answer to "Is this candidate an idiot?" as being more important than "Is this candidate running for the party I've supported for the last 30 years?", I'm reasonably certain the outcome would have been very different. You can see the reason why by making proper use of a Google fight.

Googlefight works fine.

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=ubuntu+linux&word2=linux+mint

Maybe with the right grammar... :p

Google aren't stupid.

Wrong, according to Google.

Romney's lies mostly fly through the mass media without challenge. Recently they have met some resistance, since the corporate owners know Obama's going to win, so are going along to get along with the power for 4 more years.

The mass media is populated by journalism majors, they don't have the capacity to truly do good fact checking.

1. There aren't many journalism majors in the mass media, since there aren't many journalism majors, and there are even fewer jobs in the shrinking industry.
2. Journalism majors are the ones with the fact checking capacity (skills), but there aren't many, and their corporate offices don't pay for fact checking.
3. It's the corporate disinterest in facts (to publish) that leaves facts unchecked.
4. Googling "romney lied" vs "romney plan" gives 4900 to 188,000 , 2.6% .

I too enjoy the random use of immediately made up statistics

Not that this is scientific or reliable, but it's certainly interesting.

I've never loaded a malicious app that caused me harm or did something that required repair...from either.

That you know of. That's the problem. Nobody thinks they have an STD either, and yet they keep spreading. If people don't know what's going on in their own crotch, what makes you think they have a clue what's happening on their device?

What do you mean AIDS gets all the pub? Cancer wins 2:1

This looks like a job for Googlefight!
Looks like it's the first one.

The clock is ticking, Fandroids.

Itards vs. Fandroids

Battle!!

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Itards&word2=Fandriods

Fandriods for the Win!!

I agree that china has a lot of terrible environmental problems, but google hits don't reflect that for various reasons. There's about 6x as many "US environmental disaster" here

f we're free to convert between the two now, what advantage is there in using FLAC instead of ALAC?

There are no differences between the two in terms of music quality, but FLAC:

* Supports replaygain
* Has better tagging support (subjective)
* Is better known
* Contains better (any!) error detection (able to batch-verify downloaded files)
* Is preferred lossless codec for vast majority of digital music vendors.

But honestly, all of this is irrelevant compared to how well flac / alac fit into the rest of your ecosystem. If you're using itunes (gag) / ipods, use alac. If not, use flac. If you're technically proficient & want to have lossless files that you reecnode for your portable device, I'd probably go flac for that too.

Predominant is undeniable, though. Try running 'site:nature.com "data was"' vs. 'site:nature.com "data were"' through Google Fight. 38000 for "were", 6060 for "was". Sciencemag.org is about the same, giving 1700 for "was" and 9630 for "were". Typically, the stodgier the institution, the more rigourous they are about preserving the older convention.

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22hot+cakes%22&word2=hotcakes

While you are technically correct, the majority of people use chomping. I know that doesn't make it right, but just because you are right, doesn't mean people won't look at you like you have 3 head when you say "champing at the bit".

Who else read this headline in their RSS feed and had the first thought of "aw jeez, this is gonna be a bloodbath in the comments section"?

Actually, my first thought was "nice, something to entertain myself while compiling."

Haha. I guess someone could write a firefox plugins that does like googlefight.com but in 3D, and overlays it on the comment pages and acts something out based on scores differences and relative UID powers.

Add randomness and move AI to make it less-repetitive if you refresh, and throw in HTML "bloodbath" sim a-la mortal kombat, and visualilze fun things for events like 'this comment was rated troll!' appearing and so on...

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=value&word2=cheap

Cheap wins

The phrase is "I couldn't care less".

It's "I could care less" in the left corner and "I couldn't care less" in the right corner...

And "I could care less" is the winner with 7.5 million hits vs. a measly 1.5 million hits for "I couldn't care less"!

Google wins

No contest...

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Google&word2=Apple

Slashdot appears twice as often as MSNBC.

The results sort of surprised me.
microsoft sucks vs. microsoft doesn't suck

Hmm, let's see what's going on here.
microsoft doesn't suck vs. microsoft doesn't suck that much

That makes more sense.

The results sort of surprised me.
microsoft sucks vs. microsoft doesn't suck

Hmm, let's see what's going on here.
microsoft doesn't suck vs. microsoft doesn't suck that much

That makes more sense.

I couldn't help but check:

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=kill+bush&word2=kill+obama

Google fight shows 1.42 million results for "kill bush" after the end of his 8 years of office, which included 2 large wars and too-many-to-count highly political wrongdoings (firing government employees for not being republicans, for instance).

It shows 1.79 million results for "kill obama" after only 2 years in office, with the most contentious things he has done being "passed the republicans' health care plan" and "continued Bush's economic stimulus plan".

Seriously. What the fuck. There is no justification for this kind of hatred and animosity. People need to start speaking up about the bullshit vitriol and lies on Fox News and the like. And not just on anonymous forums, but to friends and family and neighbors.

As do you.

You lose, by popular vote

He meant bold-faced lie, not bald-faced. See here for proof: http://goo.gl/GOShs (it's a google-fight link in case I mistyped it).

Except if you put the phrases in quotes... then "bald-faced lie" wins.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22bald-faced+lie%22&word2=%22bold-faced+lie%22

Since I'm not sure if the parent was a joke or not, I won't bother finding a credible source.

No he didn't.

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=hurd&word2=minix

There's no more explaining it than there is in those exceptions to the i before e rule. It's just the way English is used by those skilled in the art of speaking it. Your approach of counting how it's used in wikipedia is on the right track. But it's hardly edited by experts in the English language. The news media is a better place to look. It's the job of sub-editors to know all the rules and exceptions. That's the approach taken by this investigator of your question:

http://www.thatdanny.com/2008/11/20/one-fewer-or-one-less-a-definitive-answer/

But it's the same result and much more fun if you ask the entire web.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=one+less&word2=one+fewer

My guess at the reason for the exception is simply that "one less" sounds better in a sentence than "one fewer". But whatever the reason, it is an exception.

While I think I know what you mean by "hyperlex", I'd like to point out that Google has an order of magnitude more hits for aforism than hyperlex: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=hyperlex&word2=aforism

This was pointed out in the headline story as well..
LinuxTrends entered their names into Google's search insights tool and grabbed images of the resulting graphs

Popularity...the quality of being widely admired or accepted or sought after. No one ever said it was a measure of install base or home or corporate usage numbers. Google results in this manner do show popularity. Google numbers show Lindsey Lohan is very popular right now but not all of us have one of her at home.

On the flip side, we can jump across different uses.. A Google Fight that measures total instances and not searches of what people are looking for between water and Linux show water is about 8x more popular but we all use and need water daily.

No, really, that's what they say.

And the winner is...

The internet

Even though he got credit for every royal family reference, medieval fantasy RPG (there's always a prince), and dog-naming site, Prince got his clock cleaned.

And there was me thinking we'd moved on a bit from the dark ages of university snobbery propagated by those fortunate enough to go away to a nice university and run up debts from the bank of mum and dad.

Mum and dad didn't pay any of my university or living costs. I have a £24000 loan from the government, and I worked every summer.

others who had gone to Oxford, obtained a 2:1 in History

What were your A-level results? You can't (IMO) directly compare results from different universities.

So, sure, the plural of anecdote isn't data and all that, but I suggest you don't judge a book by it's cover.

I'm basing my opinions on what I see from my placement-student-colleagues. The ones doing "Computer Science" are usually fine, ex-poly or not. The ones who did IT stuff don't seem to be capable of anything beyond the most basic programming, and seem to have chosen the course because they couldn't get a place on a CS course. (That's fine though -- we have non-programming work for them to do.)

unless you went to MIT, just what are you bragging about anyway?

Some people have referred to Imperial College as the "MIT of Europe", but IMO it still has a way to go. I met a middle-aged MIT grad at a talk at Imperial, IIRC he now works at Google London, and walking round after the talk he was grinning and saying "this feels like MIT". But when I think of MIT I think of all the innovative projects MIT students do, and the fun ones done just for the sake of it. Imperial students do that too, but not as much. (Imperial has more students, too.)

For the sake of the English speaking world
please learn to write

"is it just I?".

Opposite water, Mrs Slocombe. The subject of the sentence isn't the speaker; it's the impersonal "it" - the same one that rains and snows. The word "me" is perfectly valid in a predicate.

Also: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22is+it+just+me%3F%22&word2=%22is+it+just+I%3F%22

I hope this helps you graduate from elementary school.

I'll put a good word in for you. Maybe they'll let you in.

They probably just use google fight to determine the results
http://www.googlefight.com/

So, the whole "metric" is basically a Googlefight for programming languages?

The winner is Google!