Firefox and IE Still Not Getting Along

juct writes "Heise describes a new demo showing how Firefox running under Windows XP SP2 can be abused to start applications. For this to work, however, Internet Explorer 7 needs to be installed. This severe security problem promises another round in the 'who-is-to-blame-war' between Mozilla and Microsoft. Mozilla currently is leading the race for a patch, as they have one ready in their bugzilla database. 'The authors of the demo note that there are many further examples of such vulnerabilities via registered URIs. What is so far visible is just "the tip of the iceberg". They state that registered URIs are tantamount to a remote gateway into your computer. To be on the safe side, users should, in the authors' opinion, deregister all unnecessary URIs - without, however, elucidating which are superfluous.'"

Comments

Re:Yea, pretty much.

[ShieldW0lf]

How about this?

Some of us have a vocabulary.

We use more unusual words because they more precisely express what we're trying to communicate.

We don't think "What's a smarter-sounding word for 'clearly explain'?". We think "elucidate".

We actually think in these "big words" because we thoroughly understand them and they express what we're trying to say.

Why don't you grab a dictionary and educate yourself instead of throwing stones at your betters and revealing that you don't belong among them?

Re:Yea, pretty much.

[Control Group]

Hyphens are easy to use well, as in "short-sighted," or (not often applicable online) when a word will not fit on the current line.

Em dashes (or em rules, depending on to whom you're speaking) are indeed a little trickier, but they aren't exactly NP-hard. The em dash can be thought of as a pause in the sentence, stronger than a comma, but weaker than a parentheses. One wouldn't be far off base thinking of it as similar to a colon - though the two aren't perfectly interchangeable, of course.

Frankly, I don't see a problem with the use of the em dash in the submission.

On the other hand, you're right about the overall quality of the submission. "Elucidate" is far from a necessary word choice; one could even argue it's not even the right word to begin with. The ambiguous predicate clause, which seems to say the users shouldn't elucidate which are superfluous is very poorly written.

Your suggestion is much better, except that it should be: "In the authors' opinion, users should deregister all unnecessary URIs. They do not, however, give instructions on how to do so."

(By preference, I would have kept it as one sentence separated by a semicolon, but I have an illicit love affair with sentences that are too complex; I have a peculiar weakness for the semicolon in particular)