That's because M-W is, like any sane dictionary, descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, they only describe what people do, they don't tell people what they should do.
But it should be obvious that using the word which means "take the direct meaning of what I say next, and ignore any associations or implications" and then using it to imply the exact opposite of that meaning is a bad idea. I mean, if we lose "literally", how do we indicate situations where we literally mean something, and not this opposite-day "literally" that actually means "not literally"?
This is absolutely false. They can't void your warranty unless you actually break something in the process. This is federal law. They might tell you otherwise, but that is how it is.
There is no position so outrageous that you cannot find a sincere advocate for it on the internet.
Simply posting something ridiculous or stupid is not enough to identify your post as being tongue in cheek. People will simply assume that you are ridiculous or stupid, as it's the more likely alternative.
That's a good question. It's interesting to note that almost nobody proposes that as a standard, even on the anti-abortion side. You have a lot of people who say that life begins at conception, a lot of people who say that life begins at birth, some (like me) who advocate a sort of sliding scale of life, where your justification for an abortion needs to get better as the pregnancy progresses. But I've never heard anybody propose electrical activity in the brain as the gold standard for whether it's right to abort a fetus. I couldn't tell you why, other than that maybe it's just too difficult to detect.
Allright, so there is a bit of evidence that lead might possibly, maybe, potentially be linked to certain types of cancer. Not exactly convincing.
As for lead being toxic, I never denied that. However, this conversation is specifically about assigning the blame to this person's cancer death. Given the above, I assert that the mention of lead is irrelevant given the context of the conversation, however bad it may otherwise be.
Oh, and for the record, I think that the guy who claimed that cancer is caused by, essentially, evil, is a total asshole who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Those artificial restrictions are what will make it so successful.
This is nonsensical. It would cost Apple nothing in the marketplace to put a hidden software switch somewhere that I could toggle to load unsigned code. For whatever reason they just don't want to.
If you want to SSH into your personal Linux server, then perhaps the iPhone was never intended for your market?
Well obviously. But I want it to be intended for my market. The hardware is there, the software is there. The company has historically done a very good job of catering to my market. But for some reason, with this one device, they have decided that hobbyists like myself no longer matter.
Anyway, it's nothing about being hypocritical. It's not like "I'd rather die than grow old" is some sort of strong moral statement, anyway. It's perfectly acceptable to change your mind as you gain new information. It's essentially meaningless to make that statement when you're young. It's what you do when you grow old that counts. Most young people think that growing old is a horrible, horrible thing. Most of those young people grow into old people and, big surprise, find that growing old is the preferred alternative. This is not hypocrisy, it's simple mind-changing.
So to sum it up you are more fearful when you drive than I am.
I was going to write this big long rebuttal to your post, but I'll just summarize instead:
Fuck you. Get bent.
You don't know anything about me except what I told you. I never said anything about my level of fear or my level of confidence. I am extremely confident in my driving, and I'm not afraid of it. You presume to know that about which you know absolutely nothing. It's impossible to have anything like a worthwhile conversation with someone who has an attitude like yours. So just fuck off and go away.
Well what are you paying for? I can get unlimited local calling for under $25/month, which is well under your pre-breakup bills when adjusted for inflation. The only way you're paying that much money is if you're making lots of paid long distance calls (which contradicts your assertion that you don't need unlimited calling) or if you have a bunch of special features on your line, every single one of which would not have been available pre-breakup.
Everybody seems to be confused about what this decision was. This was not the decision that broke up AT&T. This was the decision that allowed people to purchase telephones from companies other than AT&T. Note, not telephone service, juts plain telephones. Before this decision, you had to buy (or more likely, rent) all of your telephone equipment from the phone company.
As for the rest, what are you smoking? I can get a phone line for under $20/month, and that's 2008 money. Try doing that before the breakup. I can get plans for under $50/month that give me unlimited calling anywhere in the country. Try that before the breakup.
Yeah, life was so much better back when I was paying $1/minute to call another state. I hate it that I can call countries around the globe for less than 2% of that today.
Which is, of course, approximately 0.1% of the total cost of the launch.
Fuel costs for rockets are absolutely negligible. When the fuel cost becomes significant, then you know that space travel has truly become common and easy, because that will mean that all of the other costs have come way down.
Lead does not cause cancer. Your idea that pollution may have contributed to his cancer is reasonable, but you need to look for pollution in the form of carcinogens.
I don't think you actually understood that comparison.
They're not saying that it's like McDonald's inventing the McNugget. They're saying that it would be like McDonald's, the fast food company, inventing a computer from scratch.
A hacker compromising my bank accounts will net an order of magnitude more than this, and yet they're all protected with regular passwords and these moronic "security questions".
I'm not? That's news to me, what with buying my first Apple computer in 1988 and having purchased one every couple of years since. My house has four Apple computers, four Apple-branded wifi routers, and three iPods in it. Sure seems like I'm their customer to me! Except they've gone and fucked up the iPhone, so I'm not going to buy it.
The funny thing is that a lot of young people talk this way. And yet when they get older, they don't start offing themselves. Turns out that while a lot of people talk about how they'd rather die than be decrepit, when they're actually faced with the choice nearly all of them choose life.
You sound like you are safer than some people but not quite as safe as others.
What an amusingly pointless thing to say. The odds are only about one in three billion that I am the safest person in the world, or the least safe person in the world. This statement is therefore essentially meaningless.
I would say you are a safe enough driver bordering on the verge of being too safe.
"Too safe" is another meaningless phrase. Unless your goal is danger, there is no such thing as "too safe". Of course safety is always a tradeoff, and it's possible to emphasize safety to the extent that your other goals are no longer being reached, but in that case, you're not being "too safe", you're being too slow, too expensive, not learning enough, etc. So what is the real problem, here?
When people leave your car do they ever say "geeze, what's with him?"
Nope. People don't really comment on my driving at all.
That is a helpful gauge of where you fall on the safe driving continuum.
In my line of work I occasionally run into people that are fixated on "too much" of something. Sometimes it is washing their hands other times it is checking to see if the door is locked. If it becomes too big of a problem sometimes an SSRI can help.
The idea that you're recommending mental health medication as a remedy for my willingness to interrupt conversations with passengers while merging into traffic or otherwise performing tricky, mentally-taxing maneuvers is amusing but also completely insane. Maybe you should consider drugs.
Keep it in enterprise hardware, but for consumers, make a clean break.
You're kind of missing the point. The claim was that the need for backwards compatibility was part of what was making it so difficult to finalize the standard. If you keep it in enterprise hardware then the problem is still there! You could have two standards, I suppose, one "consumer" standard that makes a clean break and one "enterprise" standard that's backwards compatible, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a standard in the first place.
Personally, my house has a lot of g-only devices, and I'm glad that I can serve everything off a single router.
I've been on Slashdot for about 10 years, and an Apple user for about twice that time. I've never had any trouble loading my own code onto any other Apple device....
Yeah, OpenMoko would be great if it were anywhere near finished, had decent design, had a good web browser, mail client, etc.
The reality of the situation is that I like Apple's products, usually. I've been a Mac user for about two decades. The Mac today is a wonderful platform for a power user who prefers to have the hard stuff done for him when possible. It has a great intuitive GUI, but underneath is a fully powered UNIX that you can tinker with at will.
The iPhone's OS is essentially the same and it should be a similarly great platform for power users. Alas, Apple has decided that, as a user of the device, you should not be able to actually program for it or load your own code onto it in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because M-W is, like any sane dictionary, descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, they only describe what people do, they don't tell people what they should do.
But it should be obvious that using the word which means "take the direct meaning of what I say next, and ignore any associations or implications" and then using it to imply the exact opposite of that meaning is a bad idea. I mean, if we lose "literally", how do we indicate situations where we literally mean something, and not this opposite-day "literally" that actually means "not literally"?
This is absolutely false. They can't void your warranty unless you actually break something in the process. This is federal law. They might tell you otherwise, but that is how it is.
There is no position so outrageous that you cannot find a sincere advocate for it on the internet.
Simply posting something ridiculous or stupid is not enough to identify your post as being tongue in cheek. People will simply assume that you are ridiculous or stupid, as it's the more likely alternative.
And of course no non-monopoly telephone provider would ever have invested in fiber optics or semiconductors.
That's a good question. It's interesting to note that almost nobody proposes that as a standard, even on the anti-abortion side. You have a lot of people who say that life begins at conception, a lot of people who say that life begins at birth, some (like me) who advocate a sort of sliding scale of life, where your justification for an abortion needs to get better as the pregnancy progresses. But I've never heard anybody propose electrical activity in the brain as the gold standard for whether it's right to abort a fetus. I couldn't tell you why, other than that maybe it's just too difficult to detect.
Allright, so there is a bit of evidence that lead might possibly, maybe, potentially be linked to certain types of cancer. Not exactly convincing.
As for lead being toxic, I never denied that. However, this conversation is specifically about assigning the blame to this person's cancer death. Given the above, I assert that the mention of lead is irrelevant given the context of the conversation, however bad it may otherwise be.
Oh, and for the record, I think that the guy who claimed that cancer is caused by, essentially, evil, is a total asshole who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Those artificial restrictions are what will make it so successful.
This is nonsensical. It would cost Apple nothing in the marketplace to put a hidden software switch somewhere that I could toggle to load unsigned code. For whatever reason they just don't want to.
If you want to SSH into your personal Linux server, then perhaps the iPhone was never intended for your market?
Well obviously. But I want it to be intended for my market. The hardware is there, the software is there. The company has historically done a very good job of catering to my market. But for some reason, with this one device, they have decided that hobbyists like myself no longer matter.
In other words, both would be near 100%?
Anyway, it's nothing about being hypocritical. It's not like "I'd rather die than grow old" is some sort of strong moral statement, anyway. It's perfectly acceptable to change your mind as you gain new information. It's essentially meaningless to make that statement when you're young. It's what you do when you grow old that counts. Most young people think that growing old is a horrible, horrible thing. Most of those young people grow into old people and, big surprise, find that growing old is the preferred alternative. This is not hypocrisy, it's simple mind-changing.
So to sum it up you are more fearful when you drive than I am.
I was going to write this big long rebuttal to your post, but I'll just summarize instead:
Fuck you. Get bent.
You don't know anything about me except what I told you. I never said anything about my level of fear or my level of confidence. I am extremely confident in my driving, and I'm not afraid of it. You presume to know that about which you know absolutely nothing. It's impossible to have anything like a worthwhile conversation with someone who has an attitude like yours. So just fuck off and go away.
Well what are you paying for? I can get unlimited local calling for under $25/month, which is well under your pre-breakup bills when adjusted for inflation. The only way you're paying that much money is if you're making lots of paid long distance calls (which contradicts your assertion that you don't need unlimited calling) or if you have a bunch of special features on your line, every single one of which would not have been available pre-breakup.
Everybody seems to be confused about what this decision was. This was not the decision that broke up AT&T. This was the decision that allowed people to purchase telephones from companies other than AT&T. Note, not telephone service, juts plain telephones. Before this decision, you had to buy (or more likely, rent) all of your telephone equipment from the phone company.
As for the rest, what are you smoking? I can get a phone line for under $20/month, and that's 2008 money. Try doing that before the breakup. I can get plans for under $50/month that give me unlimited calling anywhere in the country. Try that before the breakup.
Yeah, life was so much better back when I was paying $1/minute to call another state. I hate it that I can call countries around the globe for less than 2% of that today.
Which is, of course, approximately 0.1% of the total cost of the launch.
Fuel costs for rockets are absolutely negligible. When the fuel cost becomes significant, then you know that space travel has truly become common and easy, because that will mean that all of the other costs have come way down.
Lead does not cause cancer. Your idea that pollution may have contributed to his cancer is reasonable, but you need to look for pollution in the form of carcinogens.
Please read about confirmation bias until you realize why your anecdotal ad-hoc observations are essentially useless.
I don't think you actually understood that comparison.
They're not saying that it's like McDonald's inventing the McNugget. They're saying that it would be like McDonald's, the fast food company, inventing a computer from scratch.
A hacker compromising my bank accounts will net an order of magnitude more than this, and yet they're all protected with regular passwords and these moronic "security questions".
Actually I fantasize about you sucking his dick after he's fucked you in the ass. And you liked it!
I'm not? That's news to me, what with buying my first Apple computer in 1988 and having purchased one every couple of years since. My house has four Apple computers, four Apple-branded wifi routers, and three iPods in it. Sure seems like I'm their customer to me! Except they've gone and fucked up the iPhone, so I'm not going to buy it.
The funny thing is that a lot of young people talk this way. And yet when they get older, they don't start offing themselves. Turns out that while a lot of people talk about how they'd rather die than be decrepit, when they're actually faced with the choice nearly all of them choose life.
You sound like you are safer than some people but not quite as safe as others.
What an amusingly pointless thing to say. The odds are only about one in three billion that I am the safest person in the world, or the least safe person in the world. This statement is therefore essentially meaningless.
I would say you are a safe enough driver bordering on the verge of being too safe.
"Too safe" is another meaningless phrase. Unless your goal is danger, there is no such thing as "too safe". Of course safety is always a tradeoff, and it's possible to emphasize safety to the extent that your other goals are no longer being reached, but in that case, you're not being "too safe", you're being too slow, too expensive, not learning enough, etc. So what is the real problem, here?
When people leave your car do they ever say "geeze, what's with him?"
Nope. People don't really comment on my driving at all.
That is a helpful gauge of where you fall on the safe driving continuum.
In my line of work I occasionally run into people that are fixated on "too much" of something. Sometimes it is washing their hands other times it is checking to see if the door is locked. If it becomes too big of a problem sometimes an SSRI can help.
The idea that you're recommending mental health medication as a remedy for my willingness to interrupt conversations with passengers while merging into traffic or otherwise performing tricky, mentally-taxing maneuvers is amusing but also completely insane. Maybe you should consider drugs.
Keep it in enterprise hardware, but for consumers, make a clean break.
You're kind of missing the point. The claim was that the need for backwards compatibility was part of what was making it so difficult to finalize the standard. If you keep it in enterprise hardware then the problem is still there! You could have two standards, I suppose, one "consumer" standard that makes a clean break and one "enterprise" standard that's backwards compatible, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a standard in the first place.
Personally, my house has a lot of g-only devices, and I'm glad that I can serve everything off a single router.
What do you propose as the alternative? The amount of spectrum that you can use without having to get a license for your installation is really small.
Welcome to /., you must be new around here.
I've been on Slashdot for about 10 years, and an Apple user for about twice that time. I've never had any trouble loading my own code onto any other Apple device....
Yeah, OpenMoko would be great if it were anywhere near finished, had decent design, had a good web browser, mail client, etc.
The reality of the situation is that I like Apple's products, usually. I've been a Mac user for about two decades. The Mac today is a wonderful platform for a power user who prefers to have the hard stuff done for him when possible. It has a great intuitive GUI, but underneath is a fully powered UNIX that you can tinker with at will.
The iPhone's OS is essentially the same and it should be a similarly great platform for power users. Alas, Apple has decided that, as a user of the device, you should not be able to actually program for it or load your own code onto it in any way.