its not something that does damage as in sets us back. people really overblow this problem. It means growth will slow down.
How dare you suggest that the oil output will slow instead of stop?! Don't you know that one day it's all just going to end and we'll go from 90M barrels a day to zero and the whole world will blow up?:-P
Exactly. I was expecting to see something like, "In a test implementation using ThisDistro, a complete mult-server LDAP solution using ThatLDAP covered 90% of the functionality of Windows user management, but at a fraction of the cost. You can use ThoseLDAPTools 2.2.8 to administer from Windows or Linux, or if you're willing to allow for a slower client, OtherLDAPUtils 1.0.4 runs in any Sun JVM."
This is an elegant version of "If you don't like Windows, try LDAP on Linux!" It may well trigger something useful here, though. One can hope.
What about the e-paper that was talked about a couple of years ago, wherein the image displayed changes only when there is charge applied to it and the pixels remain constant afterward? The idea was to make a reader with a couple hundred pages of this, and have the book loaded onto the paper from an embedded memory source with a quick use of the battery, after which the unit would shut off and you could read your book in an old-fashioned manner.
I don't like to read from standard ebook readers, either, but I have been looking forward to this, whenever it manages to arrive.
Go have a look at the mass graves from well before the invasion, where men, women, and children were gunned down and buried in a decidedly un-Islamic fashion. Check out the disabled citizens of Iraq who can no longer eat, walk, or work properly because they were beaten, had limbs broken, were forced to eat glass or sand or corrosive liquids, had electrodes applied to various parts of their bodies, and things that are beyond the imaginations of most people.
And if you need even more proof, check out the use of chemical weapons against his own people. Whether he got them from the US or not (several European nations were involved in it, too), that doesn't mean that he had to use them. If I give you a gun intending to use it for defense and you kill your own family, that's your fault.
Yes, US prisons can be brutal, but at least there's a structure to address wrongdoings. And while there were legitimate wrongdoers caught by the Iraqi police, there were still hundreds of thousands that went through the torture chambers for doing nothing other than crossing the wrong people.
It's not just Nextel phones that do this, and most common speakers will exhibit this (occasionally, I hear it on the speaker in the phone). One of my friends is with Cingular, and his does the same thing to nearby speakers.
Bin Laden's biggest complaint has for years been the presence of "Crusader" or "Christian" soldiers in Saudi Arabia, which is home to Mecca and Medina. The support of the House of Saud is secondary. How seriously Algeria factors into things, I don't know, but I suspect that even the Muslim world didn't pay so much attention to it, as the Algerians basically kept the issue internal, with the Algerian terrorist groups only relatively recently announcing affiliation with al Qaeda.
Syria is a very mixed bag, though. Even as they provided some support against terrorists, they maintained their stranglehold on Lebanon and support for Hezbollah. While they turned over intelligence, they started a flamewar over the security of the Syrian border with Iraq. Neither side handled things as well as they could have, but Syria doesn't exactly have a collective halo over it.
Honestly, I think it's the lack of an easy way to install drivers. On Windows, it's download, double-click, click, click, click, reboot. The easiest drivers I've found on Linux (ALSA doesn't count) are probably those from nVidia, which require you to download, extract, flip to a shell, run a script, and reboot -- and you have to do those last two with each new kernel update, something not especially intuitive to new users.
A yum-like utility that allowed plugins for specific vendors might be useful for these cases, where it looks for a new kernel and then offers to update the drivers automatically, while also periodically looking for current drivers. Allow the user to set it to their own schedule, and make it easily done through both a gui and a clearly-written and -defined conf file. It might simplify a lot of things that way.
I can't tell you how sick I am of know nothings that complain endlessly because their one in a million hardware configuration didn't work with Linux, and then they go on to tell the whole world that Linux sucks as a result of it, and nobody should even bother installing it.
This goes for a lot of things in the computing field. I know fanbois of every shape that have a single bad experience with a piece of equipment or software, and automatically everything produced by that company is "crap." Example: One bad Maxtor, and suddenly Maxtor is the worst drive manufacturer around. Of course, they've only ever had three drives, one of which was a Maxtor and the other two Western Digital, but this statistically proves in their minds that WD drives are flawless, and the Maxtor drives will rape your children, kill your wife, and leave you starving and thirsty in the desert.
I see the same thing with Dells ("Buy Alienware!"), Windows ("Get a real OS like Gentoo!"), Cisco ("I'd put D-Link equipment in before Cisco!") and pretty much everything else. Meanwhile, in ten years or so being in the IT field, I've seen pretty much every company exhibit a failure of some sort, sometimes fairly catastrophic, and those from major, reputable companies. It's a major pain, yes, but you just deal with it under the support contract (if there is one) and move on, using real statistical numbers as your reference point.
I'll admit that I had a major problem with Western Digital for a long time. Between a friend and me, we had to deal with more than a dozen dead or dying WD drives in less than a year at work and on friend/family systems. Nothing in particular linked them -- different models, different sizes, somewhat different ages -- so we both swore off of them for some time. In the last couple of years, we've let go of that issue, and while I have no WD drives and I don't think he does, either, we have both installed them in others' systems with no real troubles.
I run Windows on one desktop system at home, and Linux on another. My laptop is dual-boot. There are things I like about both sides, and things that infuriate me. I've had to fight driver issues on both (particularly on the laptop). Updates can flake on both (yum broke over the weekend on the Linux box, and Windows Update wouldn't work for about six weeks at one point). Odd dependencies can strike at any time on either platform. None of these systems is perfect, so unless you want the relatively inflexible hardware of a Mac (yes, I know there is some flexibility, but not nearly that of PCs), you're likely going to end up kicking a box from time to time if you're planning on doing anything other than play Solitaire (and sometimes even then). It's part of the way computers work right now.
Are you really equating actuarial tables and credit scores with random torture and executions for not paying the right bribes or just happening to be seen by someone at the wrong time? Because if you are, I'm obviously living in a completely different world than you are.
You speak as though they did not fear their prior government. Saddam had three different agencies all doing the same thing: reporting on the populace to find out who was not a good Iraqi, in competition with each other. In addition to this, numerous government officials had appetites that were difficult to sate; it was not uncommon for some of them to stop, inform a parent that his or her teenage daughter would be ready the next night to be picked up, and then that girl would be raped -- or worse -- by that government official.
Towns that displeased Saddam, even in some minor way, could have their water and electricity cut off in the middle of summer. Those that annoyed him might have segments of their populations picked up, forced to the outside of town where there was a large whole, and then executed as a warning. Sometimes, even annoyance was not necessary for this.
Mere word of disloyalty -- even uncorroborated -- might bring the secret police to a family's home in the middle of the night, and the entire family might be taken away for torture until they confessed, at which point many were executed.
There was no end in sight. None at all. At least now, there's a timetable for getting things on track. In a few weeks, we'll hopefully be seeing the new Iraqi Constitution come forth, with new elections at the end of the year with full ethnic participation, now that the Sunnis see the benefits of participation. Even Muqtada al-Sadr, who was such a thorn in the sides of the US and Iraqi forces, has largely disarmed and is cooperating with US forces to find insurgents, because he now understands that the faster they deal with the insurgency, the sooner US forces leave Iraq.
And personally, I choose freedom over safety, because there's a point at which you get diminishing returns for significant increasing losses of freedom. Sacrificing freedom for safety is worth nothing if the secret police beats your child, your wife, or yourself into a bloody pulp before finally ending things with a bullet, and you have no way to avoid this happening.
While I don't know for certain how effective red-light cameras are, the cameras to which I was referring are the cameras deployed around Britain and now some American cities in an attempt to either catch crimes as they happen or to provide evidence at a trial of the alleged crime.
Cameras in public are also nearly useless. They've only rarely, if ever, proven useful to catch a crime in progress, and are not particularly useful in court. They're a massive subsidy to the camera manufacturers, and that's about it.
Not in California, or at least in the area I drive. The Chippers routinely drive 75-80, with traffic letting them pass a couple of miles an hour faster. When they need to get somewhere, I've seen them push well beyond that.
Indeed, if he had taken the opposite viewpoint, the community here would be lambasting him for it, pointing out that just because he knew the pair didn't make him a psychology expert.
Economic necessity led to the thawing of the Cold War, not talking things over at the UN.
And the reason warheads never passed each other in the air had far less to do with the UN than did cool heads at the White House and Kremlin. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was communication between Kennedy and Krushchev, both of whom had advisors nearly screaming for direct military action, who realized that things were getting out of control, and that a compromise had to be reached. Krushchev ordered the missiles pulled from Cuba, and Kennedy ordered all nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles removed from Turkey.
What the UN provided for a long time was a place where smaller nations could go and work things out, with the possibility of larger, more powerful nations (US, France, and Britain for the most part, though I'm sure the Soviets were involved in some cases) enforcing whatever was worked out.
The problem is that the UN has grown sigificantly beyond that which was originally intended. It's a place for dialogue, but the dialogue never ends. Sudan is only the most recent problem. The slaughter in Bosnia went on for years before anyone took serious action, and when the slaughter picked up in Kosovo, it was NATO that stepped in over some UN objections. Rwanda is the classic example of no one stepping in to deal with things, threatening instead to invoke sanctions on military hardware while the people who were dying were being hacked and beaten to death as much as or more than they were being shot.
Things have been much clearer post-Cold War. Unfortunately, political realities of the US-USSR confrontation set up actions that were not in the best interest of the local populace, but may have been necessary in the larger scale of things. We stood behind some real award winners, people that these days would be universally derided and pressured. Actions taken to prevent a Soviet foothold in the Western Hemisphere beyond Cuba resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands, but there is the distinct possibility that not doing this would have resulted in the deaths of millions -- or more. Just as the US was careful to never back the Soviets into a corner, we had to make sure that we were never pushed into a corner, because the result would have been the same -- large pockets of nuclear wasteland, which kind of makes the whole exercise pointless.
The UN needs a serious workover. There are sections of it that should be disbanded, and parts that should be enhanced. I don't mind things like the Security Council being expanded, or even a couple of new permanent members being brought on-board, though I'm wary of new veto powers. The recent changes relaxing the rules of engagement with local forces are also welcome; one rebel group (and I can't recall the country off the top of my head) recently attacked a group of blue-helmets, killing several of them, believing that they would cower in their bunkers like they always do. Instead, that UN group struck back hard, killing a fair number of the rebel group, and letting them know that they weren't on the sidelines anymore. This has been debated as to its effectiveness -- there are legitimate fears that it will involve the UN taking a side (even if it's the UN's side) in peacekeeping operations, but it may also make the local warlords think first, because they know that the soldiers under the UN banner are far better trained and equipped than are their own warriors.
But these are relatively small changes in the scale of things, and possibly a false start. Maybe we need to start it over in its entirety to get back to basics. I'm not sure.
OK, so that was the scenic route back to the original topic. I hope you enjoyed the trip, and we should be pulling into the terminal in just a moment.:)
Right now, I don't see a reason for the servers to be turned over to any international body, whether it be ICANN or the UN. The system ain't broke, so don't fix it. (I'll admit to some bandages being needed, though.) I would rather see restraint in rolling out things like new TLDs than see rampant new ones thrown out in an attempt to appease everyone.
I could shorten it to just "p" but that might cause some confusion later on.
I have about 40 keywords defined here (mostly ripped from here), plus a massive other block I need to build for currency conversion involving eleven different monetary units.
No, I'm not old. I just value clear communications. My vocabulary, grammar, and spelling are better than most, not as good as some, and I do keep up with the slang for the most part, though I generally choose to avoid using it myself.
There are words that move into use and disuse, true, but that's a far cry from systematically altering the spelling and basic grammatical structure of the language through ignorance and apathy.
There's a difference between the natural evolution of a language over time, and the massacre that has been happening in recent years. Things like '*ould of' that don't even make grammatical sense are far more problematic in my mind than misspellings like 'alot' or 'loosing.' I can even cut some slack to people who frequently use text messaging and get in the habit of using those abbreviations online, but there are plenty of scary errors that are commonplace, and 'evolving language' is a weak excuse for laziness.
If I see someone making an occasional mistake or using certain common colloquialisms or minor errors like split infinitives, I let it slide. If they continue making it and it seems like they think it's proper ('ludacris' seems to be a common one over the last year or so, and I blame that on the rapper), then I will often IM or PM them in a friendly way to let them know what is the correct spelling or grammatical construct. They generally take it well. Those that don't just don't get corrected in the future.
I have it shortened even more using a Firefox keyword. The URL is http://www.php.net/%25s and the keyword assigned is php. When I need something, I just enter:
php strings
and it takes me right there, and with seven fewer keystrokes than you, making me more efficient.:)
Slashdot Mirror
its not something that does damage as in sets us back. people really overblow this problem. It means growth will slow down.
:-P
How dare you suggest that the oil output will slow instead of stop?! Don't you know that one day it's all just going to end and we'll go from 90M barrels a day to zero and the whole world will blow up?
Exactly. I was expecting to see something like, "In a test implementation using ThisDistro, a complete mult-server LDAP solution using ThatLDAP covered 90% of the functionality of Windows user management, but at a fraction of the cost. You can use ThoseLDAPTools 2.2.8 to administer from Windows or Linux, or if you're willing to allow for a slower client, OtherLDAPUtils 1.0.4 runs in any Sun JVM."
This is an elegant version of "If you don't like Windows, try LDAP on Linux!" It may well trigger something useful here, though. One can hope.
What about the e-paper that was talked about a couple of years ago, wherein the image displayed changes only when there is charge applied to it and the pixels remain constant afterward? The idea was to make a reader with a couple hundred pages of this, and have the book loaded onto the paper from an embedded memory source with a quick use of the battery, after which the unit would shut off and you could read your book in an old-fashioned manner.
I don't like to read from standard ebook readers, either, but I have been looking forward to this, whenever it manages to arrive.
Amazon and B&N have it for $18 for 672 pages (list price is $30). That's a pretty common price for a large hardbound novel.
Go have a look at the mass graves from well before the invasion, where men, women, and children were gunned down and buried in a decidedly un-Islamic fashion. Check out the disabled citizens of Iraq who can no longer eat, walk, or work properly because they were beaten, had limbs broken, were forced to eat glass or sand or corrosive liquids, had electrodes applied to various parts of their bodies, and things that are beyond the imaginations of most people.
And if you need even more proof, check out the use of chemical weapons against his own people. Whether he got them from the US or not (several European nations were involved in it, too), that doesn't mean that he had to use them. If I give you a gun intending to use it for defense and you kill your own family, that's your fault.
Yes, US prisons can be brutal, but at least there's a structure to address wrongdoings. And while there were legitimate wrongdoers caught by the Iraqi police, there were still hundreds of thousands that went through the torture chambers for doing nothing other than crossing the wrong people.
The pop-ups got through because people figured out a way around them.
That said, IIRC, Google has not included pop-up blocking in the Firefox version, because Firefox already has pop-up blocking.
It's not just Nextel phones that do this, and most common speakers will exhibit this (occasionally, I hear it on the speaker in the phone). One of my friends is with Cingular, and his does the same thing to nearby speakers.
Bin Laden's biggest complaint has for years been the presence of "Crusader" or "Christian" soldiers in Saudi Arabia, which is home to Mecca and Medina. The support of the House of Saud is secondary. How seriously Algeria factors into things, I don't know, but I suspect that even the Muslim world didn't pay so much attention to it, as the Algerians basically kept the issue internal, with the Algerian terrorist groups only relatively recently announcing affiliation with al Qaeda.
Syria is a very mixed bag, though. Even as they provided some support against terrorists, they maintained their stranglehold on Lebanon and support for Hezbollah. While they turned over intelligence, they started a flamewar over the security of the Syrian border with Iraq. Neither side handled things as well as they could have, but Syria doesn't exactly have a collective halo over it.
Per capita, China is a net saint
:)
I hear the Amish are also very good about not polluting the internet.
Honestly, I think it's the lack of an easy way to install drivers. On Windows, it's download, double-click, click, click, click, reboot. The easiest drivers I've found on Linux (ALSA doesn't count) are probably those from nVidia, which require you to download, extract, flip to a shell, run a script, and reboot -- and you have to do those last two with each new kernel update, something not especially intuitive to new users.
A yum-like utility that allowed plugins for specific vendors might be useful for these cases, where it looks for a new kernel and then offers to update the drivers automatically, while also periodically looking for current drivers. Allow the user to set it to their own schedule, and make it easily done through both a gui and a clearly-written and -defined conf file. It might simplify a lot of things that way.
I can't tell you how sick I am of know nothings that complain endlessly because their one in a million hardware configuration didn't work with Linux, and then they go on to tell the whole world that Linux sucks as a result of it, and nobody should even bother installing it.
This goes for a lot of things in the computing field. I know fanbois of every shape that have a single bad experience with a piece of equipment or software, and automatically everything produced by that company is "crap." Example: One bad Maxtor, and suddenly Maxtor is the worst drive manufacturer around. Of course, they've only ever had three drives, one of which was a Maxtor and the other two Western Digital, but this statistically proves in their minds that WD drives are flawless, and the Maxtor drives will rape your children, kill your wife, and leave you starving and thirsty in the desert.
I see the same thing with Dells ("Buy Alienware!"), Windows ("Get a real OS like Gentoo!"), Cisco ("I'd put D-Link equipment in before Cisco!") and pretty much everything else. Meanwhile, in ten years or so being in the IT field, I've seen pretty much every company exhibit a failure of some sort, sometimes fairly catastrophic, and those from major, reputable companies. It's a major pain, yes, but you just deal with it under the support contract (if there is one) and move on, using real statistical numbers as your reference point.
I'll admit that I had a major problem with Western Digital for a long time. Between a friend and me, we had to deal with more than a dozen dead or dying WD drives in less than a year at work and on friend/family systems. Nothing in particular linked them -- different models, different sizes, somewhat different ages -- so we both swore off of them for some time. In the last couple of years, we've let go of that issue, and while I have no WD drives and I don't think he does, either, we have both installed them in others' systems with no real troubles.
I run Windows on one desktop system at home, and Linux on another. My laptop is dual-boot. There are things I like about both sides, and things that infuriate me. I've had to fight driver issues on both (particularly on the laptop). Updates can flake on both (yum broke over the weekend on the Linux box, and Windows Update wouldn't work for about six weeks at one point). Odd dependencies can strike at any time on either platform. None of these systems is perfect, so unless you want the relatively inflexible hardware of a Mac (yes, I know there is some flexibility, but not nearly that of PCs), you're likely going to end up kicking a box from time to time if you're planning on doing anything other than play Solitaire (and sometimes even then). It's part of the way computers work right now.
Are you really equating actuarial tables and credit scores with random torture and executions for not paying the right bribes or just happening to be seen by someone at the wrong time? Because if you are, I'm obviously living in a completely different world than you are.
You speak as though they did not fear their prior government. Saddam had three different agencies all doing the same thing: reporting on the populace to find out who was not a good Iraqi, in competition with each other. In addition to this, numerous government officials had appetites that were difficult to sate; it was not uncommon for some of them to stop, inform a parent that his or her teenage daughter would be ready the next night to be picked up, and then that girl would be raped -- or worse -- by that government official.
Towns that displeased Saddam, even in some minor way, could have their water and electricity cut off in the middle of summer. Those that annoyed him might have segments of their populations picked up, forced to the outside of town where there was a large whole, and then executed as a warning. Sometimes, even annoyance was not necessary for this.
Mere word of disloyalty -- even uncorroborated -- might bring the secret police to a family's home in the middle of the night, and the entire family might be taken away for torture until they confessed, at which point many were executed.
There was no end in sight. None at all. At least now, there's a timetable for getting things on track. In a few weeks, we'll hopefully be seeing the new Iraqi Constitution come forth, with new elections at the end of the year with full ethnic participation, now that the Sunnis see the benefits of participation. Even Muqtada al-Sadr, who was such a thorn in the sides of the US and Iraqi forces, has largely disarmed and is cooperating with US forces to find insurgents, because he now understands that the faster they deal with the insurgency, the sooner US forces leave Iraq.
And personally, I choose freedom over safety, because there's a point at which you get diminishing returns for significant increasing losses of freedom. Sacrificing freedom for safety is worth nothing if the secret police beats your child, your wife, or yourself into a bloody pulp before finally ending things with a bullet, and you have no way to avoid this happening.
A most appropriate quote, courtesy of IMDB:
Waldorf: Just when you think this show is terrible, something wonderful happens.
Statler: What?
Waldorf: It ends!
Actually, they rather bashed Bewitched.
OK, I should have clarified.
While I don't know for certain how effective red-light cameras are, the cameras to which I was referring are the cameras deployed around Britain and now some American cities in an attempt to either catch crimes as they happen or to provide evidence at a trial of the alleged crime.
Cameras in public are also nearly useless. They've only rarely, if ever, proven useful to catch a crime in progress, and are not particularly useful in court. They're a massive subsidy to the camera manufacturers, and that's about it.
Not in California, or at least in the area I drive. The Chippers routinely drive 75-80, with traffic letting them pass a couple of miles an hour faster. When they need to get somewhere, I've seen them push well beyond that.
Indeed, if he had taken the opposite viewpoint, the community here would be lambasting him for it, pointing out that just because he knew the pair didn't make him a psychology expert.
Economic necessity led to the thawing of the Cold War, not talking things over at the UN.
:)
And the reason warheads never passed each other in the air had far less to do with the UN than did cool heads at the White House and Kremlin. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was communication between Kennedy and Krushchev, both of whom had advisors nearly screaming for direct military action, who realized that things were getting out of control, and that a compromise had to be reached. Krushchev ordered the missiles pulled from Cuba, and Kennedy ordered all nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles removed from Turkey.
What the UN provided for a long time was a place where smaller nations could go and work things out, with the possibility of larger, more powerful nations (US, France, and Britain for the most part, though I'm sure the Soviets were involved in some cases) enforcing whatever was worked out.
The problem is that the UN has grown sigificantly beyond that which was originally intended. It's a place for dialogue, but the dialogue never ends. Sudan is only the most recent problem. The slaughter in Bosnia went on for years before anyone took serious action, and when the slaughter picked up in Kosovo, it was NATO that stepped in over some UN objections. Rwanda is the classic example of no one stepping in to deal with things, threatening instead to invoke sanctions on military hardware while the people who were dying were being hacked and beaten to death as much as or more than they were being shot.
Things have been much clearer post-Cold War. Unfortunately, political realities of the US-USSR confrontation set up actions that were not in the best interest of the local populace, but may have been necessary in the larger scale of things. We stood behind some real award winners, people that these days would be universally derided and pressured. Actions taken to prevent a Soviet foothold in the Western Hemisphere beyond Cuba resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands, but there is the distinct possibility that not doing this would have resulted in the deaths of millions -- or more. Just as the US was careful to never back the Soviets into a corner, we had to make sure that we were never pushed into a corner, because the result would have been the same -- large pockets of nuclear wasteland, which kind of makes the whole exercise pointless.
The UN needs a serious workover. There are sections of it that should be disbanded, and parts that should be enhanced. I don't mind things like the Security Council being expanded, or even a couple of new permanent members being brought on-board, though I'm wary of new veto powers. The recent changes relaxing the rules of engagement with local forces are also welcome; one rebel group (and I can't recall the country off the top of my head) recently attacked a group of blue-helmets, killing several of them, believing that they would cower in their bunkers like they always do. Instead, that UN group struck back hard, killing a fair number of the rebel group, and letting them know that they weren't on the sidelines anymore. This has been debated as to its effectiveness -- there are legitimate fears that it will involve the UN taking a side (even if it's the UN's side) in peacekeeping operations, but it may also make the local warlords think first, because they know that the soldiers under the UN banner are far better trained and equipped than are their own warriors.
But these are relatively small changes in the scale of things, and possibly a false start. Maybe we need to start it over in its entirety to get back to basics. I'm not sure.
OK, so that was the scenic route back to the original topic. I hope you enjoyed the trip, and we should be pulling into the terminal in just a moment.
Right now, I don't see a reason for the servers to be turned over to any international body, whether it be ICANN or the UN. The system ain't broke, so don't fix it. (I'll admit to some bandages being needed, though.) I would rather see restraint in rolling out things like new TLDs than see rampant new ones thrown out in an attempt to appease everyone.
Do you prefer a situation with no end in sight, or with a possible end in sight?
I was using the URL mentioned by Nos. and dropping the protocol.
:)
ca.php.com/strings = 18 characters
php strings = 11 characters
I could shorten it to just "p" but that might cause some confusion later on.
I have about 40 keywords defined here (mostly ripped from here), plus a massive other block I need to build for currency conversion involving eleven different monetary units.
And Danes have weird keyboards.
No, I'm not old. I just value clear communications. My vocabulary, grammar, and spelling are better than most, not as good as some, and I do keep up with the slang for the most part, though I generally choose to avoid using it myself.
There are words that move into use and disuse, true, but that's a far cry from systematically altering the spelling and basic grammatical structure of the language through ignorance and apathy.
There's a difference between the natural evolution of a language over time, and the massacre that has been happening in recent years. Things like '*ould of' that don't even make grammatical sense are far more problematic in my mind than misspellings like 'alot' or 'loosing.' I can even cut some slack to people who frequently use text messaging and get in the habit of using those abbreviations online, but there are plenty of scary errors that are commonplace, and 'evolving language' is a weak excuse for laziness.
If I see someone making an occasional mistake or using certain common colloquialisms or minor errors like split infinitives, I let it slide. If they continue making it and it seems like they think it's proper ('ludacris' seems to be a common one over the last year or so, and I blame that on the rapper), then I will often IM or PM them in a friendly way to let them know what is the correct spelling or grammatical construct. They generally take it well. Those that don't just don't get corrected in the future.
I have it shortened even more using a Firefox keyword. The URL is http://www.php.net/%25s and the keyword assigned is php. When I need something, I just enter:
:)
php strings
and it takes me right there, and with seven fewer keystrokes than you, making me more efficient.