They are not copyrighting a few generic phrases on the coupons, that are similar to such phrases elsewhere - that would be the domain of trademark - and you're right they'd have a hard time getting such a trademark.
They are copyrighting the entire coupon - the phrases, their ordering, the graphical layout - the whole thing. Just like a photographer copyrights a photo. You can't just copy it. And you can't make one exactly like it, less some minor change - that, in some cases, would still be a copyright violation. (And in this case, I'd guess a judge would rule that a "similar" coupon that violated their copyright would include the serial number of the original - possibly if that were the only thing on the new coupon, it would still trigger a copyright violation in the eyes of many judges or juries).
So copyright violation does seem to be in play here - he was granted a copyright license for 2 copies - he made more than two copies, and so may have some liability under the implicit copyright license that he was under.
I don't like, and it doesn't sound like you do either, but I think the law is pretty clear about this sort of copyright violation in our current situation (in the US). Using the DMCA is a little wierd - but this guy is under legal attack for both for DMCA violations AND plain old copyright violations. The latter will be much easier to prove and prosecute in this case, I suspect. But that won't get you on slashdot..
I'm a little skeptical of your claim that a CC company would even threaten to drop your parents solely b/c they pay their bills in full. You might ask them if there were additional details.
CC networks make big money on people like you (and maybe your parents if they use their card like you do). They collect around 3% of the total transaction from merchants on EVERYTHING you buy with your card. You don't see it on the bill b/c it's a hidden cost but when you buy something with a credit card, the merchant has accepted in advance a 3% fee to receive the funds via credit card. So if you put $50k on your card, merchants have been charged around $1500 in transaction fees.
This is why some the super cheap gas stations will accept only cash and charge you a dime to use your ATM card (ATM networks charge around a dime per transaction, I believe). They can reduce their gas prices by 3% and pass that savings on to you.
It seems like you're describing the PocketPC segment - Microsoft opened up their developer kit (it was free until recently), and as a result there are lots of phones that use Windows Mobile and many, many small time software developers writing applications for the platform. But this is an old story - Apple has never been nearly as supportive of small-time developers as Microsoft has, and as a result, there are many many more cottage application developers for Windows than Mac. I may not be fond of Microsoft, but I'm no fonder of Apple - I can't really see much difference between the two, except Apple ties its OS to its own hardware in every endeavor and Microsoft doesn't.
You're right that it would be interesting to see what a gPhone would look like - Google has been more open in its API than Apple and would benefit from a multi-carrier, multi-band phone more (b/c it would drive more traffic back to gHQ)..
I agree with you, but SL isn't really meant to be a game. In this context SL is more of a toy. Unlike games, toys aren't goal or end-point oriented, they are open ended.
More substantially to your point, I think that SL and other v-worlds are "lowest common denominator" kind of systems. They appeal to many people who cannot make sense of the "real" internet. So my father will think SL is "cool" (or "boss" in his idiom). He can immediately understand it, yet he can still take advantage of certain communication systems that he would probably not engage with through the traditional internet (multi-person chat & on-line shopping are easy examples). It's not b/c he's incompetent to log into Amazon and buy something there but going to a book store in SL (I assume there must be such a place) would be much more intuitive and appealing for him - and in the end he'd still buy a book over the internet..
I'm not saying all SL'ers are noobs - just that noobs "get it" in SL much more quickly than they do on the internet, and that makes v-world tech potentially very powerful. Certainly as another child post says, reporters are noobs; reporters "get" SL, therefore reporters write about SL all the time. It's great press. But we must ask ourselves why reporters get SL and can write copy about it that their readers understand..
It does show how bullying over electronic channels can be effective - to the point of (at least partially) causing youths to kill themselves. In fact, the e-bullying seems to look an awful lot like bullying in RL - repeated personal attacks, ostracizing, humiliation and degrading treatment.
I'd have to guess that bullying in Wikipedia would probably heavily rely on ostracizing of various forms, b/c being part of the community seems important to many there. So if a person can get other editors of a page against you, you might end up feeling unwelcome and going elsewhere: they "win".
I'll have to disagree slightly with you, but it'll be hard to resolve unless you have the back issues of Science News (or at least the annual indices). Although I'm still a subscriber to Science News, their on-line archives are spotty in the 1994 time range.
I remember reading two articles about this in the late 80's or early 90's in Science News - the one you mention about how the computer played the best player in the world (wasn't he a used car salesman in Florida and far better than his nearest competitor? Now deceased I think..) But I also read an article dating from late 80's or early 90's that said that the same researchers had computationally solved checkers.
My dim memory of the article recalls that the reseachers had not nailed down every last move (probably b/c disk storage was way more expensive then) but had basically solved the necessary board-trees to allow perfect play. The only reason I remember this at all, is because I remember bringing up the fact that checkers had finally been solved to others at that time.
I'm totally willing to admit I misremember the facts but I pretty clearly remember both articles.
If I understand the question and the issue (not certain) - the point is that the "best" possible move for the weaker color, always (at best) leads to a draw. There are other possible moves that lead to a loss of course. While there is no move that leads to a guaranteed win for the stronger color, the worst that side can do with perfect play is draw. If both sides play perfectly they draw. If the weaker color ever deviates from perfect play, the stronger side may win. At least that's how I understand it.
I think they've proven that it's kind of like tic-tac-toe, but with way more possible ways to draw.
Every time you move a piece the the computer can say: the best you can still do is "draw" - or it can say, "you're certain to lose now"
And finally, regarding this "news" - WTF - I read about this story in grad school around 1994 in Science News. I know/. is slow on the uptake sometimes but this doesn't seem like news.
Ruby is concise. Perl is terse. Once I started writing Ruby code and learned how it really works, I decided I'm never going to write another line of Perl again. A nice article (not by me) on this point is: http://gurge.com/blog/2006/10/16/ruby-at-60/
I know this OT but this whole thread on Perl seems OT.
In general what you are saying in true, but there are certain kinds of assets called "dual basis" assets which can cause you to pay real money, even if you have never realized a gain. One example is Incentive Stock Options - if you exercise such options you might owe real alternative minimum taxes (AMT) even if you never put an actual penny in the bank from such stocks.
There's a quote from technology mucky muck at Amazon that speaks clearly to this point:
Failure in any large-scale system is the normal case, not the exception.
- Werner Vogels
If you can't tolerate large scale failure, then you shouldn't rely on it. Voting should use paper. Fewer bugs, propagate less, and they're easier to find and fix. The idea that we would use electronic voting is basically an argument that "it's more efficient." Efficiency is exactly what I don't want in voting. We can pay $300B to goof off in Iraq, I think we can pay to run an election properly with paper.
It's a virtual class in Second life that a group of Uni people are experimenting with. Show up and see what's happening in there! Kevin's an interesting guy and this class should be fascinating..
Mod parent up. This is exactly right (IMHO). The only thing I wonder about (and have no experience with) is whether the IP rights strategy in the early days at Microsoft (83-93, say) was driven by a motive not dissimilar to MySQL's stratetgy now: get as large an install base as quickly as possible, and don't worry about licensing it to everyone.
Once Microsoft had securely locked in their OS and Office user base and decimated all competitors (WordPerfect, Correl, Borland, Novell, etc), their license strategies started to change. Ironically, I wonder if the availability of free software like Linux and Apache has driven Microsoft away from their looser licensing approach in the past? They can't compete by giving it away, when their competitors are free forever, so they are in effect "forced" to tighten up? (I'm not saying it makes sense, I'm saying they may feel erroneously compelled by the bottom line to behave this way because they don't "get" the big picture: as the parent points out, the people in charge at Microsoft are now largely career business people, not software nugs.)
The concepts of no corporate licenses, limiting to one transfer to new hardware and not being able to save ISO's to disk, are all starting to look like the death throws of a beached whale? I would be the last person to predict the coming demise of Microsoft, but I would never have thought Sun would be in the position they are in right now back in 1996 either..
But aren't a lot of the people who build their own PC's at home the same people who buy corporate PC's for thousands at work? I guess these people will have access to site licensed software at work that will somehow install itself at home too, but it seems like they're screwing over exactly the people who are supposed to support and manage corporate networks?
And another thing: no ISO's? WTF? Is this an anti-piracy campaign or what is the rationale? I download some open source distribution as an ISO and I can't save it to disk in Vista? I'm boggled at this level of "file management" by the OS..
They'll try to make a super baby from the 100 people and it'll get the brains of Larry King and ALS from Hawking..
Reminds me of a George Bernard Shaw quote (mis-attributed sometimes to Einstein I think). When it was suggested to him by a beautiful woman that they could make super-babies together, he replied:
The real appeal of this method of suspending animation is that it could be used in trauma cases. Assuming it actually works safely for humans (big if), this method is so easy that it could be applied in the field by paramedics. Someone with a massive heart attack or stroke could possibly be placed into suspended animation until they are in the right location for full diagnosis and treatment. Also, someone with critical organ failure could be suspended for a few days/weeks until the right organ turns up.
I'm sure there will be plenty more reasons once/if the tech proves itself. New Scientist and Science News have been covering this possibility for some now, so this is only news right now if you don't follow the science trades.
Not that it's any use for iPods, but Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org/) MP3 (open source) OS has a random feature that (I believe this is how it works) seeds a psuedo-random number once, writes it to file, and then passes it to a two-way function that guarantees a random order but never repeats a song unless all the other songs have already been played (and since the seed is stored in a file along with the index count, it remembers where you were between power-offs - plus since it's a two way function, you can press back and get the "random" song you were just listening to.
I still have an ancient Archos MP3 player but Rockbox is so good, I can't get rid of it and downgrade to lesser functionality.:)
Right. I understand that technically a "child no grandchild" (CnG?) DRM is just as boffo as the rest of it (i.e. bolt-on limitations to what you could do without it). I was suggesting that from a mindset point of view, if companies were working toward CnG DRM, I'd feel like they were trying to achieve something reasonable and wouldn't feel like I actually do: which that the media companies want to make sure they can control all content whether they own it or not..
I don't think we need to produce a bullet-proof DRM solution to accomplish what both sides should want: fair use of copyrighted material. I suppose the fundamental business/social problem is that if big media can make CnG work, they'll certainly not stop there. Sigh.
I think you're right that getting to play something three times or over three days is goofy and reflects a view that all the money is in "hits" not the long tail. Three times and three days with Brittany is probably more than enough time. Where I disagree with you is that the idea of creating a "child no grandchild" model for DRM is bad. I've been wishing they would come up with this model for a while: I own the master rights. From that master, I can make an unlimited number of copies, but each of those copies can't copy itself. It would still allow infinite copies, technically, but practically it would create a fair representation (to my thinking) of what's fair: I can give stuff to you, but you can't give it to anyone else.
Dedicated people could get around this by uploading a hundred copies of a song, but that seems ok, because it would take effort and bandwidth to do it. Maybe there is already such a system? I haven't heard of it (which means little since I use an old Archos MP3 player running rockbox).
And thus protologism would then be true of itself, making it homological. Reminds me of this quote:
If a homological adjective is one that is true of itself, e.g., "polysyllabic", and a heterological adjective is one which is not true of itself, e.g., "bisyllabic", then what about "heterological?" Is it heterological or not?
- Grelling's Paradox
I know some of the organizers of this project. They are actually planning some of the features you describe. See this link for more details.
I believe they are intending to build a community review process, not a community wiki of patents. So there will be threaded discussion, karma, ratings AND group editing of documents. From what I can tell the project is designed to provide a community forum and process where experts can work together (or singly) to identify prior art, rate the relevance of submissions and send a sorted list of best examples to examiners BEFORE the examiner decides whether to approve of the patent. They may also take on the "novelty" part of the claim but this is obviously more subjective and therefore a somewhat harder problem.
Actually Word (since v6 I think) will automagically correct if you backwards case a sentence. It actually doesn't just fix the sentence you messed up but it turns off capslock altogther on the keyboard so you're not in the f**ked state anymore.
Whatever else I think about Word, this feature is a gOOD tHING.
Hmm. Not to split hairs with you, but maybe - maybe not. In addition to M-W, American Heritage supports my use, as does Wikipedia, though they offer some comments as to the controversy you're bringing up:
Wikipedia on irony usage controversy
Makes me wonder if other forms of cancer might turn out to transmissible? Yikes.
Wouldn't it be ironic if some of the tendency of families to be more susceptible to the same form of cancer turns out to be related to the fact that family members often live together or go and visit when a relative has a serious cancer? Eweesh.
If you think AIDS has stigma - wait until some researcher finds a hint that some forms of human cancer may be transmissible through contact or otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not copyrighting a few generic phrases on the coupons, that are similar to such phrases elsewhere - that would be the domain of trademark - and you're right they'd have a hard time getting such a trademark.
They are copyrighting the entire coupon - the phrases, their ordering, the graphical layout - the whole thing. Just like a photographer copyrights a photo. You can't just copy it. And you can't make one exactly like it, less some minor change - that, in some cases, would still be a copyright violation. (And in this case, I'd guess a judge would rule that a "similar" coupon that violated their copyright would include the serial number of the original - possibly if that were the only thing on the new coupon, it would still trigger a copyright violation in the eyes of many judges or juries).
So copyright violation does seem to be in play here - he was granted a copyright license for 2 copies - he made more than two copies, and so may have some liability under the implicit copyright license that he was under.
I don't like, and it doesn't sound like you do either, but I think the law is pretty clear about this sort of copyright violation in our current situation (in the US). Using the DMCA is a little wierd - but this guy is under legal attack for both for DMCA violations AND plain old copyright violations. The latter will be much easier to prove and prosecute in this case, I suspect. But that won't get you on slashdot..
I'm a little skeptical of your claim that a CC company would even threaten to drop your parents solely b/c they pay their bills in full. You might ask them if there were additional details.
CC networks make big money on people like you (and maybe your parents if they use their card like you do). They collect around 3% of the total transaction from merchants on EVERYTHING you buy with your card. You don't see it on the bill b/c it's a hidden cost but when you buy something with a credit card, the merchant has accepted in advance a 3% fee to receive the funds via credit card. So if you put $50k on your card, merchants have been charged around $1500 in transaction fees.
This is why some the super cheap gas stations will accept only cash and charge you a dime to use your ATM card (ATM networks charge around a dime per transaction, I believe). They can reduce their gas prices by 3% and pass that savings on to you.
It seems like you're describing the PocketPC segment - Microsoft opened up their developer kit (it was free until recently), and as a result there are lots of phones that use Windows Mobile and many, many small time software developers writing applications for the platform. But this is an old story - Apple has never been nearly as supportive of small-time developers as Microsoft has, and as a result, there are many many more cottage application developers for Windows than Mac. I may not be fond of Microsoft, but I'm no fonder of Apple - I can't really see much difference between the two, except Apple ties its OS to its own hardware in every endeavor and Microsoft doesn't.
You're right that it would be interesting to see what a gPhone would look like - Google has been more open in its API than Apple and would benefit from a multi-carrier, multi-band phone more (b/c it would drive more traffic back to gHQ)..
I agree with you, but SL isn't really meant to be a game. In this context SL is more of a toy. Unlike games, toys aren't goal or end-point oriented, they are open ended.
More substantially to your point, I think that SL and other v-worlds are "lowest common denominator" kind of systems. They appeal to many people who cannot make sense of the "real" internet. So my father will think SL is "cool" (or "boss" in his idiom). He can immediately understand it, yet he can still take advantage of certain communication systems that he would probably not engage with through the traditional internet (multi-person chat & on-line shopping are easy examples). It's not b/c he's incompetent to log into Amazon and buy something there but going to a book store in SL (I assume there must be such a place) would be much more intuitive and appealing for him - and in the end he'd still buy a book over the internet..
I'm not saying all SL'ers are noobs - just that noobs "get it" in SL much more quickly than they do on the internet, and that makes v-world tech potentially very powerful. Certainly as another child post says, reporters are noobs; reporters "get" SL, therefore reporters write about SL all the time. It's great press. But we must ask ourselves why reporters get SL and can write copy about it that their readers understand..
There's an interesting, though limited, article on cyberbullying on NewScientist.com:
5 26136.300-the-rise-of-cyberbullying.html
http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg19
It does show how bullying over electronic channels can be effective - to the point of (at least partially) causing youths to kill themselves. In fact, the e-bullying seems to look an awful lot like bullying in RL - repeated personal attacks, ostracizing, humiliation and degrading treatment.
I'd have to guess that bullying in Wikipedia would probably heavily rely on ostracizing of various forms, b/c being part of the community seems important to many there. So if a person can get other editors of a page against you, you might end up feeling unwelcome and going elsewhere: they "win".
I'll have to disagree slightly with you, but it'll be hard to resolve unless you have the back issues of Science News (or at least the annual indices). Although I'm still a subscriber to Science News, their on-line archives are spotty in the 1994 time range.
I remember reading two articles about this in the late 80's or early 90's in Science News - the one you mention about how the computer played the best player in the world (wasn't he a used car salesman in Florida and far better than his nearest competitor? Now deceased I think..) But I also read an article dating from late 80's or early 90's that said that the same researchers had computationally solved checkers.
My dim memory of the article recalls that the reseachers had not nailed down every last move (probably b/c disk storage was way more expensive then) but had basically solved the necessary board-trees to allow perfect play. The only reason I remember this at all, is because I remember bringing up the fact that checkers had finally been solved to others at that time.
I'm totally willing to admit I misremember the facts but I pretty clearly remember both articles.
If I understand the question and the issue (not certain) - the point is that the "best" possible move for the weaker color, always (at best) leads to a draw. There are other possible moves that lead to a loss of course. While there is no move that leads to a guaranteed win for the stronger color, the worst that side can do with perfect play is draw. If both sides play perfectly they draw. If the weaker color ever deviates from perfect play, the stronger side may win. At least that's how I understand it.
/. is slow on the uptake sometimes but this doesn't seem like news.
I think they've proven that it's kind of like tic-tac-toe, but with way more possible ways to draw.
Every time you move a piece the the computer can say: the best you can still do is "draw" - or it can say, "you're certain to lose now"
And finally, regarding this "news" - WTF - I read about this story in grad school around 1994 in Science News. I know
Ruby is concise. Perl is terse. Once I started writing Ruby code and learned how it really works, I decided I'm never going to write another line of Perl again. A nice article (not by me) on this point is: http://gurge.com/blog/2006/10/16/ruby-at-60/
I know this OT but this whole thread on Perl seems OT.
In general what you are saying in true, but there are certain kinds of assets called "dual basis" assets which can cause you to pay real money, even if you have never realized a gain. One example is Incentive Stock Options - if you exercise such options you might owe real alternative minimum taxes (AMT) even if you never put an actual penny in the bank from such stocks.
cf. http://www.fairmark.com/amt/dual.htm
There's a quote from technology mucky muck at Amazon that speaks clearly to this point:
Failure in any large-scale system is the
normal case, not the exception.
- Werner Vogels
If you can't tolerate large scale failure, then you shouldn't rely on it. Voting should use paper. Fewer bugs, propagate less, and they're easier to find and fix. The idea that we would use electronic voting is basically an argument that "it's more efficient." Efficiency is exactly what I don't want in voting. We can pay $300B to goof off in Iraq, I think we can pay to run an election properly with paper.
Today only, 5:30pm Pacific time in Second Life:
i ew=day&course=11&cal_d=17&cal_m=10&cal_y=2006
h p?id=17
http://stateofplayacademy.com/calendar/view.php?v
It's a virtual class in Second life that a group of Uni people are experimenting with. Show up and see what's happening in there! Kevin's an interesting guy and this class should be fascinating..
Info on State of Play Academy: http://stateofplayacademy.com/mod/resource/view.p
Saying slippery slope arguments always leads to fallacies is a slippery slope.
Mod parent up. This is exactly right (IMHO). The only thing I wonder about (and have no experience with) is whether the IP rights strategy in the early days at Microsoft (83-93, say) was driven by a motive not dissimilar to MySQL's stratetgy now: get as large an install base as quickly as possible, and don't worry about licensing it to everyone.
Once Microsoft had securely locked in their OS and Office user base and decimated all competitors (WordPerfect, Correl, Borland, Novell, etc), their license strategies started to change. Ironically, I wonder if the availability of free software like Linux and Apache has driven Microsoft away from their looser licensing approach in the past? They can't compete by giving it away, when their competitors are free forever, so they are in effect "forced" to tighten up? (I'm not saying it makes sense, I'm saying they may feel erroneously compelled by the bottom line to behave this way because they don't "get" the big picture: as the parent points out, the people in charge at Microsoft are now largely career business people, not software nugs.)
The concepts of no corporate licenses, limiting to one transfer to new hardware and not being able to save ISO's to disk, are all starting to look like the death throws of a beached whale? I would be the last person to predict the coming demise of Microsoft, but I would never have thought Sun would be in the position they are in right now back in 1996 either..
But aren't a lot of the people who build their own PC's at home the same people who buy corporate PC's for thousands at work? I guess these people will have access to site licensed software at work that will somehow install itself at home too, but it seems like they're screwing over exactly the people who are supposed to support and manage corporate networks?
And another thing: no ISO's? WTF? Is this an anti-piracy campaign or what is the rationale? I download some open source distribution as an ISO and I can't save it to disk in Vista? I'm boggled at this level of "file management" by the OS..
They'll try to make a super baby from the 100 people and it'll get the brains of Larry King and ALS from Hawking..
Reminds me of a George Bernard Shaw quote (mis-attributed sometimes to Einstein I think). When it was suggested to him by a beautiful woman that they could make super-babies together, he replied:
"But what if they had my looks and your brains?
The real appeal of this method of suspending animation is that it could be used in trauma cases. Assuming it actually works safely for humans (big if), this method is so easy that it could be applied in the field by paramedics. Someone with a massive heart attack or stroke could possibly be placed into suspended animation until they are in the right location for full diagnosis and treatment. Also, someone with critical organ failure could be suspended for a few days/weeks until the right organ turns up.
I'm sure there will be plenty more reasons once/if the tech proves itself. New Scientist and Science News have been covering this possibility for some now, so this is only news right now if you don't follow the science trades.
Not that it's any use for iPods, but Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org/) MP3 (open source) OS has a random feature that (I believe this is how it works) seeds a psuedo-random number once, writes it to file, and then passes it to a two-way function that guarantees a random order but never repeats a song unless all the other songs have already been played (and since the seed is stored in a file along with the index count, it remembers where you were between power-offs - plus since it's a two way function, you can press back and get the "random" song you were just listening to.
:)
I still have an ancient Archos MP3 player but Rockbox is so good, I can't get rid of it and downgrade to lesser functionality.
Right. I understand that technically a "child no grandchild" (CnG?) DRM is just as boffo as the rest of it (i.e. bolt-on limitations to what you could do without it). I was suggesting that from a mindset point of view, if companies were working toward CnG DRM, I'd feel like they were trying to achieve something reasonable and wouldn't feel like I actually do: which that the media companies want to make sure they can control all content whether they own it or not..
I don't think we need to produce a bullet-proof DRM solution to accomplish what both sides should want: fair use of copyrighted material. I suppose the fundamental business/social problem is that if big media can make CnG work, they'll certainly not stop there. Sigh.
I think you're right that getting to play something three times or over three days is goofy and reflects a view that all the money is in "hits" not the long tail. Three times and three days with Brittany is probably more than enough time. Where I disagree with you is that the idea of creating a "child no grandchild" model for DRM is bad. I've been wishing they would come up with this model for a while: I own the master rights. From that master, I can make an unlimited number of copies, but each of those copies can't copy itself. It would still allow infinite copies, technically, but practically it would create a fair representation (to my thinking) of what's fair: I can give stuff to you, but you can't give it to anyone else.
Dedicated people could get around this by uploading a hundred copies of a song, but that seems ok, because it would take effort and bandwidth to do it. Maybe there is already such a system? I haven't heard of it (which means little since I use an old Archos MP3 player running rockbox).
And thus protologism would then be true of itself, making it homological. Reminds me of this quote:
If a homological adjective is one that is true of itself, e.g., "polysyllabic", and a heterological adjective is one which is not true of itself, e.g., "bisyllabic", then what about "heterological?" Is it heterological or not?
- Grelling's Paradox
No, I think the first was some company called Microsoft. The specific page was called "IIS."
I believe they are intending to build a community review process, not a community wiki of patents. So there will be threaded discussion, karma, ratings AND group editing of documents. From what I can tell the project is designed to provide a community forum and process where experts can work together (or singly) to identify prior art, rate the relevance of submissions and send a sorted list of best examples to examiners BEFORE the examiner decides whether to approve of the patent. They may also take on the "novelty" part of the claim but this is obviously more subjective and therefore a somewhat harder problem.
Actually Word (since v6 I think) will automagically correct if you backwards case a sentence. It actually doesn't just fix the sentence you messed up but it turns off capslock altogther on the keyboard so you're not in the f**ked state anymore.
Whatever else I think about Word, this feature is a gOOD tHING.
Steve
Hmm. Not to split hairs with you, but maybe - maybe not. In addition to M-W, American Heritage supports my use, as does Wikipedia, though they offer some comments as to the controversy you're bringing up: Wikipedia on irony usage controversy
Makes me wonder if other forms of cancer might turn out to transmissible? Yikes.
Wouldn't it be ironic if some of the tendency of families to be more susceptible to the same form of cancer turns out to be related to the fact that family members often live together or go and visit when a relative has a serious cancer? Eweesh.
If you think AIDS has stigma - wait until some researcher finds a hint that some forms of human cancer may be transmissible through contact or otherwise.