"Supported" has different meanings to different people. Saying that Linux is not supported as a client is a long, long way from saying that it won't work. They may just not have their support staff trained on Linux printing issues. It's as valid a reason as any.
Yes. A modern nuclear power plant does not underestimate the power of human stupidity. It's called a fail-safe system. The laws of nature itself conspire to make it not possible for the plant to have a "leak".
You're saying one kind of radioactive waste product is alright, but another isn't? Where do you draw the line... can we have a figure in say children with leukemia per square mile?
You're damn right he's saying that. I'd rather have an amount of nuclear waste in a container buried deep in the desert than a large amount of free radioactive radon particles spewing out of the top of the nearest coal burning facility.
Wait a second, you do know that, barring accident, no radioactive materials escape nuclear plants, don't you? Perhaps not.
Now, if you collected it with a few sattilites, and 'beamed' it down, that's another thing altogether, but that's about the most expensive, least efficient way of doing anything, even though it would have the neatest Discovery channel special
Yeah, especially when you miss the target by a fraction of a degree and fry a nearby town. They'll need some SPF 2 million sunblock, man.
That's what I always do. www.anonymizer.com is the most common one, but it's pretty slow at times. Try this link: https://proxy.magusnet.com:8090/-_-http://www.2600 .com/news/2000/0821.html ---
Jeez, calm down man. You're blatently wrong in that you think you need to decrypt in order to copy. If you copy the entire disk, byte for byte, you've made a copy that will play in any DVD player. Simple.
And yes, you can get the session key. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to play the damn thing, would you?
They may have deeper motives, but the obvious way to argue the case is that CSS is not a copy protection system. I have no idea how easy that is to show to a non-programmer, but it's fairly obvious to any computer professional.
a) Tivo runs a modified Linux PPC.
b) Yes, you can even get a shell prompt on it (thru the serial port on the back no less).
c) Yes, you can even pull out the drive and mount it on your Linux box, with some minor effort.
d) We're getting closer to figuring out the drive format they use to store shows.
Therefore e) within a few weeks or months we'll know how to pull shows off the unit in MPEG format.
If you want to help, get a Tivo and come by the Tivo Underground forum at www.tivocommunity.com.
Thought this was interesting... I wanted to see if the other bits were there just not linked.. So.. rip off the end of the URL to the pdf file, and get:
Before it died I got a good look at the source. I also logged in using a paypal account I made with no credit card info or cash in it or anything, so no problems there.:)
Anyway, all the login info was routed through paypai.com, then it returned the paypal.com webpage. Worked essentially like a proxy, but probably logged the passwords. But the front end of the page was copied directly from paypal.com and had the paypal references changed to go to paypai.
Interesting method of attack. I wonder if this is going to become more common. Makes you wonder how you can secure against this kind of scam from the viewpoint of the website designer. Okay, admittedly, if you can get a user to give out a password, he's boned, but still.
The Dead Past First Published In: Astounding Science Fiction, April 1956, pp. 6-46 Collections: Earth Is Room Enough The Best of Isaac Asimov The Far Ends of Time and Earth (omnibus edition) The Edge Of Tomorrow The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov Other Worlds of Isaac Asimov The Complete Stories, Volume 1 Anthologies: Five-Odd, Groff Conklin, ed. Pyramid (pbk), 1964, pp. 8-54 Beyond Control, Robert Silverberg, ed. Thomas Nelson, 1972, pp. 162-219 The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Arbor House, 1980, pp. 302-345 The Analog Anthology #1, Stanley Schmidt, ed. Davis Publications, 1981, pp. 187-260 6 Decades: The Best of Analog, Stanley Schmidt, ed. Davis Publications, 1986, pp. 35-67 Worlds Imagined: 14 Short Science Fiction Novels, Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Avenel, 1989, pp. 302-345 The World Treasury of Science Fiction, David G. Hartwell and Clifton Fadiman, eds. Little Brown, 1989, pp. 503-543 Foreign Anthologies: Kroki W Nie-Zname, Warsaw: Iskry, 1970
Good story. He used a different concept, that of neutrinos traveling forward in time could be read somehow.. Kinda nifty idea, anyway.
There was also a subplot going on about how knowledge had become so compartmentalized that nobody dared think outside their realm of expertise, as it were. It's a bit long for a short story though and tends to ramble, a lot like Asimov.:)
I hereby declare my own genetic code open to the public. Anyone may use, modify, and distribute any base pair sequences that are part of me.
Interested parties may obtain samples by sending cute women to collect them. Due to restrictions imposed by nature, and the fact that I hate needles, samples may only be collected in halves, through all-natural means. Putting these sample halves back together again is your own problem.
Okay, there's a difference between sales tax and use tax. Not all states have use taxes.
Currently, for the purpose of taxation, internet is the same as mail-order.
Where a company sells in a state, that state may require the company to collect a sales or use tax, assuming nexus is established. Whether a company is liable for a tax depends on whether the company has nexus in the state. It also depends on the tangible or intangible nature of the product or service sold.
Nexus for sales and use tax is different from nexus for income tax. A company may have nexus for one and not the other.
Sales tax is a tax based on the gross sales price of property. It is collected by the seller of the property. The consumer of the property may be an individual buying the product from a local retailer, or a business buying a product which is "consumed" in the process of making other products.
There are a handful of exemptions from sales tax. The most common exemption is the purchase of an item for resale. The exemption that we are concerned with here is the exemption for a sale to an out-of-state buyer.
When a company sells to an out-of-state buyer, the sale is usually exempt from sales tax in the seller's state of residence. For instance, a retailer preparing a California sales and use tax return would find that "sales in interstate or foreign commerce" are exempt from sales tax. The instructions to the California form indicate that exempt sales are "those involving shipments or deliveries from California to points outside this State which are exempt from tax as interstate or foreign commerce. In order to be exempt, property must be shipped to a point outside this State, pursuant to the contract of sale, and delivered by the retailer to such point by means of facilities operated by the retailer, delivery by the retailer to a carrier for shipment to a consignee at such a point, or delivery by the retailer to a customs broker or forwarding agent for shipment outside this State." California's rules are fairly typical of the way out-of-state sales are treated.
A retailer making an out-of-state sale is usually not liable for sales tax in the retailer's home state. Neither is the retailer liable for sales tax in the state where the customer is located, unless the retailer has nexus in that state. It is possible, then, for out-of-state sales to be completely free of sales tax.
Use tax: A sale that is not subject to sales tax in the states of either the buyer or seller is a serious problem. States have attempted to remedy this problem with a use tax. A use tax is exactly the same as the sales tax, except that it is charged to the buyer of property by the state in which the property is used. For example, a mail-order computer company may not be required to collect a sales tax. The buyer, however, is required to compute a use tax and pay it to the state in which the computer is used. Use tax, for all practical purposes, is the same as sales tax, and is meant to pick up sales which are not subject to sales tax.
The use tax is imposed on purchasers, not sellers. Out-of-state sellers with nexus in a state may be required to collect the use tax, but that does not change the fact that it is imposed on the purchasers. If the out-of-state seller does not collect the use tax, the state can come after the purchaser for the tax.
The difficulty with the use tax is that there is almost universal noncompliance. Most buyers do not know that they should pay a use tax. There are a few exceptions, however. For example, automobiles and boats purchased out-of-state must be registered. Use tax is payable at the time of registration.
Because of the difficulties involved in getting purchasers to remit use tax, states have attempted to get out-of-state sellers to collect the tax. The Supreme Court has consistently held against states unless the seller has nexus in the state.
States continue to seek ways to collect the use tax. In 1988, a group of states began developing lists of purchasers from mail-order companies. Each state shared information with other states based on their audits of mail-order companies headquartered in their state. Several years later, certain states began sending out forms to these purchasers. The forms requested the purchasers to verify reported purchases and pay use tax to the state.
Obviously, such efforts are only a drop in a very large bucket. Substantial mail-order business takes place without sales or use tax being charged, and with no chance of the consumer voluntarily paying the tax, or even knowing the tax is due. The states will have no chance of capturing even a small portion of this tax.
Are these things legal, so to speak, i mean are you allowed to record stuff from the TV Networks (i am talking technically, not rights &tc, just plain and simple law).:-).
Yes. The betamax case way back when pretty much settled the whole question of recording shows and time-shifting content.
However, copyright still lies with the network. You, in theory, can't record a show off TV then copy it for a friend. At least, not while making cash off it.
Of course there's a difference between what the law says and what the networks do for enforcement. Their main concern is that you don't rip their content without showing the commercials too. That really irks them.
So they can get an IP address. That's all fine and happy. But who you gonna sue? They'd have to:
a) trace down everyone serving those copyrighted files, using nothing but their IP. b) sue each and every one of them.
Good luck, and more power to them. You can't sue Gnutella like you sue Napster, since there is no such entity as Gnutella. Decentralization is the key. Gnutella is essentially nothing more than bunches and bunches of people acting independently to share files.
I've been a regular over on that board for a while (nick: Otto) and there's really only one reason people are hacking it, right now. To add new drives. New drives = more space to record programs. They use a weird filesystem called Media FS for storing the recorded programs, and to add a new drive you have to do some strange things with the Tivo software. You can plug in anything, but the Tivo software won't recognize it unless you follow a certain procedure. Since Tivo won't tell us, we're just figuring it out. There have been 2 reports of someone doing a self upgrade on the space. One guy copied the second drive from a fresh, unused Tivo, the other guy says he figured out how to "bless" a drive so the Tivo software recognizes it.
Anyway, we've been working on this for a while, and the possibilities are staggering. The Tivo is essentially a PowerPC 50 Mhz or so, with a built in modem/ IDE interface card. Also on board are an MPEG encoder and decoder chips and a TV tuner. Very neat. The serial port is actually used to directly connect to DSS receivers, to change channels reliably.
To connect a shell to the serial port: take out the drive, mount it under linux (use bswap to do byte swapping). To mount it under linux, you probably have to recompile your kernel using the genhd.c from the tivo linux sources. Anyway, once you mount it you'll find several things on several partitions. You can then edit the startup rc.d's to put a shell on/dev/ttyS3 and then you can use a null modem cable to connect to that shell while it's back in the Tivo unit. Pretty neat.
There's a lot of cool swag going on here, but it'll be a while before good mods come out. The only thing I worry about is that some wanker will hack the thing to get around Tivo's service.
Making it not use Tivo's service at all would be extremely difficult. Making it use Tivo service wrongly, by giving the wrong serial or some such, would be easier, but they could crack down on the modified Tivo's and not let people with mods dialin anymore. That would suck. Plus, since Tivo updates the software from time to time, an update to a modded box could ruin the sucker.
Well, it has a built in MPEG decoder. Possibly, but I don't know if the decoder can be used. The PowerPC chip itself only runs at maybe 50 Mhz, and is heavily used already.
The whole reason people are hacking the Tivo is that they want to be able to add their own drives. That's it. They use a special file system, and we've been working that out for a while now.
Well, the deposition is marked May 15, 2000. I assume they either did not get the ruling to make it confidential, or it got leaked somehow. Any info anyone? ---
> "Viruses sounds stupid"? What a self-revealing thing to say. You're just jealous because you probably flunked English and never had even a whit of Latin. The illiterati of the net are always close at hand. You simply insist that you're right in the face of all evidence of the contrary, being unwilling and unable to accept your own woefully inadequate language skills as a bug, not a feature.
Shame, shame. You know you've lost an arguement when you resort to a personal attack.
If you'll notice, I do not insist I am right in the face of contrary evidence, I insist that the evidence is biased by the "intelligensi" of the net. In other words, yourself, sir. You assume that your arguements are valid because they sound good. You never seem to know that the majority of the world is not an academic playground, that people must live, breathe, and work out here.
Language is only useful when it serves a purpose. Language is a living, breathing thing. Attempts to define the language are attempts to regulate it. People who try to "regulate" it are fighting the natural evolution of the language itself, and are doomed to failure.
So continue to use what you will. I will continue to use it my way. But never attack another man's way of speaking, as it simply undermines any attempt you had at communicating with him.
So you're a latin scholar? Good on you man, now wake up to the real world where people make up the words that they use when they need them. I use "virii" because if I said "viruses" people might confuse what I'm saying with an actual biological virus. Also, "viruses" sounds stupid. I will continue to advocate the use of "virii" regardless of the proper "Latin" way of doing things.
Virii is a proper English word. Why? It is in common usage and it is commonly known. Simple.
Languages change according to need. Trying to define rules to change them is a ridiculous error made only by academic morons who have no experience in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
"Supported" has different meanings to different people. Saying that Linux is not supported as a client is a long, long way from saying that it won't work. They may just not have their support staff trained on Linux printing issues. It's as valid a reason as any.
---
And fast forward through the tripe to the meat of the program. I watched the whole 'content' of the preview episode in about 10 minutes.
Hopefully the later episodes won't be as stupid. I love the concept though.. Very cool.
---
Yes. A modern nuclear power plant does not underestimate the power of human stupidity. It's called a fail-safe system. The laws of nature itself conspire to make it not possible for the plant to have a "leak".
---
You're saying one kind of radioactive waste product is alright, but another isn't? Where do you draw the line... can we have a figure in say children with leukemia per square mile?
You're damn right he's saying that. I'd rather have an amount of nuclear waste in a container buried deep in the desert than a large amount of free radioactive radon particles spewing out of the top of the nearest coal burning facility.
Wait a second, you do know that, barring accident, no radioactive materials escape nuclear plants, don't you? Perhaps not.
---
Now, if you collected it with a few sattilites, and 'beamed' it down, that's another thing altogether, but that's about the most expensive, least efficient way of doing anything, even though it would have the neatest Discovery channel special
Yeah, especially when you miss the target by a fraction of a degree and fry a nearby town. They'll need some SPF 2 million sunblock, man.
---
That's what I always do. www.anonymizer.com is the most common one, but it's pretty slow at times. Try this link: https://proxy.magusnet.com:8090/-_-http://www.2600 .com/news/2000/0821.html
---
Jeez, calm down man. You're blatently wrong in that you think you need to decrypt in order to copy. If you copy the entire disk, byte for byte, you've made a copy that will play in any DVD player. Simple.
And yes, you can get the session key. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to play the damn thing, would you?
---
They may have deeper motives, but the obvious way to argue the case is that CSS is not a copy protection system. I have no idea how easy that is to show to a non-programmer, but it's fairly obvious to any computer professional.
---
a) Tivo runs a modified Linux PPC.
b) Yes, you can even get a shell prompt on it (thru the serial port on the back no less).
c) Yes, you can even pull out the drive and mount it on your Linux box, with some minor effort.
d) We're getting closer to figuring out the drive format they use to store shows.
Therefore e) within a few weeks or months we'll know how to pull shows off the unit in MPEG format.
If you want to help, get a Tivo and come by the Tivo Underground forum at www.tivocommunity.com.
---
Thought this was interesting... I wanted to see if the other bits were there just not linked.. So.. rip off the end of the URL to the pdf file, and get:
http://radiant.www.conxion.com/
Pretty funny, I thought.
Here's the text:
You are not permitted to view the contents of this directory.
If you have gotten here by mistake, then please use your back button and follow the correct link for The Plant download.
If you have gotten here on purpose, remember -- don't steal from the blind newsboy.
---
Before it died I got a good look at the source. I also logged in using a paypal account I made with no credit card info or cash in it or anything, so no problems there. :)
Anyway, all the login info was routed through paypai.com, then it returned the paypal.com webpage. Worked essentially like a proxy, but probably logged the passwords. But the front end of the page was copied directly from paypal.com and had the paypal references changed to go to paypai.
Interesting method of attack. I wonder if this is going to become more common. Makes you wonder how you can secure against this kind of scam from the viewpoint of the website designer. Okay, admittedly, if you can get a user to give out a password, he's boned, but still.
---
The Dead Past
:)
First Published In: Astounding Science Fiction, April 1956, pp. 6-46
Collections:
Earth Is Room Enough
The Best of Isaac Asimov
The Far Ends of Time and Earth (omnibus edition)
The Edge Of Tomorrow
The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov
Other Worlds of Isaac Asimov
The Complete Stories, Volume 1
Anthologies:
Five-Odd, Groff Conklin, ed. Pyramid (pbk), 1964, pp. 8-54
Beyond Control, Robert Silverberg, ed. Thomas Nelson, 1972, pp. 162-219
The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Arbor House, 1980, pp. 302-345
The Analog Anthology #1, Stanley Schmidt, ed. Davis Publications, 1981, pp. 187-260
6 Decades: The Best of Analog, Stanley Schmidt, ed. Davis Publications, 1986, pp. 35-67
Worlds Imagined: 14 Short Science Fiction Novels, Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Avenel, 1989, pp. 302-345
The World Treasury of Science Fiction, David G. Hartwell and Clifton Fadiman, eds. Little Brown, 1989, pp. 503-543
Foreign Anthologies:
Kroki W Nie-Zname, Warsaw: Iskry, 1970
Good story. He used a different concept, that of neutrinos traveling forward in time could be read somehow.. Kinda nifty idea, anyway.
There was also a subplot going on about how knowledge had become so compartmentalized that nobody dared think outside their realm of expertise, as it were. It's a bit long for a short story though and tends to ramble, a lot like Asimov.
---
God is love
Love is blind
Ray Charles is blind
Therefore Ray Charles is God. QED.
:)
---
I hereby declare my own genetic code open to the public. Anyone may use, modify, and distribute any base pair sequences that are part of me.
Interested parties may obtain samples by sending cute women to collect them. Due to restrictions imposed by nature, and the fact that I hate needles, samples may only be collected in halves, through all-natural means. Putting these sample halves back together again is your own problem.
(Well, I thought it was funny...)
---
[i]tivo uses big-endian ext2? if so, i believe fsck still has the meta-data byte swap option. doesn't bswap swap every byte on the partition?[/i]
You're correct. My bad. Going through and actually swapping it on the disk would be bad.
Yes, it still uses big-endian ext2. The kernel is 2.1.14, I believe, with the Tivo mods to make it a more real-time system.
Also, remember it's PPC and I don't think they removed big endian support until 2.1.21, right?
---
Okay, there's a difference between sales tax and use tax. Not all states have use taxes.
Currently, for the purpose of taxation, internet is the same as mail-order.
Where a company sells in a state, that state may require the company to collect a sales or use tax, assuming nexus is established. Whether a company is liable for a tax depends on whether the company has nexus in the state. It also depends on the tangible or intangible nature of the product or service sold.
Nexus for sales and use tax is different from nexus for income tax. A company may have nexus for one and not the other.
Sales tax is a tax based on the gross sales price of property. It is collected by the seller of the property. The consumer of the property may be an individual buying the product from a local retailer, or a business buying a product which is "consumed" in the process of making other products.
There are a handful of exemptions from sales tax. The most common exemption is the purchase of an item for resale. The exemption that we are concerned with here is the exemption for a sale to an out-of-state buyer.
When a company sells to an out-of-state buyer, the sale is usually exempt from sales tax in the seller's state of residence. For instance, a retailer preparing a California sales and use tax return would find that "sales in interstate or foreign commerce" are exempt from sales tax. The instructions to the California form indicate that exempt sales are "those involving shipments or deliveries from California to points outside this State which are exempt from tax as interstate or foreign commerce. In order to be exempt, property must be shipped to a point outside this State, pursuant to the contract of sale, and delivered by the retailer to such point by means of facilities operated by the retailer, delivery by the retailer to a carrier for shipment to a consignee at such a point, or delivery by the retailer to a customs broker or forwarding agent for shipment outside this State." California's rules are fairly typical of the way out-of-state sales are treated.
A retailer making an out-of-state sale is usually not liable for sales tax in the retailer's home state. Neither is the retailer liable for sales tax in the state where the customer is located, unless the retailer has nexus in that state. It is possible, then, for out-of-state sales to be completely free of sales tax.
Use tax: A sale that is not subject to sales tax in the states of either the buyer or seller is a serious problem. States have attempted to remedy this problem with a use tax. A use tax is exactly the same as the sales tax, except that it is charged to the buyer of property by the state in which the property is used. For example, a mail-order computer company may not be required to collect a sales tax. The buyer, however, is required to compute a use tax and pay it to the state in which the computer is used. Use tax, for all practical purposes, is the same as sales tax, and is meant to pick up sales which are not subject to sales tax.
The use tax is imposed on purchasers, not sellers. Out-of-state sellers with nexus in a state may be required to collect the use tax, but that does not change the fact that it is imposed on the purchasers. If the out-of-state seller does not collect the use tax, the state can come after the purchaser for the tax.
The difficulty with the use tax is that there is almost universal noncompliance. Most buyers do not know that they should pay a use tax. There are a few exceptions, however. For example, automobiles and boats purchased out-of-state must be registered. Use tax is payable at the time of registration.
Because of the difficulties involved in getting purchasers to remit use tax, states have attempted to get out-of-state sellers to collect the tax. The Supreme Court has consistently held against states unless the seller has nexus in the state.
States continue to seek ways to collect the use tax. In 1988, a group of states began developing lists of purchasers from mail-order companies. Each state shared information with other states based on their audits of mail-order companies headquartered in their state. Several years later, certain states began sending out forms to these purchasers. The forms requested the purchasers to verify reported purchases and pay use tax to the state.
Obviously, such efforts are only a drop in a very large bucket. Substantial mail-order business takes place without sales or use tax being charged, and with no chance of the consumer voluntarily paying the tax, or even knowing the tax is due. The states will have no chance of capturing even a small portion of this tax.
---
Are these things legal, so to speak, i mean are you allowed to record stuff from the TV Networks (i am talking technically, not rights &tc, just plain and simple law). :-).
Yes. The betamax case way back when pretty much settled the whole question of recording shows and time-shifting content.
However, copyright still lies with the network. You, in theory, can't record a show off TV then copy it for a friend. At least, not while making cash off it.
Of course there's a difference between what the law says and what the networks do for enforcement. Their main concern is that you don't rip their content without showing the commercials too. That really irks them.
---
So they can get an IP address. That's all fine and happy. But who you gonna sue? They'd have to:
a) trace down everyone serving those copyrighted files, using nothing but their IP.
b) sue each and every one of them.
Good luck, and more power to them. You can't sue Gnutella like you sue Napster, since there is no such entity as Gnutella. Decentralization is the key. Gnutella is essentially nothing more than bunches and bunches of people acting independently to share files.
---
I've been a regular over on that board for a while (nick: Otto) and there's really only one reason people are hacking it, right now. To add new drives. New drives = more space to record programs. They use a weird filesystem called Media FS for storing the recorded programs, and to add a new drive you have to do some strange things with the Tivo software. You can plug in anything, but the Tivo software won't recognize it unless you follow a certain procedure. Since Tivo won't tell us, we're just figuring it out. There have been 2 reports of someone doing a self upgrade on the space. One guy copied the second drive from a fresh, unused Tivo, the other guy says he figured out how to "bless" a drive so the Tivo software recognizes it.
/dev/ttyS3 and then you can use a null modem cable to connect to that shell while it's back in the Tivo unit. Pretty neat.
Anyway, we've been working on this for a while, and the possibilities are staggering. The Tivo is essentially a PowerPC 50 Mhz or so, with a built in modem/ IDE interface card. Also on board are an MPEG encoder and decoder chips and a TV tuner. Very neat. The serial port is actually used to directly connect to DSS receivers, to change channels reliably.
To connect a shell to the serial port: take out the drive, mount it under linux (use bswap to do byte swapping). To mount it under linux, you probably have to recompile your kernel using the genhd.c from the tivo linux sources. Anyway, once you mount it you'll find several things on several partitions. You can then edit the startup rc.d's to put a shell on
There's a lot of cool swag going on here, but it'll be a while before good mods come out. The only thing I worry about is that some wanker will hack the thing to get around Tivo's service.
Making it not use Tivo's service at all would be extremely difficult. Making it use Tivo service wrongly, by giving the wrong serial or some such, would be easier, but they could crack down on the modified Tivo's and not let people with mods dialin anymore. That would suck. Plus, since Tivo updates the software from time to time, an update to a modded box could ruin the sucker.
Just some of my thoughts, and insights.
---
Well, it has a built in MPEG decoder. Possibly, but I don't know if the decoder can be used. The PowerPC chip itself only runs at maybe 50 Mhz, and is heavily used already.
The whole reason people are hacking the Tivo is that they want to be able to add their own drives. That's it. They use a special file system, and we've been working that out for a while now.
---
Well, the deposition is marked May 15, 2000. I assume they either did not get the ruling to make it confidential, or it got leaked somehow. Any info anyone?
---
> "Viruses sounds stupid"? What a self-revealing thing to say. You're just jealous because you probably flunked English and never had even a whit of Latin. The illiterati of the net are always close at hand. You simply insist that you're right in the face of all evidence of the contrary, being unwilling and unable to accept your own woefully inadequate language skills as a bug, not a feature.
Shame, shame. You know you've lost an arguement when you resort to a personal attack.
If you'll notice, I do not insist I am right in the face of contrary evidence, I insist that the evidence is biased by the "intelligensi" of the net. In other words, yourself, sir. You assume that your arguements are valid because they sound good. You never seem to know that the majority of the world is not an academic playground, that people must live, breathe, and work out here.
Language is only useful when it serves a purpose. Language is a living, breathing thing. Attempts to define the language are attempts to regulate it. People who try to "regulate" it are fighting the natural evolution of the language itself, and are doomed to failure.
So continue to use what you will. I will continue to use it my way. But never attack another man's way of speaking, as it simply undermines any attempt you had at communicating with him.
---
"Viri" is latin for "man" or some such, isn't it? Anyway, it's already used.
---
So you're a latin scholar? Good on you man, now wake up to the real world where people make up the words that they use when they need them. I use "virii" because if I said "viruses" people might confuse what I'm saying with an actual biological virus. Also, "viruses" sounds stupid. I will continue to advocate the use of "virii" regardless of the proper "Latin" way of doing things.
Latin is a dead language. English is not.
---
Virii is a proper English word. Why? It is in common usage and it is commonly known. Simple.
Languages change according to need. Trying to define rules to change them is a ridiculous error made only by academic morons who have no experience in the real world.
---