Blanket statements like "Palms are inferior to PocketPCs" always amaze me, particularly in this case.
Maybe it's because I have a strong (and contrarian) opinion on what a PDA is used for. One doesn't get a PDA when what one needs is a notebook computer.
One gets a PDA to organize one's life: keep phone lists, to-dos, calendars, project management, password caches, and databases of system configurations and favorite restaurants and people's birthdays; read electronic books; and play an occasional time-wasting puzzle games. Maybe in rare cases do a Google search, or get crossword help from OneAcross.com, or download a map to your next meeting.
But if you're wanting to edit Excel spreadsheets, organize photo collections, edit your novel, create PowerPoint presentations, do nonlinear movie editing, etc, why not use something that's designed for that kind of activity? Why not use something that has a mega-pixel display? I have a reasonably portable 5 lb, 12", Unix-based notebook that I can do all that stuff on.
But for my PDA, I don't want all the complexity and extra features. I want reliability, simplicity, and long battery life. I don't want an OS that I have to update and patch and worry about. I do think it's a grand idea to have my PDA integrated into my phone, but I don't want to have to worry about all that other stuff. A PDA is about stability. It's about utility. It's not about extreme versatility.
And I don't want a camera in my PDA. If I'm going to take pictures, I want a real quality lens. I want decent dynamic range. I want 3 fps at useful resolution (e.g., 3008x2000 pixels). I have a digital camera that is designed for the single purpose of doing good digital photography. I don't want half-assed features just for the benefit of having them integrated into one box.
When I was a teenager, Dad always would complain when I was listening to the radio.
"Please, can't you just tune it to a station instead of leaving it floating there between 'em?" he'd beg.
He'd threaten occasionally to build a Faraday cage around the house, or set up a Van de Graf generator to swamp the signal with static.
He didn't really understand the attraction of Country Joe & The Fish, or 13th Floor Elevators. His idea of good music was Glen Miller and His Orchestra. This electric stuff didn't sound like music to him.
Little did he know that he had lots of Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull looming in his future. Not to mention Sex Pistols, Mekons, and the Ramones. I think if he had, that Faraday cage would have been built.
Those were more or less my first thoughts as well.
If the F/OSS world loses MySQL, and there isn't a satisfactory fork of the GPLed version, why wouldn't we all switch over to the superior power of PostgreSQL?
They don't mention a single thought experiment regarding the immobilization creatures with magnetic or ferric teeth by way of a powerful electromagnetic aparatus. What a shameful oversight.
Consider what would happen to your hypothetical pimply teenage nephew/niece were you to restrict his/her entry into the kitchen by a powerful magnetic field that (due to his/her headgear/retainer/braces) fixed his/her position in 3-Space. Logic dictates that shedding one's teeth would then allow access to food but leave one without the means to assimilate it. Thus, this gedankenexperiment gives us insight into the historical and evolutionary development of cheese-spray-in-a-can and other food-like products.
Ahem. Anyway, I just used gedankenexperiment because I hadn't actually attempted the actual experiment. Nor do I intend to, for that matter.
It's not exactly what you're calling for, but look at the research by Heinz Lowenstam, Joe Kerschwink, and Steve Weiner (among others) on Biomineralization.
Many organisms, humans included, depend on biomineralization. Fergzample, bones are calcium, and which are (obviously) created biologically. Less well known, however, are ferrous crystals, set down by biological organisms. Some rodents have iron crystal structures in their teeth. Some molluscs have magnetite teeth. Many species, including birds and mammals, have magnet-sensitive structures in their brains.
So why is this relevant? Well, this is a pathway for EM radiation to affect organisms that hasn't been studied deeply in this context. It'd be a physical force argument. And, while histology is not my field, I would imagine that tissue and cellular membranes could be affected by localized physical pressure.
It's no smoking gun, certainly, but it is worth considering. (And, if you need an extreme gedankenexperiment on a organism level, consider the fact that you could kill a chiton by immobilizing it with a strong electromagnet.)
Personally, I'm not worried about getting cancer from cell phones, AM radio, WiFi, or using Microsoft Products. But I'm also not at all convinced that EM radiation, even at low levels, has *no* effect. Subtle effects are worthy of study. Think about chaos theory, and that damn destructive butterfly in China.
Another interesting thing to look at is the effect of heat-stress on cells and the relation to apoptosis. There may or may not be a clean threshhold for a heat-stress effect.
Re:blatant thread-jacking,but
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 1
And if you *do* like Gibson, track down some Jack Womack.
Start with Ambient. It's hard to read, since it's in futurespeak, but kind of a disturbing messed-up cyberpunk dystopian adventure.
Imagine Burgess' A Clockwork Orange crossed with Gibson's Neuromancer, some assorted Raymond Chandler, and perhaps a quick Doom III session, and you'll end up in something not unlike Ambient. Well, you may need to take some methamphetamines and huff some spraypaint in a circus sideshow first, but you'll get there eventually.
I once knew a sysadmin who liked doing the ol' Abbott & Costello with passwords:
User: What's my password again? Admin: "login" User: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do, but I can't remember my password. Admin: "login" (etc)
User2: What's the username for the Reservation system? Admin: "password?" User2: No, I remember the password is "a$$h@t" but I don't remember that funny username. Admin: "password?" (etc)
I've always admired ol' Pete's sentiment, but, as slogans go, Woody's wins hands down. Pete's is just too wordy.
If I could play guitar, I'd have a favorite Pete story reference written on it: "This too shall pass."
(One version of Pete's story, paraphrased, and probably protected under Fair Use: A benevolent king wants to pass on all good knowledge to his children, so calls together his wise men and women to write it into a book. A year later, they present him with a book six inches thick. "Too long," he says, after reading it. "I need a single sentence that conveys all of this." Five years later they come back. The sentence is "This too shall pass." "Excellent," he says, and has it carved on all the lintels of the kingdom. "Still, it'd be nice if we could have it in a single word." Twenty years pass. The king is on his death-bed, when the wise folk come back and give him the word: "maybe."...
Hundreds of years later, some people are trekking through a sandy wasteland. They come across some scattered stone fragments, one of which having "oo shall pa" carved in it. They ponder this briefly, and walk on. )
Well, except that much of the hardware is not really built by Apple.
Sure, they have some control over the quality of their providers and subcontractors, but it's not like they can walk down the street to their factory in Cupertino anymore.
Hm. Well, I suspect that correlating spread spectrum is a potentially NP-incomplete problem, but I'm getting out of my depth here.
Still, not knowing anything has never stopped me from speculating. So here's my thinking:
- A sufficiently spread spectrum signal is indistinguishable from noise.
- A sufficiently encrypted signal is indistinguishable from noise.
Thus, in true SETI-ish Wide-eyed Believer-mode Optimism, I declare that we have *already* successfully detected many, many ETs, but we just can't understand them yet. We just need to correlate the signals and decrypt 'em.
All we need to do is get the Bible Code folks on it, and pretty soon, we'll discover that the ETs predicted the assassination of JFK...
At the Getty Museum, they recently had an exhibit of influential photographers and the history of photography (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/genius/).
One example photo from the beginning of the last century or before, depicted two figures by a lamppost on a foggy Parisian street. I took it for an unaltered print, but it turned out to be a composite of seven [!] separate images. It was laboriously done in the darkroom. It was incredible. (Unfortunately, I can't find the specific photo on their otherwise excellent site.)
Now, we've all seen great darkroom manipulation like the work of Jerry Uelsman (www.uelsman.net), but this particular picture was a hundred years older than his work. It was absolutely convincing.
I guess my point is, photographs have in fact been "faked" as long as there have been photographs.
Where this fails, of course, is with symbolic links.
I once had a nightmarish situation emerge with a bunch of symlinked X11 dirs and CVS-ing my/etc directory. I won't bore you with *that* story...
Still, for many users, just using CVS, as-is, should be sufficient.
Another alternative is to backup directories like/etc with rdiff-backup. If you do it to another machine, you basically have a distributed backup with as much revision history as you've configured it to keep. Sweet!
So I have a Nikon D70, which uses all the same lenses as my N80. Excellent!
But now I'm going travelling, and want a very capable lens. I figure an 14mm-440mm zoom, with a constant 2.0 aperature would be just fine, although I'd prefer a constant f/1.8. Absolutely no less than 0.95 MTF at 10 lines/mm. Oh, and it needs to do 1:1 macro at ranges of about six inches.
I aked for a lens like this at the local high-end lens manufacturer. They said "no problem!" They wheeled out a small truck to transport it, since it comprised 750lbs of glass.
So I guess I'm in the market for a different travel lens. (Actually, the Nikkor 28-105/3.5-5 is pretty decent, but I'd love a brighter version).
Or an insecure operating system with "secure" middleware, but stray config files that can be read or reconstructed.
It's that eternal "but I need the system to be able to restart automagically from a crash" versus the "I need to enter the passphrase to bring up our app" conflict. Often, convenience wins over security. Or as they used to say:
But you can't have spectacular fires in oxygen-deprived environments.
I haven't done the math, but unless you're worrying about literal bullets being fired at the thing when it's near the ground (also a significant danger for, say, the Space Shuttle, I'd imagine), I suspect at higher elevations there's a lot less of a risk of explosion.
Although the Hindenburg is often perceived as an advertisement against hydrogen, it was, in reality, more of an advertisement against using cellulose nitrate or cellulose acetate to add rigidity to the skin of a dirigible.
In all likelihood, it was the flammable nature of the skin that led to the ignition. Sure, having all that hydrogen there didn't help once the fire started, but there were a lot of successful hydrogen-filled blimps and dirigibles up to that point (the survival ratio was at least as good, if not better, than that of hydrazine or solid-propellant rockets).
I thought that this was a particularly interesting clause in the filing and one that you don't often see:
"IBM further requests extensive injunctive relief from litigants, viz, their fields shall be burned, and sown with salt; their buildings torn assunder; their leaders beaten and hanged; their animals slain, and left unto the beasts; their wives enslaved and set to lamentation; their names and images expunged from the histories and chiseled from the monuments; and their children's teeth set on edge, yea unto the seventh generation. So shall vengeance be wreaked upon those who look with enmity upon Big Blue."
I have an email address I established in '93. I happily used it on Usenet posts, posted artwork on web sites and included the address, posted to majordomo discussion lists on art and code, etc. It's also been used in numerous Whois records... Maybe that's the problem. In any case, it gets close to 400 spams a day these days.
My poor, ancient, Pentium-120 mail server is heavily slammed, especially since I now run Spamassassin on it. I've also had to dump my mail logs more frequently, since I run out of disk space.
I can say with authority that when this exchange happened, there were two registers open and nobody in line behind... uh... the anonymous person, who is sensitive to wasting people's time when there is a line.
The anonymous person does, however, have a mysterious history of inadvertant conflict with Coffee House Clerks.
A few years ago, a clerk at a coffee place went off on him for wearing a KXLU T-shirt, but not knowing the name of the hardcore show's DJ. He was told sneeringly that they "normally don't serve coffee to poseurs." Fortunately, he had already been served his coffee at this point.
Another time, he was not only refused service, but nearly assaulted at a hole-in-the-wall coffee place since he wasn't wearing green on St. Patrick's Day. In this case, he was accused loudly of being an Orangeman and an oppressor, even though he was not wearing any orange, is not of Irish nor English descent, has never been to Ireland, and is neither Catholic nor Protestant by faith or ancestry.
Possibly True Story, with names changed to protect the guilty:
So a certain anonymous individual went into a Starbuck's one morning last year, a bit cranky because he had to be up earlier than usual. He spoke to the individual at the cash register...
Anon.: I'd like a medium chai, please.
Register Person: Do you mean tall or grande?
Anon.: I mean medium.
Register Person: We don't sell a size called medium.
Anon.: "Medium" is a description, not a name. You sell three sizes. I'd like the one in the middle.
Register Person: We call that size "grande."
Anon.: Right.
Register Person: So what is it you'd like?
Anon.: I'd like a medium chai, please.
Register Person: You mean a "grande."
Anon.: Haven't we already been through this?
Register Person: I just would like to be certain.
Anon.: You can be certain I'm not going to use your ridiculous trademarked name, when a descriptive adjective completely connotes my intent.
Register Person: It's not a ridiculous name -- it's Italian!
Anon.: Yes, and "chai" is either Chinese or Sanskrit. What's that got to do with it? The word I want in English is "medium."
Register Person: Dude, what have you got against Italians?
Anon.: Nothing. Well, perhaps they bear some responsibility for Madonna, but I think she's actually from New York.
Register Person: Bay City, Michigan, actually. That'll be $3.50.
Slashdot Mirror
Blanket statements like "Palms are inferior to PocketPCs" always amaze me, particularly in this case.
Maybe it's because I have a strong (and contrarian) opinion on what a PDA is used for. One doesn't get a PDA when what one needs is a notebook computer.
One gets a PDA to organize one's life: keep phone lists, to-dos, calendars, project management, password caches, and databases of system configurations and favorite restaurants and people's birthdays; read electronic books; and play an occasional time-wasting puzzle games. Maybe in rare cases do a Google search, or get crossword help from OneAcross.com, or download a map to your next meeting.
But if you're wanting to edit Excel spreadsheets, organize photo collections, edit your novel, create PowerPoint presentations, do nonlinear movie editing, etc, why not use something that's designed for that kind of activity? Why not use something that has a mega-pixel display? I have a reasonably portable 5 lb, 12", Unix-based notebook that I can do all that stuff on.
But for my PDA, I don't want all the complexity and extra features. I want reliability, simplicity, and long battery life. I don't want an OS that I have to update and patch and worry about. I do think it's a grand idea to have my PDA integrated into my phone, but I don't want to have to worry about all that other stuff. A PDA is about stability. It's about utility. It's not about extreme versatility.
And I don't want a camera in my PDA. If I'm going to take pictures, I want a real quality lens. I want decent dynamic range. I want 3 fps at useful resolution (e.g., 3008x2000 pixels). I have a digital camera that is designed for the single purpose of doing good digital photography. I don't want half-assed features just for the benefit of having them integrated into one box.
Feh!
Well, I guess I'm a Luddite.
Funny how things change... and how they don't.
When I was a teenager, Dad always would complain when I was listening to the radio.
"Please, can't you just tune it to a station instead of leaving it floating there between 'em?" he'd beg.
He'd threaten occasionally to build a Faraday cage around the house, or set up a Van de Graf generator to swamp the signal with static.
He didn't really understand the attraction of Country Joe & The Fish, or 13th Floor Elevators. His idea of good music was Glen Miller and His Orchestra. This electric stuff didn't sound like music to him.
Little did he know that he had lots of Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull looming in his future. Not to mention Sex Pistols, Mekons, and the Ramones. I think if he had, that Faraday cage would have been built.
Those were more or less my first thoughts as well.
If the F/OSS world loses MySQL, and there isn't a satisfactory fork of the GPLed version, why wouldn't we all switch over to the superior power of PostgreSQL?
Strange.
They don't mention a single thought experiment regarding the immobilization creatures with magnetic or ferric teeth by way of a powerful electromagnetic aparatus. What a shameful oversight.
Consider what would happen to your hypothetical pimply teenage nephew/niece were you to restrict his/her entry into the kitchen by a powerful magnetic field that (due to his/her headgear/retainer/braces) fixed his/her position in 3-Space. Logic dictates that shedding one's teeth would then allow access to food but leave one without the means to assimilate it. Thus, this gedankenexperiment gives us insight into the historical and evolutionary development of cheese-spray-in-a-can and other food-like products.
Ahem. Anyway, I just used gedankenexperiment because I hadn't actually attempted the actual experiment. Nor do I intend to, for that matter.
It's not exactly what you're calling for, but look at the research by Heinz Lowenstam, Joe Kerschwink, and Steve Weiner (among others) on Biomineralization.
Many organisms, humans included, depend on biomineralization. Fergzample, bones are calcium, and which are (obviously) created biologically. Less well known, however, are ferrous crystals, set down by biological organisms. Some rodents have iron crystal structures in their teeth. Some molluscs have magnetite teeth. Many species, including birds and mammals, have magnet-sensitive structures in their brains.
So why is this relevant? Well, this is a pathway for EM radiation to affect organisms that hasn't been studied deeply in this context. It'd be a physical force argument. And, while histology is not my field, I would imagine that tissue and cellular membranes could be affected by localized physical pressure.
It's no smoking gun, certainly, but it is worth considering. (And, if you need an extreme gedankenexperiment on a organism level, consider the fact that you could kill a chiton by immobilizing it with a strong electromagnet.)
Personally, I'm not worried about getting cancer from cell phones, AM radio, WiFi, or using Microsoft Products. But I'm also not at all convinced that EM radiation, even at low levels, has *no* effect. Subtle effects are worthy of study. Think about chaos theory, and that damn destructive butterfly in China.
Another interesting thing to look at is the effect of heat-stress on cells and the relation to apoptosis. There may or may not be a clean threshhold for a heat-stress effect.
And if you *do* like Gibson, track down some Jack Womack.
Start with Ambient. It's hard to read, since it's in futurespeak, but kind of a disturbing messed-up cyberpunk dystopian adventure.
Imagine Burgess' A Clockwork Orange crossed with Gibson's Neuromancer, some assorted Raymond Chandler, and perhaps a quick Doom III session, and you'll end up in something not unlike Ambient. Well, you may need to take some methamphetamines and huff some spraypaint in a circus sideshow first, but you'll get there eventually.
I once knew a sysadmin who liked doing the ol' Abbott & Costello with passwords:
User: What's my password again?
Admin: "login"
User: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do, but I can't remember my password.
Admin: "login"
(etc)
User2: What's the username for the Reservation system?
Admin: "password?"
User2: No, I remember the password is "a$$h@t" but I don't remember that funny username.
Admin: "password?"
(etc)
I've always admired ol' Pete's sentiment, but, as slogans go, Woody's wins hands down. Pete's is just too wordy.
...
If I could play guitar, I'd have a favorite Pete story reference written on it: "This too shall pass."
(One version of Pete's story, paraphrased, and probably protected under Fair Use:
A benevolent king wants to pass on all good knowledge to his children, so calls together his wise men and women to write it into a book. A year later, they present him with a book six inches thick.
"Too long," he says, after reading it. "I need a single sentence that conveys all of this."
Five years later they come back. The sentence is "This too shall pass."
"Excellent," he says, and has it carved on all the lintels of the kingdom. "Still, it'd be nice if we could have it in a single word."
Twenty years pass. The king is on his death-bed, when the wise folk come back and give him the word: "maybe."
Hundreds of years later, some people are trekking through a sandy wasteland. They come across some scattered stone fragments, one of which having "oo shall pa" carved in it. They ponder this briefly, and walk on.
)
Well, except that much of the hardware is not really built by Apple.
Sure, they have some control over the quality of their providers and subcontractors, but it's not like they can walk down the street to their factory in Cupertino anymore.
Hm. Well, I suspect that correlating spread spectrum is a potentially NP-incomplete problem, but I'm getting out of my depth here.
Still, not knowing anything has never stopped me from speculating. So here's my thinking:
- A sufficiently spread spectrum signal is indistinguishable from noise.
- A sufficiently encrypted signal is indistinguishable from noise.
Thus, in true SETI-ish Wide-eyed Believer-mode Optimism, I declare that we have *already* successfully detected many, many ETs, but we just can't understand them yet. We just need to correlate the signals and decrypt 'em.
All we need to do is get the Bible Code folks on it, and pretty soon, we'll discover that the ETs predicted the assassination of JFK...
At the Getty Museum, they recently had an exhibit of influential photographers and the history of photography (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/genius/).
One example photo from the beginning of the last century or before, depicted two figures by a lamppost on a foggy Parisian street. I took it for an unaltered print, but it turned out to be a composite of seven [!] separate images. It was laboriously done in the darkroom. It was incredible. (Unfortunately, I can't find the specific photo on their otherwise excellent site.)
Now, we've all seen great darkroom manipulation like the work of Jerry Uelsman (www.uelsman.net), but this particular picture was a hundred years older than his work. It was absolutely convincing.
I guess my point is, photographs have in fact been "faked" as long as there have been photographs.
Yeah, just think... the ETs probably use CDMA (Andy Viterbi may have more influence than we think).
SETI'll have a hard time grokking the spread spectrum.
or whether those transmissions will be distinguishable from random noise (OK, probably)
I submit: probably not.
Where this fails, of course, is with symbolic links.
/etc directory. I won't bore you with *that* story...
/etc with rdiff-backup. If you do it to another machine, you basically have a distributed backup with as much revision history as you've configured it to keep. Sweet!
I once had a nightmarish situation emerge with a bunch of symlinked X11 dirs and CVS-ing my
Still, for many users, just using CVS, as-is, should be sufficient.
Another alternative is to backup directories like
So I have a Nikon D70, which uses all the same lenses as my N80. Excellent!
But now I'm going travelling, and want a very capable lens. I figure an 14mm-440mm zoom, with a constant 2.0 aperature would be just fine, although I'd prefer a constant f/1.8. Absolutely no less than 0.95 MTF at 10 lines/mm. Oh, and it needs to do 1:1 macro at ranges of about six inches.
I aked for a lens like this at the local high-end lens manufacturer. They said "no problem!" They wheeled out a small truck to transport it, since it comprised 750lbs of glass.
So I guess I'm in the market for a different travel lens. (Actually, the Nikkor 28-105/3.5-5 is pretty decent, but I'd love a brighter version).
Or an insecure operating system with "secure" middleware, but stray config files that can be read or reconstructed.
It's that eternal "but I need the system to be able to restart automagically from a crash" versus the "I need to enter the passphrase to bring up our app" conflict. Often, convenience wins over security. Or as they used to say:
secure, convenient, reliable, pick any two.
... the day I drew black aces over eights.
Well, you would have to worry about leakage.
But you can't have spectacular fires in oxygen-deprived environments.
I haven't done the math, but unless you're worrying about literal bullets being fired at the thing when it's near the ground (also a significant danger for, say, the Space Shuttle, I'd imagine), I suspect at higher elevations there's a lot less of a risk of explosion.
Although the Hindenburg is often perceived as an advertisement against hydrogen, it was, in reality, more of an advertisement against using cellulose nitrate or cellulose acetate to add rigidity to the skin of a dirigible.
In all likelihood, it was the flammable nature of the skin that led to the ignition. Sure, having all that hydrogen there didn't help once the fire started, but there were a lot of successful hydrogen-filled blimps and dirigibles up to that point (the survival ratio was at least as good, if not better, than that of hydrazine or solid-propellant rockets).
I thought that this was a particularly interesting clause in the filing and one that you don't often see:
"IBM further requests extensive injunctive relief from litigants, viz, their fields shall be burned, and sown with salt; their buildings torn assunder; their leaders beaten and hanged; their animals slain, and left unto the beasts; their wives enslaved and set to lamentation; their names and images expunged from the histories and chiseled from the monuments; and their children's teeth set on edge, yea unto the seventh generation. So shall vengeance be wreaked upon those who look with enmity upon Big Blue."
Well, I'm not sure how you got so lucky.
I have an email address I established in '93. I happily used it on Usenet posts, posted artwork on web sites and included the address, posted to majordomo discussion lists on art and code, etc. It's also been used in numerous Whois records... Maybe that's the problem. In any case, it gets close to 400 spams a day these days.
My poor, ancient, Pentium-120 mail server is heavily slammed, especially since I now run Spamassassin on it. I've also had to dump my mail logs more frequently, since I run out of disk space.
As much as I hate to be an annoying, pedantic, OS-cheerleader, I guess someone has to do it.
As a web developer, why not look at the Tabbrwoser source and fix it?
I can say with authority that when this exchange happened, there were two registers open and nobody in line behind ... uh ... the anonymous person, who is sensitive to wasting people's time when there is a line.
The anonymous person does, however, have a mysterious history of inadvertant conflict with Coffee House Clerks.
A few years ago, a clerk at a coffee place went off on him for wearing a KXLU T-shirt, but not knowing the name of the hardcore show's DJ. He was told sneeringly that they "normally don't serve coffee to poseurs." Fortunately, he had already been served his coffee at this point.
Another time, he was not only refused service, but nearly assaulted at a hole-in-the-wall coffee place since he wasn't wearing green on St. Patrick's Day. In this case, he was accused loudly of being an Orangeman and an oppressor, even though he was not wearing any orange, is not of Irish nor English descent, has never been to Ireland, and is neither Catholic nor Protestant by faith or ancestry.
I think it's the caffeine.
Possibly True Story, with names changed to protect the guilty:
So a certain anonymous individual went into a Starbuck's one morning last year, a bit cranky because he had to be up earlier than usual. He spoke to the individual at the cash register...
Anon.: I'd like a medium chai, please.
Register Person: Do you mean tall or grande?
Anon.: I mean medium.
Register Person: We don't sell a size called medium.
Anon.: "Medium" is a description, not a name. You sell three sizes. I'd like the one in the middle.
Register Person: We call that size "grande."
Anon.: Right.
Register Person: So what is it you'd like?
Anon.: I'd like a medium chai, please.
Register Person: You mean a "grande."
Anon.: Haven't we already been through this?
Register Person: I just would like to be certain.
Anon.: You can be certain I'm not going to use your ridiculous trademarked name, when a descriptive adjective completely connotes my intent.
Register Person: It's not a ridiculous name -- it's Italian!
Anon.: Yes, and "chai" is either Chinese or Sanskrit. What's that got to do with it? The word I want in English is "medium."
Register Person: Dude, what have you got against Italians?
Anon.: Nothing. Well, perhaps they bear some responsibility for Madonna, but I think she's actually from New York.
Register Person: Bay City, Michigan, actually. That'll be $3.50.
Yes, but the Big Brothers will be isometrically polarized, so you'll only be able to detect one at a time.
Or wait... when you detect one, it will collapse the wave equation, and force the other to be nonexistant.
Or something like that.
(obviously, I meant the ad-word links on Google, not the search result links).
You'd either cost the advertiser a lot, or use up their quota of ad displays. Either way, it costs 'em...