A guess is that this is because much of emacs' functionality is implemented in elisp code, which is not part of the core program and so not included in the source line count, whereas most of vim is implemented directly.
On several occasions I've been unable to make purchases because the forms not only made strong, usually US-based, assumptions about the form of an address but also enforced them by validation. I wonder if these companies realize how much money they may be losing.
No, your example doesn't show that process is relevant to genuineness in the normal case because currency is not like software. Currency is special because it gets its value by fiat rather than via any intrinsic property. Software is like an ounce of gold - its value, and its genuineness, depend only on whether it is actually gold and actually an ounce, not on who produced it or how it came into your possession.
Sorry, I don't think the courts have said what you think they have said. Microsoft continues to sell copies of Windows to OEMs that may be installed only by OEMs and may not be transferred to another machine. Here's an article about Microsoft licensing and activation for XP that describes this.
In response to the people who think that Microsoft is not slanting anything and that talking about what is "genuine" is a reasonable way to bring out the advantages of having a valid license, I suggest that a comparison with the advertising by free software companies like RedHat and Mandriva may be informative. Such companies differ from Microsoft in that you can legally obtain their software without purchasing a license, but they are similar in terms of what you get if you do pay that you do not get if you don't. That is, if you pay for RedHat or Mandriva, you get support, printed documentation, and often an advance on updates and access to additional goodies.
If Microsoft were cleanly advertising the value to the consumer of purchasing valid licenses for its software, presumably its advertising would resemble that of companies like RedHat and Mandriva in focussing on exactly what you get if you pay.
But what I at least have seen of Microsoft's campaign is not like this. There is actually very little specificity as to what it is you get by way of support and so forth if you have a valid license. This suggests to me that their use of "genuine" is not simply as a shorthand needed to make a reasonably short slogan but something intrinsic to their advertising campaign.
Analogies based on currency are false analogies because of a special property of currency. Currency gains its value by fiat, in contrast to money with intrinsic value, such as gold and silver throughout most of known economic history. A $100 bill has an intrinsic value of maybe a few cents (I ignore, for expository purposes, the cocaine residue:); the fact that it is worth $100 is due to the fact that the US government says it is. If the US government suddenly declares that that bill is no longer legal tender, or people lose confidence in the US treasury, or the US revalues its currency, the very same bill will cease to be worth $100. An ounce of gold, on the other hand, has a value that does not depend on who produced it.
Software in and of itself is like gold and silver, not paper currency. If a million monkeys by chance produce an OS identical in every respect to MS Windows (thereby avoiding copyright, though not patent, problems) it will in fact have the same utility as the copy produced by Microsoft.
Microsoft also provides certain services, such as updates and support, that you do not get without the right license, but the software itself is the same whether or not it is validly licensed just as an ounce of gold has the same value and utility whether you earned it by hard work, received it as a gift, or stole it.
As the author of the Language Log post, I agree that this is not a big deal from a tech point of view. I didn't post it to/. Please remember that Language Log is about language, and that something that isn't very interesting from a tech point of view may be of greater interest from a linguistic point of view. If I were to submit something to/. about how awful Microsoft or some other tech company is, it wouldn't be this.
The point is that using "genuine" in the non-standard way that Microsoft does puts a deceptive slant on things. Using "king" in the metaphorical way that "Burger King" does, does not. My observation about Microsoft's use of "genuine" is not that it deviates from the standard usage but that in this particular context it is deceptive.
The fact that you know what they mean does not change the fact that they are not using the word "genuine" as it is normally used.
On a different tangent entirely, and one somewhat more related to TFA, I think it would be instructive if people had a quick look at Bill Poser's web site. I would like in particular to direct you the list of links at the bottom "The Beginning of the Free Software Movement ", "The Free Software Foundation ", "Groklaw [Everything about SCO's anti-Linux campaign]", "LinuxLinks", "Why You Shouldn't Send People (Including Me) Microsoft Word Documents" and "Treacherous Computing". Perhaps a more fitting headline for this story would have been "Free software Advocate Finds Tenuous Excuse To Bash MS".
This is known as the ad hominem fallacy. The fact that the person who puts forward an argument may have a bias is not relevant to the validity of the argument except where the argument depends on his or her truthfulness as a witness to matters of fact. The fact that I am not a fan of Microsoft is irrelevant.
n a slight side track, I really do despise these language conservatives. The meaning of words changes over time, and if enough people understand a word to mean something, then that is what it means. The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary (I believe the equivalent reference work for you chaps in the Colonies is Websters) do not decide what a word means, they report what it means. Witness "google" becoming a verb.
You've missed the point of my post. (You have realized that I am Bill Poser?)
I am not a language conservative. My Language Log post is not a lament that the language is going to the dogs because people are using "genuine" in a way that deviates from whatever I think it should be. Rather, my point is that Microsoft is using the word "genuine" in a way that deviates from the way the word IS used
and that this evidently has a deceptive motivation. This is entirely different from whining about somebody splitting an infinitive.
Inasmuch as pirated copies of Windows are fraudulent copies, they are NOT genuine.
Both the protasis and apodosis here are questionable. First, since when are pirated copies of Windows "fraudulent"? If I sell you a CD that I claim to contain Windows and it actually contains Knoppix, that is fraud. If I sell you a CD that I claim to contain Windows and it actually does contain Windows, there is no fraud, even if the sale violates the licensing conditions, unless I make false representations to you regarding the licensing. So, although SOME sales of pirated software may involve fraud on the purchaser, in general they do not. Furthermore, in many cases pirated software is not sold, so of course there is no fraud.
Second, I do not accept the claim that "fraudulent" implies "not genuine".
"fraudulent" describes the transaction, not the product. If you represent yourself as an authorized appliance dealer and sell me a refrigerator that fell off the truck, the refrigerator is still perfectly genuine in spite of the legal problems with the transaction.
That said, if the guy really is a linguist, I find the attitude rather strange. Most linguists I know are about as far from the "spelling/grammar/definition-Nazi" type of person as you can get
You've missed the point. (I know for sure because I am Bill Poser.) My Language Log post is not a lament about how the language is going to the dogs because "genuine" is being used "incorrectly", that is, in a way that deviates from whatever I think the standard should be. The point is that Microsoft is using "genuine" in a way that deviates from the way it is commonly used and that it looks like they are doing this for a deceptive purpose. Linguistic change and variation is natural and nothing to get upset about. Use of language in deceptive ways is something that one can legitimately complain about.
Actually, in many cases a "pirated" copy of MS software was prepared by Microsoft. One of the kinds of pirating that Microsoft is concerned with is one in which a single, legitimate, Microsoft-produced CD is used to install MS Windows on a bunch of machines. Only one license has been purchased but multiple machines have been set up, so Microsoft loses money. Another scenario with which they are concerned is one in which CDs intended to be used only by OEMs are sold at a discount to end users. Here again, the media are absolutely genuine - the problem for Microsoft is that they are sold in a way that violates the licensing conditions. So, it may be that "counterfeited" software is not burned onto CDs by Microsoft, but much "pirated" software is.
That a university with such an outstanding CS program has such an awful web site is a nice example of the disconnect between IT and CS in many universities.
Maybe before going ballistic you should read the article CAREFULLY. The part of the problem that the article highlighted was, as you say, human error: the elections staff forgot to bring the cards that activate the machines. But the article also reported two problems with machines. One was that many of the machines used by the staff to check voters off the voter list didn't work. The other was that the cards that activate the machines either didn't work or had choices already filled in.
So, yes, there were problems with the voting machines and associated hardware as well as human error.
Vote-counting is a task that is easily parallelizable. By using a sufficiently
large number of volunteer vote counters, you can make the time very small.
The security clearance process seems to be equally weird. Some of it makes sense. They try to rule out people with a history of drug problems, gambling, and so forth that would make them vulnerable to to being bought by a foreign power. They also try to make sure you are who you say you are in order to eliminate deep-cover moles. That makes sense to an extent, though it was probably more important during the Cold War than now. But other aspects seem to be just nuts. For instance, you can't get a security clearance if you are a dual citizen. Okay, having another citizenship does indicate some potentially conflicting loyalties, but lots of people without dual citizenship have them too, and you'd think it would matter what the other country was. But the really crazy thing is, you can eliminate the problem if you give up your other citizenship. If someone was really an enemy agent, surely he would either conceal the existence of the other citizenship in the first place or give it up.
MIT has an ocean acoustics program. That at least used to deal to a large extent with submarine detection, with lots of military research money available. MIT also has an acoustics and vibration lab.
And Amar Bose, who may well have designed your loud speakers, taught acoustics at MIT until his retirement in 2000. I took his intro acoustics course many years ago. I think that he may still teach a course. He is still listed in the MIT directory.
The views cited in the linked article may be lies or they may be the sincere view of
some Muslims, but they are not representative of mainstream Muslim views and behavior.
The mainstream Muslim position (that of the Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali schools of law, but not that of the Hanafi) is that People of the Book, that is, Christians and Jews, are to be permitted to keep their religion provided that they submit to the second-class status of dhimmitude. All others must either convert to Islam or be killed. This is considered not to conflict with the statement "There is no compulsion in Islam" on the grounds that no one is forced to convert - they are free to accept death instead.
This also makes the very important point that no conclusion can be drawn from isolated quotations from the Qur'an. The Qur'an is vague on many matters, silent on many, and even contradicts itself on some. Most of Islamic law is based on the hadith, the reported sayings of the Prophet, not on explicit statements in the Qur'an. To find out what Muslims actually believe, you need to look at the hadith and at how they are interpreted by Muslim legal scholars.
Historically, Islam has spread to a large extent by warfare and forced conversion. Here's an article about the reporters recently kidnapped in Gaza who were released only after being coerced into formal conversion to Islam. It contains an accurate summary of forced conversion throughout the history of Islam, including very recent events.
I think you need to add a third: a constitution that protects civil liberties and is enforced by an independent judiciary. Without that, freedom of speech is at risk, as are fair elections, and even with fair elections, there is a real risk that a majority will, at times, democratically try to impose fascist policies. We see this right now in the United States where one of the complaints of many right-wingers is that the courts are interfering with the will of the people. What many of them don't understand is that this is exactly what the courts are supposed to do: one of the functions of the constitution is to prevent the tyranny of the majority. (Some of them understand this just fine - they are opposed to the principles on which the United States was founded.)
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A guess is that this is because much of emacs' functionality is implemented in elisp code, which is not part of the core program and so not included in the source line count, whereas most of vim is implemented directly.
Coverity's study is based on their analysis of the code itself, not on bug reports, so the considerations you mention are not relevant.
On several occasions I've been unable to make purchases because the forms not only made strong, usually US-based, assumptions about the form of an address but also enforced them by validation. I wonder if these companies realize how much money they may be losing.
I don't have any copy of Windows, genuine or not. A computer without Windows is like a fish without a bicycle. :)
Well, sure, but I wouldn't want to be accused of having it in for Microsoft. :)
No, your example doesn't show that process is relevant to genuineness in the normal case because currency is not like software. Currency is special because it gets its value by fiat rather than via any intrinsic property. Software is like an ounce of gold - its value, and its genuineness, depend only on whether it is actually gold and actually an ounce, not on who produced it or how it came into your possession.
Sorry, I don't think the courts have said what you think they have said. Microsoft continues to sell copies of Windows to OEMs that may be installed only by OEMs and may not be transferred to another machine. Here's an article about Microsoft licensing and activation for XP that describes this.
In response to the people who think that Microsoft is not slanting anything and that talking about what is "genuine" is a reasonable way to bring out the advantages of having a valid license, I suggest that a comparison with the advertising by free software companies like RedHat and Mandriva may be informative. Such companies differ from Microsoft in that you can legally obtain their software without purchasing a license, but they are similar in terms of what you get if you do pay that you do not get if you don't. That is, if you pay for RedHat or Mandriva, you get support, printed documentation, and often an advance on updates and access to additional goodies. If Microsoft were cleanly advertising the value to the consumer of purchasing valid licenses for its software, presumably its advertising would resemble that of companies like RedHat and Mandriva in focussing on exactly what you get if you pay. But what I at least have seen of Microsoft's campaign is not like this. There is actually very little specificity as to what it is you get by way of support and so forth if you have a valid license. This suggests to me that their use of "genuine" is not simply as a shorthand needed to make a reasonably short slogan but something intrinsic to their advertising campaign.
Analogies based on currency are false analogies because of a special property of currency. Currency gains its value by fiat, in contrast to money with intrinsic value, such as gold and silver throughout most of known economic history. A $100 bill has an intrinsic value of maybe a few cents (I ignore, for expository purposes, the cocaine residue:); the fact that it is worth $100 is due to the fact that the US government says it is. If the US government suddenly declares that that bill is no longer legal tender, or people lose confidence in the US treasury, or the US revalues its currency, the very same bill will cease to be worth $100. An ounce of gold, on the other hand, has a value that does not depend on who produced it.
Software in and of itself is like gold and silver, not paper currency. If a million monkeys by chance produce an OS identical in every respect to MS Windows (thereby avoiding copyright, though not patent, problems) it will in fact have the same utility as the copy produced by Microsoft.
Microsoft also provides certain services, such as updates and support, that you do not get without the right license, but the software itself is the same whether or not it is validly licensed just as an ounce of gold has the same value and utility whether you earned it by hard work, received it as a gift, or stole it.
As the author of the Language Log post, I agree that this is not a big deal from a tech point of view. I didn't post it to /. Please remember that Language Log is about language, and that something that isn't very interesting from a tech point of view may be of greater interest from a linguistic point of view. If I were to submit something to /. about how awful Microsoft or some other tech company is, it wouldn't be this.
Since you don't even suggest an argument as to how I have misunderstood "genuine", I suggest that it is your post that is pathetic.
The point is that using "genuine" in the non-standard way that Microsoft does puts a deceptive slant on things. Using "king" in the metaphorical way that "Burger King" does, does not. My observation about Microsoft's use of "genuine" is not that it deviates from the standard usage but that in this particular context it is deceptive.
We read constantly about how people are able to work around Activation, so this is apparently still a problem.
The fact that you know what they mean does not change the fact that they are not using the word "genuine" as it is normally used.
This is known as the ad hominem fallacy. The fact that the person who puts forward an argument may have a bias is not relevant to the validity of the argument except where the argument depends on his or her truthfulness as a witness to matters of fact. The fact that I am not a fan of Microsoft is irrelevant.
You've missed the point of my post. (You have realized that I am Bill Poser?) I am not a language conservative. My Language Log post is not a lament that the language is going to the dogs because people are using "genuine" in a way that deviates from whatever I think it should be. Rather, my point is that Microsoft is using the word "genuine" in a way that deviates from the way the word IS used and that this evidently has a deceptive motivation. This is entirely different from whining about somebody splitting an infinitive.
Both the protasis and apodosis here are questionable. First, since when are pirated copies of Windows "fraudulent"? If I sell you a CD that I claim to contain Windows and it actually contains Knoppix, that is fraud. If I sell you a CD that I claim to contain Windows and it actually does contain Windows, there is no fraud, even if the sale violates the licensing conditions, unless I make false representations to you regarding the licensing. So, although SOME sales of pirated software may involve fraud on the purchaser, in general they do not. Furthermore, in many cases pirated software is not sold, so of course there is no fraud.
Second, I do not accept the claim that "fraudulent" implies "not genuine". "fraudulent" describes the transaction, not the product. If you represent yourself as an authorized appliance dealer and sell me a refrigerator that fell off the truck, the refrigerator is still perfectly genuine in spite of the legal problems with the transaction.
You've missed the point. (I know for sure because I am Bill Poser.) My Language Log post is not a lament about how the language is going to the dogs because "genuine" is being used "incorrectly", that is, in a way that deviates from whatever I think the standard should be. The point is that Microsoft is using "genuine" in a way that deviates from the way it is commonly used and that it looks like they are doing this for a deceptive purpose. Linguistic change and variation is natural and nothing to get upset about. Use of language in deceptive ways is something that one can legitimately complain about.
Actually, in many cases a "pirated" copy of MS software was prepared by Microsoft. One of the kinds of pirating that Microsoft is concerned with is one in which a single, legitimate, Microsoft-produced CD is used to install MS Windows on a bunch of machines. Only one license has been purchased but multiple machines have been set up, so Microsoft loses money. Another scenario with which they are concerned is one in which CDs intended to be used only by OEMs are sold at a discount to end users. Here again, the media are absolutely genuine - the problem for Microsoft is that they are sold in a way that violates the licensing conditions. So, it may be that "counterfeited" software is not burned onto CDs by Microsoft, but much "pirated" software is.
That a university with such an outstanding CS program has such an awful web site is a nice example of the disconnect between IT and CS in many universities.
Maybe before going ballistic you should read the article CAREFULLY. The part of the problem that the article highlighted was, as you say, human error: the elections staff forgot to bring the cards that activate the machines. But the article also reported two problems with machines. One was that many of the machines used by the staff to check voters off the voter list didn't work. The other was that the cards that activate the machines either didn't work or had choices already filled in. So, yes, there were problems with the voting machines and associated hardware as well as human error.
Vote-counting is a task that is easily parallelizable. By using a sufficiently large number of volunteer vote counters, you can make the time very small.
The security clearance process seems to be equally weird. Some of it makes sense. They try to rule out people with a history of drug problems, gambling, and so forth that would make them vulnerable to to being bought by a foreign power. They also try to make sure you are who you say you are in order to eliminate deep-cover moles. That makes sense to an extent, though it was probably more important during the Cold War than now. But other aspects seem to be just nuts. For instance, you can't get a security clearance if you are a dual citizen. Okay, having another citizenship does indicate some potentially conflicting loyalties, but lots of people without dual citizenship have them too, and you'd think it would matter what the other country was. But the really crazy thing is, you can eliminate the problem if you give up your other citizenship. If someone was really an enemy agent, surely he would either conceal the existence of the other citizenship in the first place or give it up.
Maybe Linux needs to adopt this so as to ease the transition from MS Windows.
MIT has an ocean acoustics program. That at least used to deal to a large extent with submarine detection, with lots of military research money available. MIT also has an acoustics and vibration lab. And Amar Bose, who may well have designed your loud speakers, taught acoustics at MIT until his retirement in 2000. I took his intro acoustics course many years ago. I think that he may still teach a course. He is still listed in the MIT directory.
The views cited in the linked article may be lies or they may be the sincere view of some Muslims, but they are not representative of mainstream Muslim views and behavior. The mainstream Muslim position (that of the Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali schools of law, but not that of the Hanafi) is that People of the Book, that is, Christians and Jews, are to be permitted to keep their religion provided that they submit to the second-class status of dhimmitude. All others must either convert to Islam or be killed. This is considered not to conflict with the statement "There is no compulsion in Islam" on the grounds that no one is forced to convert - they are free to accept death instead. This also makes the very important point that no conclusion can be drawn from isolated quotations from the Qur'an. The Qur'an is vague on many matters, silent on many, and even contradicts itself on some. Most of Islamic law is based on the hadith, the reported sayings of the Prophet, not on explicit statements in the Qur'an. To find out what Muslims actually believe, you need to look at the hadith and at how they are interpreted by Muslim legal scholars.
Historically, Islam has spread to a large extent by warfare and forced conversion. Here's an article about the reporters recently kidnapped in Gaza who were released only after being coerced into formal conversion to Islam. It contains an accurate summary of forced conversion throughout the history of Islam, including very recent events.
I think you need to add a third: a constitution that protects civil liberties and is enforced by an independent judiciary. Without that, freedom of speech is at risk, as are fair elections, and even with fair elections, there is a real risk that a majority will, at times, democratically try to impose fascist policies. We see this right now in the United States where one of the complaints of many right-wingers is that the courts are interfering with the will of the people. What many of them don't understand is that this is exactly what the courts are supposed to do: one of the functions of the constitution is to prevent the tyranny of the majority. (Some of them understand this just fine - they are opposed to the principles on which the United States was founded.)