For the purpose of budgets and appropriations, they absolutely do.
Idiot moderators strike again.
I swear, the USA is one lost staring contest away from a bloodless military coup. I mean, if it hasn't already happened. How would we tell the difference?
Perhaps by military leadership making domestic policy decisions? Refusing to carry out laws passed by Congress? It wouldn't be hard to spot the difference.
Either practice is acceptable in American English, contrary to your site's indication. The only exception is if you are required to work from a particular style manual requiring the inside punctuation.
There is growing consensus to adopt the British convention for general usage. If the end of the sentence coincides with the end of the quote, the period goes inside, as your web page suggests. If, however, you are quoting a word or phrase without punctuation, the post-quote period is growing more common. In fact, historically, you see that pattern. It was disrupted for a time, but the practice is returning to normalcy. Unless you are required to work from a particular style manual which requires otherwise, press the key marked "Enter".
Enforcing an arbitrary prescriptivist tenet based on an historical idiosyncrasy make no sense at all. Why anyone would voluntarily propagate an error eludes me.
The problem is that the verb "to steal" does require it to refer to actual property
No. The verb 'to steal' does not refer specifically solely to property at all. Moreover, even to the extent that property may be referenced by an individual's use, the word 'property' requires neither physicality nor finiteness. 'Property' in its most basic sense is an exclusive right, which Intellectual Property absolutely is. It is no different in function than real property or personal property, both of which are regrettably considered false metonyms with the subject of property by people like you.
Unless, of course, you fell for that idiotic "IP" scam, in which case I'd kindly refer you to this excellent rebuttal
No. It is an absurd rebuttal made by an ideological blowhard who has no clue what the hell he's talking about.
Not only does he intentionally misrepresent the scope of Intellectual Property, he conflates multiple senses of the word property to make a disingenuous point, and he ignores the similar practice elsewhere in the field. Intellectual Property is not the information, nor is it the idea. In fact, it explicitly does not cover those things. It is, instead, the exclusive rights of the rightsholder. It is exactly the same as any other kind of property at law, which is allentirely intangible. Moreover, "Intellectual Property" is a term of convenience for a field, not a statement of relatedness, just like "Family Law" and "Administrative Law", neither of which contain legal fields that are any more closely structured or originated. Family law covers such disparate topics as marriage, custody, domestic abuse, and adoption, plus many others, and itself overlaps with areas of criminal, property, and probate law.
His license, furthermore, is neither particularly well-written nor is he a lawyer or academic expert on either the philosophy of law or its history.
IP is neither idiotic nor a scam, and you'd have to be a complete lummox or an intentional troll to believe otherwise. Like everything else in the law, it is imperfect. But more relevant to this discussion, it is misunderstood by most lay people, including quite notably RMS, whose "rebuttal" is the subject of much humor and ridicule. A person who can't even get his definitions straight can't possibly build a compelling argument.
Just semantics, I know, but UBISoft didn't steal anything.
No, it's not semantics, because according to the science of semantics, they did steal. How that bullshit argument got so popular around here absolutely eludes me. Somehow, people who know nothing about law or linguistics have spawned a meme that has incredible staying power. UBISoft absolutely did steal that crack. THERE IS NO REQUIREMENT OF PHYSICAL DEPRIVATION IN THE ENGLISH VERB 'TO STEAL'. FURTHER, 'STEAL' IS NOT A LEGAL TERM OF ART, SO ANY THEFT ANALOGY IS DOOMED TO FAILURE.
What you mean to say is "Just false pedanticism..."
Their "hidden contract" requires action of you regardless of your agreement
Every consumer sales contract does. This is irrelevant.
So which contract superceedes which?
Neither. The store is technically free to set its own sales terms, though they cannot reject returns on software where the disc is still sealed, even if the outer box is open, unless there is no seal on the software inside. If the disc seal is broken, they do not have to accept the return, though most will if you point to the terms of the software.
A responsible consumer reviews the terms before purchase and avoids the situation entirely. Sometimes pursuing contractual rights takes time and effort, especially when a person blindly enters into an agreement despite having multiple opportunities to slow down and think about it. The deeper into the process you go, the harder it is to get out.
If you encounter a store refusing to accept the return, contact the publisher and/or have a letter drafted by a local attorney. My office prepares this type of letter for a nominal fee and has always resolved the issue.
'Opened' to most stores is the box, not the sticker-sealed software packet that's inside many/most.
That's simply not true. That may be your intuition on the policy, particularly if it's labeled and "open box" policy, but that is usually to encompass CD and DVD sales as well. It is the final seal to the media that is at issue in those store policies. Further, breaking the seal on the disc only occurs after at least three opportunities to view the terms have been missed.
Actually, there are. And they are precisely some of the biggest phishing targets.
Nonsense. If people need a tutorial to determine whether an email is a fake, the single change of your real name instead of your eBay ID is not going to make a difference.
In the past (their help pages are too labyrinthine for me to completely check out their current advice) eBay EXPLICITLY said to check for your real name in the greeting to separate genuine eBay emails from phishing.
That was one of the tips, absolutely, but by no means definitive. Phishing emails will almost always have one or two more significant flaws based on their help advice: either asking for things they have a policy not to request in email, or being nonspecific as to the nature of their inquiry. Both are far more significant. Furthermore, eBay's advice specifically states that "There may still be cases where spoof emails could contain your first and last name as well as eBay User ID, so seeing this information isn't a foolproof indicator that eBay sent an email".
phishers will be sending apparently authentic emails saying otherwise
They do that now with other information. It's not convincing.
Knowing something comes with additional terms doesn't mean I agreed to them prior to purchase nor, as i've pointed out, agreed to them.
I never said otherwise.
Agreeing and then using the software, on the other hand, is certain assent, so long as terms are available beforehand.
Furthermore it's just another example of how broken copyright/DMCA/patent laws are.
No, it's not. It's got nothing to do with copyright/DMCA/patent law. Quit trying to invoke the Slashdot unholy trinity so you have a monster to rail against. It's contract law, and well-established contract law at that.
The legal issues of assent EULAs lie elsewhere, and failures of assent are dependent on either not making the terms available prior to purchase (e.g. ) or on allowing agreement without directly presenting terms (e.g. Netscape).
So google should stop securing gmail because your email and name might already be in somebody's DB?
Of course not. They should fix the bug, but it is by no means a serious privacy breach, as you had indicated.
f the spammer gets your gmail address from a DB or a generator, now they just need to use the calendar vuln. to get your name.
Again, so what?
So to keep your name out of the hands of spammers, if you have a gmail account, you would need to *become* the kind of person who emails others without disclosing their real name
If you weren't that kind of person before, your name is already in the hands of spammers. There is no particular value in having a person's name.
Your whole point seems to be -- it isn't possible to keep the association between your email address and name private, so why bother?
No, it's not.
My point is that either your name is associated with your email address or it's not. If it's not, they can't give out what they don't know. If it is, your name is already out there on a list somewhere that spammers can buy. There are, as I've already said, a few people who gave their names to Google but don't give it out in web forms with that email address, but they are so few in number that there's no value in a brute force/generator approach to retrieving their names from Google.
Not only is that information a lot of work to obtain, but it's got almost no potential ROI. If you're careful not to give your name out with that address, you'd immediately be suspicious of an email arriving with your name on it--it actually makes phishing LESS likely to succeed.
By all means, fix the bug, but only because it's a poor coding situation.
consider that emails from Nigerian princes are still thriving. Clearly somebody is falling prey to stuff like that. If that works, using names works too.
That's exactly the point. There is no set of people for whom "ooh, my name, it must be legit" is true.
Either they're susceptible to phishing emails (of varying sophistication) or they're not responsive to them.
It's more serious than that. Once the spammers know your name they can construct more personalized messages
They can already do this (and do), based on the name of your email account and other sources. The presence or absence of your name on your email account is not going to make a significant difference in the accuracy of their bulk lists.
Better chance of fooling a spam filter.
Based on what? The presence or absence of a name amongst the text is not going to affect spam scoring.
Spammers don't wait for you to email them. They buy lists of email addresses in bulk.
No shit. This doesn't have anything to do with that.
For this particular vulnerability, they can even use a random generator and just keep track of the hits when adding appointments to the calendar.
To what end? A person not susceptible to a social engineering attack isn't going to become more so because the email suddenly contains their name. What would be the point of using a random generator, signing up for a Google account, and pounding the hell out of the calendar servers to extract real names, when they can just BUY lists of names and addresses?
Adding your real name to a spam message isn't going to make it any more believable. There are already plenty of phishing emails that use real names/service user names. Either people have the sense to figure it out or they don't. I don't see any evidence of a great many people teetering on the edge of, "if only they had addressed me by name, I'd click on that link."
An email account is an email account. Either the account name itself is some variation on your name or the email "name" text that mail clients show contains your name already. If you have a non-name-based email address that doesn't disclose your name in the "human readable" namespace, then chances are you didn't give them your real name when you signed up anyway.
Sure, it's an unfortunate bug. Yes, the spam has potential to annoy--but it's spam; would you even notice a few more in the spam box? If you're the kind of person who emails others without disclosing your real name, why would you give your real name to the email provider? There is undoubtedly at least one person who has done so, however, and it sucks to be him right now, but I'd gladly take this bug over a more egregious one, even if I were that one affected guy.
Unless I'm a spambot, I'm not going to sit down and type out random strings of words and numbers to find out the name data on some arbitrary addresses. Whether it's Hotmail or Yahoo or Gmail doesn't matter here.
It's never a requirement that you read a contract. It only matters that you be given an opportunity to do so. Whether you take that opportunity is your choice.
If it is, then the VENDOR had better enforce it before they accept my money.
It's not their responsibility. It's yours. If you read it and disagree with the terms, return it. The disc itself would still be sealed, after all. It's not like you even have to fight about it.
If you ignored your imputed knowledge of practice, ignored the notices, ignored the printed copy of the terms, and popped the disc in, then you might have to fight a little to get them to accept the return, but you can still do it.
No, you bought product XYZ fully knowing, through prior experience, trade practice, and explicit notice on the packaging and/or website, that it came with additional terms. Those terms are available for your review before purchase, and those terms include a right of dissolution after purchase as well. No court case has ever fallen apart based on the simple existence of a EULA. The primary cases cited where provisions were rejected have all tacitly accepted their validity and found a term or practice within the EULA to be at issue and inadequate at law. The reason you know this is that no court has ever said, "Oh. It's a EULA. Case dismissed."
Willful blindness is not an excuse. Many of the purchases you make come with additional terms, and the failure to read them does not invalidate them. The failure to request to read them is nothing more than the fault of the purchaser.
The First Sale Doctrine has exactly nothing to do with it. The terms were in place at the time of purchase, and the current setup actually provides you with time to review carefully and an option to return. They could just as easily make you sign an agreement at time of purchase, but it would be a logistical headache and a burden on commerce, and it would force assent on the spot.
They can't force an action upon me (such as returning) that I don't agree to.
By using it, you are agreeing to it. That's the beauty of assent through course of performance. Not to mention that you can't get past the license without agreeing to it.
You're committing the exact fallacy you complain about.
If you start from the specs and settle on something Apple doesn't offer, Apple is not a contender. If you start with specs and find something Apple does offer, then nine times out of ten the Apple will be competitively priced.
It's not a ripoff that company X doesn't make configuration Y. It's called a market economy. Different people make different things. You have to evaluate your options. Sometimes you just can't get exactly everything you want; even if there's no technical reason someone can't satisfy YOUR need, sometimes that's just life.
If you want OS X, you give up some flexibility in configuration. If you want super cheap, you give up the little touches that define Apple products. If they don't want to sell what you want them to, that's their choice, just like it's your choice not to buy it.
If I ask someone "If you have some bananas, and I take all of them, how many bananas do you have left?" they will undoubtedly look at me like I'm some kind of nut and answer "None".
'None' and 'zero' are not the same concept.
In case I wasn't clear, I'm not saying they have the abstract idea of zero.
Existing and not existing is not the same as having a concept for mathematical zero. What you describe is actually fairly high-level reasoning. The concept of zero as a number isn't very old, when you get right down to it. 5000 years ago, it would have been unheard of. Even 3000 years ago, it was an uncommon feature in existing societies.
A language with no discrete number system is almost guaranteed by the functional aspects of Sapir-Whorf not to have any concept of "zero".
Pidgins are created when speakers of two languages each partially learn each other's language and use a simplified version to communicate. This usually occurs with a superstrate--both native language speakers will know a little bit of a third language--the superstrate, which allows them to communicate grammatically, while adopting terms from their native languages to substitute for the limited knowledge of the superstrate.
A pidgin cannot form without at least two preexisting languages. It is not a primitive precursor to a language, but an advanced intermediary between languages. Eventually, some pidgins begin to take on distinctive characteristics in a community that are not taken from any of the contributing languages, and they develop a population of native speakers, at which time it becomes a creole.
In the old days there weren't that many humans around, so it can't be just about hearing humans;).
Hence the standardization of hearing potential across the 1-10kHz range--to hear other animals.
Peak sensitivity, on the other hand, is a direct consequence of needing to be able to filter out human sounds from the din of the forest/savannah. The general hearing range is designed to encompass the sounds of others--this is not peak sensitivity, however.
Take a look. What's special about that range? Human linguistic vocalization. What's the deviation in that range? Men have a statistically significant lower peak sensitivity (and a statistically significant lower vocalization range).
That said maybe even back then humans (and not other predators) were the greatest (audible) threat to humans.
That has been the case as long as homo sapiens has existed.
You, like other posters, clearly do not understand the concept of peak sensitivity. It is a selective enhancement within a much larger range of hearing--that is a coupled pair with the human vocalization range. There is absolutely no reason that can be explained by empirical evidence for hearing to have arbitrarily selected the 2-4kHz range; the only thing significant about that particular range is that that is where most human language sounds are expressed. It is not where any large predator makes sounds; it is not the range of footsteps or any other signaling sound.
Further, it would not make sense for the vocalization range to cover up other sounds in that range, e.g. of predators, especially since primitive warning sounds, like any other animal, are more important to pick up than local predators or other hazards. This is the sentry effect, exhibited in animals hundreds of thousands of years less evolved than ourselves. The hearing of most animals with similar social patterns is attuned with their vocalization range, so that they can best hear each other--and there is no evidence to suggest that the ear leads that process, and every sign pointing to the vocal tract motivating peak sensitivity.
An Englishman and a Chinese one meet in India and they speak to each other using a trade language or pidgin that already exists.
The first time two speakers encounter each other, they may find a common ground for communication, but they do not create a pidgin by doing so--that's impossible. A pidgin requires lengthy socialization and/or a common frame of linguistic reference--usually achieved by a superstrate.
Pointing and gesticulating, with rudimentary exchanges of words is not a pidgin. You can speak a pidgin just as you would any other language, and like any other language, it requires a functional grammar.
before negotiating the price of silk they thrash out the rules on verb conjugations?
Pidgins generally don't have verb conjugations, so no.
Negotiating the price of silk is also a gross oversimplification of the purpose and scope of a pidgin. You don't need to speak a language at all to negotiate a price.
Not really, no. Language requires the ability to describe novel constructions, and once it is created, it expands at a tremendous pace because of that ability--language acquisition takes only a few years. Once you implement a framework, it's done. A slow evolution over even hundreds (let alone tens of thousands as you state) of years would require some element actively retarding the spread and constricting the operation of that language. Once you have a method of discourse, filling in the holes is fast and easy; simultaneously, if that method of discourse is fundamentally incomplete, then discourse isn't possible to begin with. Long-term language shift is more of a streamlining process (development and loss of case markers, formal grammatical context, complex and alternate syntax) rather than outright reconstruction.
In other words, the basic parts of speech come together at the same time. A language can't work with massive gaps. It is, in many ways, all or nothing. You can have sounds associated with objects and actions without having a language, but the transition to nouns and verbs requires a complete and immediate implementation of a grammar. Otherwise what you have is just a particularized form of communication, not a language.
It is that shift between communication and language that takes a long time, because it is dependent on the evolution of long-term socialization and culturalization. Languages evolve rapidly once they're formed, but they must be created with a relatively complete structure from day one in order to form at all.
So wait, because what emits noise is a certain way, and of certain dimensions, the things that pick up the noise had to change to accommodate? It works both ways.
You're not listening.
The peak hearing range is attuned to the human vocal range. They are a coupled pair. It is not a case of speech being optimized to our hearing, because the speech organs have much more confining physical limitations than hearing organs. Of note here is that the peak sensitivity of women is higher than that of men--and the vocal organ's peak performance is higher as well. We are not physically capable of producing speech in a significantly different range--our vocal apparatus could not evolve to match a peak hearing sensitivity in a different range.
The ear evolved to optimize to the human vocal range's specific limitations. All speech had to do was get inside the 1-10kHz "normal" mammalian range--the human ear can hear well below and above this range, but the vocal apparatus cannot function there.
I imagine that spoken language communication would have adjusted itself to the hearing range rather than the other way around.
No. The human vocal apparatus has significantly narrower physical limits than the human ear. It cannot respond as effectively.
Something that is variable amongst many humans seems most likely to be something that evolution would play with.
That's just it: it's not that variable. What your brain interprets as great variations in frequency are, in fact, relatively minor. Further, your ability to produce sounds outside the midrange of your vocal tract grows exponentially more difficult. Your ability to hear those sounds requires no similar exertion.
wildly/randomly communicating at a certain frequency range
It's neither wild nor random. It is a direct, physical consequence of the structure and size of the vocal organs. It's not coincidental that a kitten makes high pitched, squeaky noises and a lion has a low, reverberant roar.
Slashdot Mirror
The USAF doesn't report to Congress.
For the purpose of budgets and appropriations, they absolutely do.
Idiot moderators strike again.
I swear, the USA is one lost staring contest away from a bloodless military coup. I mean, if it hasn't already happened. How would we tell the difference?
Perhaps by military leadership making domestic policy decisions? Refusing to carry out laws passed by Congress? It wouldn't be hard to spot the difference.
Sorry, on my browser, the threading is broken--there is no iPhone reference in the thread. Damn Slashcode.
What does this have to do with iPhones?
Either practice is acceptable in American English, contrary to your site's indication. The only exception is if you are required to work from a particular style manual requiring the inside punctuation.
There is growing consensus to adopt the British convention for general usage. If the end of the sentence coincides with the end of the quote, the period goes inside, as your web page suggests. If, however, you are quoting a word or phrase without punctuation, the post-quote period is growing more common. In fact, historically, you see that pattern. It was disrupted for a time, but the practice is returning to normalcy. Unless you are required to work from a particular style manual which requires otherwise, press the key marked "Enter".
Enforcing an arbitrary prescriptivist tenet based on an historical idiosyncrasy make no sense at all. Why anyone would voluntarily propagate an error eludes me.
The problem is that the verb "to steal" does require it to refer to actual property
No. The verb 'to steal' does not refer specifically solely to property at all. Moreover, even to the extent that property may be referenced by an individual's use, the word 'property' requires neither physicality nor finiteness. 'Property' in its most basic sense is an exclusive right, which Intellectual Property absolutely is. It is no different in function than real property or personal property, both of which are regrettably considered false metonyms with the subject of property by people like you.
Unless, of course, you fell for that idiotic "IP" scam, in which case I'd kindly refer you to this excellent rebuttal
No. It is an absurd rebuttal made by an ideological blowhard who has no clue what the hell he's talking about.
Not only does he intentionally misrepresent the scope of Intellectual Property, he conflates multiple senses of the word property to make a disingenuous point, and he ignores the similar practice elsewhere in the field. Intellectual Property is not the information, nor is it the idea. In fact, it explicitly does not cover those things. It is, instead, the exclusive rights of the rightsholder. It is exactly the same as any other kind of property at law, which is all entirely intangible. Moreover, "Intellectual Property" is a term of convenience for a field, not a statement of relatedness, just like "Family Law" and "Administrative Law", neither of which contain legal fields that are any more closely structured or originated. Family law covers such disparate topics as marriage, custody, domestic abuse, and adoption, plus many others, and itself overlaps with areas of criminal, property, and probate law.
His license, furthermore, is neither particularly well-written nor is he a lawyer or academic expert on either the philosophy of law or its history.
IP is neither idiotic nor a scam, and you'd have to be a complete lummox or an intentional troll to believe otherwise. Like everything else in the law, it is imperfect. But more relevant to this discussion, it is misunderstood by most lay people, including quite notably RMS, whose "rebuttal" is the subject of much humor and ridicule. A person who can't even get his definitions straight can't possibly build a compelling argument.
Just semantics, I know, but UBISoft didn't steal anything.
No, it's not semantics, because according to the science of semantics, they did steal. How that bullshit argument got so popular around here absolutely eludes me. Somehow, people who know nothing about law or linguistics have spawned a meme that has incredible staying power. UBISoft absolutely did steal that crack. THERE IS NO REQUIREMENT OF PHYSICAL DEPRIVATION IN THE ENGLISH VERB 'TO STEAL'. FURTHER, 'STEAL' IS NOT A LEGAL TERM OF ART, SO ANY THEFT ANALOGY IS DOOMED TO FAILURE.
What you mean to say is "Just false pedanticism..."
Their "hidden contract" requires action of you regardless of your agreement
Every consumer sales contract does. This is irrelevant.
So which contract superceedes which?
Neither. The store is technically free to set its own sales terms, though they cannot reject returns on software where the disc is still sealed, even if the outer box is open, unless there is no seal on the software inside. If the disc seal is broken, they do not have to accept the return, though most will if you point to the terms of the software.
A responsible consumer reviews the terms before purchase and avoids the situation entirely. Sometimes pursuing contractual rights takes time and effort, especially when a person blindly enters into an agreement despite having multiple opportunities to slow down and think about it. The deeper into the process you go, the harder it is to get out.
If you encounter a store refusing to accept the return, contact the publisher and/or have a letter drafted by a local attorney. My office prepares this type of letter for a nominal fee and has always resolved the issue.
'Opened' to most stores is the box, not the sticker-sealed software packet that's inside many/most.
That's simply not true. That may be your intuition on the policy, particularly if it's labeled and "open box" policy, but that is usually to encompass CD and DVD sales as well. It is the final seal to the media that is at issue in those store policies. Further, breaking the seal on the disc only occurs after at least three opportunities to view the terms have been missed.
Actually, there are. And they are precisely some of the biggest phishing targets.
Nonsense. If people need a tutorial to determine whether an email is a fake, the single change of your real name instead of your eBay ID is not going to make a difference.
In the past (their help pages are too labyrinthine for me to completely check out their current advice) eBay EXPLICITLY said to check for your real name in the greeting to separate genuine eBay emails from phishing.
That was one of the tips, absolutely, but by no means definitive. Phishing emails will almost always have one or two more significant flaws based on their help advice: either asking for things they have a policy not to request in email, or being nonspecific as to the nature of their inquiry. Both are far more significant. Furthermore, eBay's advice specifically states that "There may still be cases where spoof emails could contain your first and last name as well as eBay User ID, so seeing this information isn't a foolproof indicator that eBay sent an email".
phishers will be sending apparently authentic emails saying otherwise
They do that now with other information. It's not convincing.
Knowing something comes with additional terms doesn't mean I agreed to them prior to purchase nor, as i've pointed out, agreed to them.
I never said otherwise.
Agreeing and then using the software, on the other hand, is certain assent, so long as terms are available beforehand.
Furthermore it's just another example of how broken copyright/DMCA/patent laws are.
No, it's not. It's got nothing to do with copyright/DMCA/patent law. Quit trying to invoke the Slashdot unholy trinity so you have a monster to rail against. It's contract law, and well-established contract law at that.
The legal issues of assent EULAs lie elsewhere, and failures of assent are dependent on either not making the terms available prior to purchase (e.g. ) or on allowing agreement without directly presenting terms (e.g. Netscape).
So google should stop securing gmail because your email and name might already be in somebody's DB?
Of course not. They should fix the bug, but it is by no means a serious privacy breach, as you had indicated.
f the spammer gets your gmail address from a DB or a generator, now they just need to use the calendar vuln. to get your name.
Again, so what?
So to keep your name out of the hands of spammers, if you have a gmail account, you would need to *become* the kind of person who emails others without disclosing their real name
If you weren't that kind of person before, your name is already in the hands of spammers. There is no particular value in having a person's name.
Your whole point seems to be -- it isn't possible to keep the association between your email address and name private, so why bother?
No, it's not.
My point is that either your name is associated with your email address or it's not. If it's not, they can't give out what they don't know. If it is, your name is already out there on a list somewhere that spammers can buy. There are, as I've already said, a few people who gave their names to Google but don't give it out in web forms with that email address, but they are so few in number that there's no value in a brute force/generator approach to retrieving their names from Google.
Not only is that information a lot of work to obtain, but it's got almost no potential ROI. If you're careful not to give your name out with that address, you'd immediately be suspicious of an email arriving with your name on it--it actually makes phishing LESS likely to succeed.
By all means, fix the bug, but only because it's a poor coding situation.
consider that emails from Nigerian princes are still thriving. Clearly somebody is falling prey to stuff like that. If that works, using names works too.
That's exactly the point. There is no set of people for whom "ooh, my name, it must be legit" is true.
Either they're susceptible to phishing emails (of varying sophistication) or they're not responsive to them.
It's more serious than that. Once the spammers know your name they can construct more personalized messages
They can already do this (and do), based on the name of your email account and other sources. The presence or absence of your name on your email account is not going to make a significant difference in the accuracy of their bulk lists.
Better chance of fooling a spam filter.
Based on what? The presence or absence of a name amongst the text is not going to affect spam scoring.
Spammers don't wait for you to email them. They buy lists of email addresses in bulk.
No shit. This doesn't have anything to do with that.
For this particular vulnerability, they can even use a random generator and just keep track of the hits when adding appointments to the calendar.
To what end? A person not susceptible to a social engineering attack isn't going to become more so because the email suddenly contains their name. What would be the point of using a random generator, signing up for a Google account, and pounding the hell out of the calendar servers to extract real names, when they can just BUY lists of names and addresses?
Adding your real name to a spam message isn't going to make it any more believable. There are already plenty of phishing emails that use real names/service user names. Either people have the sense to figure it out or they don't. I don't see any evidence of a great many people teetering on the edge of, "if only they had addressed me by name, I'd click on that link."
I don't buy that.
An email account is an email account. Either the account name itself is some variation on your name or the email "name" text that mail clients show contains your name already. If you have a non-name-based email address that doesn't disclose your name in the "human readable" namespace, then chances are you didn't give them your real name when you signed up anyway.
Sure, it's an unfortunate bug. Yes, the spam has potential to annoy--but it's spam; would you even notice a few more in the spam box? If you're the kind of person who emails others without disclosing your real name, why would you give your real name to the email provider? There is undoubtedly at least one person who has done so, however, and it sucks to be him right now, but I'd gladly take this bug over a more egregious one, even if I were that one affected guy.
Unless I'm a spambot, I'm not going to sit down and type out random strings of words and numbers to find out the name data on some arbitrary addresses. Whether it's Hotmail or Yahoo or Gmail doesn't matter here.
It's not a requirement that I read anything.
It's never a requirement that you read a contract. It only matters that you be given an opportunity to do so. Whether you take that opportunity is your choice.
If it is, then the VENDOR had better enforce it before they accept my money.
It's not their responsibility. It's yours. If you read it and disagree with the terms, return it. The disc itself would still be sealed, after all. It's not like you even have to fight about it.
If you ignored your imputed knowledge of practice, ignored the notices, ignored the printed copy of the terms, and popped the disc in, then you might have to fight a little to get them to accept the return, but you can still do it.
No, you bought product XYZ fully knowing, through prior experience, trade practice, and explicit notice on the packaging and/or website, that it came with additional terms. Those terms are available for your review before purchase, and those terms include a right of dissolution after purchase as well. No court case has ever fallen apart based on the simple existence of a EULA. The primary cases cited where provisions were rejected have all tacitly accepted their validity and found a term or practice within the EULA to be at issue and inadequate at law. The reason you know this is that no court has ever said, "Oh. It's a EULA. Case dismissed."
Willful blindness is not an excuse. Many of the purchases you make come with additional terms, and the failure to read them does not invalidate them. The failure to request to read them is nothing more than the fault of the purchaser.
The First Sale Doctrine has exactly nothing to do with it. The terms were in place at the time of purchase, and the current setup actually provides you with time to review carefully and an option to return. They could just as easily make you sign an agreement at time of purchase, but it would be a logistical headache and a burden on commerce, and it would force assent on the spot.
They can't force an action upon me (such as returning) that I don't agree to.
By using it, you are agreeing to it. That's the beauty of assent through course of performance. Not to mention that you can't get past the license without agreeing to it.
You're committing the exact fallacy you complain about.
If you start from the specs and settle on something Apple doesn't offer, Apple is not a contender. If you start with specs and find something Apple does offer, then nine times out of ten the Apple will be competitively priced.
It's not a ripoff that company X doesn't make configuration Y. It's called a market economy. Different people make different things. You have to evaluate your options. Sometimes you just can't get exactly everything you want; even if there's no technical reason someone can't satisfy YOUR need, sometimes that's just life.
If you want OS X, you give up some flexibility in configuration. If you want super cheap, you give up the little touches that define Apple products. If they don't want to sell what you want them to, that's their choice, just like it's your choice not to buy it.
Just because you don't know what the hell you're talking about doesn't mean the rest of us are pontificating or pretentious.
Reduced to a trolling child. How predictable.
If I ask someone "If you have some bananas, and I take all of them, how many bananas do you have left?" they will undoubtedly look at me like I'm some kind of nut and answer "None".
'None' and 'zero' are not the same concept.
In case I wasn't clear, I'm not saying they have the abstract idea of zero.
Then they don't have the idea of zero.
Existing and not existing is not the same as having a concept for mathematical zero. What you describe is actually fairly high-level reasoning. The concept of zero as a number isn't very old, when you get right down to it. 5000 years ago, it would have been unheard of. Even 3000 years ago, it was an uncommon feature in existing societies.
A language with no discrete number system is almost guaranteed by the functional aspects of Sapir-Whorf not to have any concept of "zero".
Pidgins are created when speakers of two languages each partially learn each other's language and use a simplified version to communicate. This usually occurs with a superstrate--both native language speakers will know a little bit of a third language--the superstrate, which allows them to communicate grammatically, while adopting terms from their native languages to substitute for the limited knowledge of the superstrate.
A pidgin cannot form without at least two preexisting languages. It is not a primitive precursor to a language, but an advanced intermediary between languages. Eventually, some pidgins begin to take on distinctive characteristics in a community that are not taken from any of the contributing languages, and they develop a population of native speakers, at which time it becomes a creole.
In the old days there weren't that many humans around, so it can't be just about hearing humans ;).
Hence the standardization of hearing potential across the 1-10kHz range--to hear other animals.
Peak sensitivity, on the other hand, is a direct consequence of needing to be able to filter out human sounds from the din of the forest/savannah. The general hearing range is designed to encompass the sounds of others--this is not peak sensitivity, however.
Take a look. What's special about that range? Human linguistic vocalization. What's the deviation in that range? Men have a statistically significant lower peak sensitivity (and a statistically significant lower vocalization range).
That said maybe even back then humans (and not other predators) were the greatest (audible) threat to humans.
That has been the case as long as homo sapiens has existed.
You, like other posters, clearly do not understand the concept of peak sensitivity. It is a selective enhancement within a much larger range of hearing--that is a coupled pair with the human vocalization range. There is absolutely no reason that can be explained by empirical evidence for hearing to have arbitrarily selected the 2-4kHz range; the only thing significant about that particular range is that that is where most human language sounds are expressed. It is not where any large predator makes sounds; it is not the range of footsteps or any other signaling sound.
Further, it would not make sense for the vocalization range to cover up other sounds in that range, e.g. of predators, especially since primitive warning sounds, like any other animal, are more important to pick up than local predators or other hazards. This is the sentry effect, exhibited in animals hundreds of thousands of years less evolved than ourselves. The hearing of most animals with similar social patterns is attuned with their vocalization range, so that they can best hear each other--and there is no evidence to suggest that the ear leads that process, and every sign pointing to the vocal tract motivating peak sensitivity.
An Englishman and a Chinese one meet in India and they speak to each other using a trade language or pidgin that already exists.
The first time two speakers encounter each other, they may find a common ground for communication, but they do not create a pidgin by doing so--that's impossible. A pidgin requires lengthy socialization and/or a common frame of linguistic reference--usually achieved by a superstrate.
Pointing and gesticulating, with rudimentary exchanges of words is not a pidgin. You can speak a pidgin just as you would any other language, and like any other language, it requires a functional grammar.
before negotiating the price of silk they thrash out the rules on verb conjugations?
Pidgins generally don't have verb conjugations, so no.
Negotiating the price of silk is also a gross oversimplification of the purpose and scope of a pidgin. You don't need to speak a language at all to negotiate a price.
What about them? Both types have complete grammars.
Not really, no. Language requires the ability to describe novel constructions, and once it is created, it expands at a tremendous pace because of that ability--language acquisition takes only a few years. Once you implement a framework, it's done. A slow evolution over even hundreds (let alone tens of thousands as you state) of years would require some element actively retarding the spread and constricting the operation of that language. Once you have a method of discourse, filling in the holes is fast and easy; simultaneously, if that method of discourse is fundamentally incomplete, then discourse isn't possible to begin with. Long-term language shift is more of a streamlining process (development and loss of case markers, formal grammatical context, complex and alternate syntax) rather than outright reconstruction.
In other words, the basic parts of speech come together at the same time. A language can't work with massive gaps. It is, in many ways, all or nothing. You can have sounds associated with objects and actions without having a language, but the transition to nouns and verbs requires a complete and immediate implementation of a grammar. Otherwise what you have is just a particularized form of communication, not a language.
It is that shift between communication and language that takes a long time, because it is dependent on the evolution of long-term socialization and culturalization. Languages evolve rapidly once they're formed, but they must be created with a relatively complete structure from day one in order to form at all.
So wait, because what emits noise is a certain way, and of certain dimensions, the things that pick up the noise had to change to accommodate? It works both ways.
You're not listening.
The peak hearing range is attuned to the human vocal range. They are a coupled pair. It is not a case of speech being optimized to our hearing, because the speech organs have much more confining physical limitations than hearing organs. Of note here is that the peak sensitivity of women is higher than that of men--and the vocal organ's peak performance is higher as well. We are not physically capable of producing speech in a significantly different range--our vocal apparatus could not evolve to match a peak hearing sensitivity in a different range.
The ear evolved to optimize to the human vocal range's specific limitations. All speech had to do was get inside the 1-10kHz "normal" mammalian range--the human ear can hear well below and above this range, but the vocal apparatus cannot function there.
I imagine that spoken language communication would have adjusted itself to the hearing range rather than the other way around.
No. The human vocal apparatus has significantly narrower physical limits than the human ear. It cannot respond as effectively.
Something that is variable amongst many humans seems most likely to be something that evolution would play with.
That's just it: it's not that variable. What your brain interprets as great variations in frequency are, in fact, relatively minor. Further, your ability to produce sounds outside the midrange of your vocal tract grows exponentially more difficult. Your ability to hear those sounds requires no similar exertion.
wildly/randomly communicating at a certain frequency range
It's neither wild nor random. It is a direct, physical consequence of the structure and size of the vocal organs. It's not coincidental that a kitten makes high pitched, squeaky noises and a lion has a low, reverberant roar.