Which is ridiculous. It’s like suing someone for tapping you on the shoulder while you’re deep in thought, claiming that you almost came up with a great invention but their interference meant you lost your train of thought. Therefore, by tapping you on the shoulder, they owe you millions of dollars of lost potential revenue from that invention.
In addition, you have to consider whether they’re morally justified in receiving that revenue. Say someone manages to bribe the government so that they get paid $1 every time someone says “shazam”. If you say “shazam” and don’t pay them, they lose $1 in potential revenue. But, is this potential revenue that they are morally justified in collecting? Copyright law is just as ridiculous as “shazam” law. In both cases the government came up with a rule that allows someone to collect revenue simply because the government says so.
IMO the entertainment industry has ridiculously warped copyright. It used to be that copyright was a 14 year term, renewable for another 14 years if the author was alive. Under that rule, Forrest Gump would just have had its copyright expire. That seems pretty reasonable. It cost them $55 million to produce, and it brought in $678 million, it’s probably mostly done making money for them. Time for their rights to expire, right? Nope, they get to keep their monopoly until 2114. It’s fucking ludicrous.
Copyright is supposed to be a balance between what’s good for people creating something, and the general public. The creator is given a short-term monopoly as an incentive to create, that’s how they benefit. The public benefits because after a short time that creation becomes public. The alternative is no copyright, where creators need to be paid up-front by someone like a patron, and what they create becomes public immediately. The patronage system is responsible for all kinds of magnificent art like most classical music, the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, etc. The argument for copyright is that the patronage system wasn’t good enough, and the public could benefit even more by allowing a short monopoly for the creator. But, with the lobbying of the entertainment cartel, the public benefit is far worse. You now still effectively have the patronage system controlling what art gets made (the entertainment cartel), they then also keep that art from the public for more than a century.
Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you’re not stealing anything. You can access services you don’t have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.
Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don’t.
Copyright infringement isn’t theft, that’s the main point. It’s breaking a rule that the government created giving people a temporary (now extremely long term, but temporary) right to control the spread of ideas. Whether or not you approve of that law is beside the point. The point being, theft is as old as the ten commandments, if not older. Copyright is a new thing that’s only a few centuries old.
MacOS is still Unix under the hood, and has been since they adapted NeXTSTEP.
Maybe it’s just because I’m fundamentally more of a console user than a windowing-system user, but to me a Unix-based OS is always going to be a winner compared to Windows.
But, if you want to laugh at OSes, laugh at classic MacOS, where everything would grind to a halt if you clicked and held the mouse button.
Yeah, apparently you need to know the origin of the word to know how to pluralize it.
One octopus, two octopuses. But you can also say “octopodes” because the elements used to create the word are originally Greek (okto for 8, pous for foot), and that’s how Greek words get pluralized. But, although it was based on Greek elements it was never used in Ancient Greek. It was a modern Latin word, created in the 1700s as a scientific term using those Greek elements. As a Latin word, the “us” ending should be pluralized with “i”, so “octopi” (which is one of the oldest known pluralizations of the word). But, it’s an English word, and the proper way to pluralize an English word ending in “us” is to tack on “es”.
So, you can go with “octopodes”, “octopi” or “octopuses” and have an argument why any of them is correct.
For Unix, since it’s a word created in English, it’s probably “unixes”. To claim it’s “unices” you’d have to pretend that “unix” is a Latin word, which it isn’t, and never was, but “ix” is a common declension pattern in Latin, and an uncommon ending in English, so it’s fun to pretend it’s a Latin word and doesn’t get pluralized normally.
I assume he doesn’t have access to it. He just knows there’s a camera pointing at the place where his bike was stolen, and that the police have access to the footage.
Yeah, I don’t get that. Bicycling requires strength and endurance. It exposes you to the elements. Why is sitting in a cushy car something some people think as being more macho? Is it that you’re in control of a heavier and more powerful machine?
If you’re rich you can afford to gamble, lose and try again.
If you’re poor, you can gamble, win, and then have to spend your winnings helping out your family and community. Like, paying for the operation your uncle needs but couldn’t afford, or helping mom’s friend from church avoid losing her home.
This is a reason that a lot of poor-person owned businesses don’t grow. They may start strong, but then the business owner has trouble continuing to invest.
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on their internalization of the obscure patterns of English pronunciation, informed by the most similar word: “gift” which uses a hard g. Everyone I know of started saying it with a hard g because that’s what made sense based on the spelling, long before hearing the weird thing about constituent words.
Nobody pronounced LASER as Lah-seer, which you’d have to do if you used “A as in Amplification” an “E as in Emission”.
There are, there are just exceptions. For example, an e at the end of the word is silent. I’m certain you can give me a word where it’s not, but there are at least six in this paragraph alone where it is.
One of the most common words with a final “e” in that paragraph is “the” which not only has a final “e” sound, but has two different final “e” sounds depending on the context: “the end” uses a /ði/ pronunciation but “the word” uses a /ðə/ pronunciation. English is very stupid.
But, I agree with your assessment. English has rules, or at least patterns. “G” is most often hard, not soft, because “J” is available for the soft version, but there’s no alternative for the hard version. English tends to follow patterns, and “gift” has a hard g, and it (and words based on it) are the only ones that start with “gif”, so every “gif” word is hard. Because “t” (unlike “e”) can’t change the sounds before it, the pattern says that “gif” should have a hard “g”.
If it were “gir”, then there would be more debate. The word “giraffe” has a soft “g” but “girl” has a hard one, so the pattern is more muddy.
Also, people who coin words don’t get to decide how they’ll be pronounced. They can certainly try, but they’ll often lose. There are plenty of words in English borrowed from other languages that not only sound nothing like the original language, but that sound nothing like they’d sound if they were English words. For example, “lingerie”. It’s a French word, but the English pronunciation sounds nothing like a French word. In fact, if someone just sounded out the word as if it were an English word, they’d probably get much closer to the French pronunciation than the awful “lawn-je-ray” which is the current accepted English pronunciation (though, they’d probably assume a hard “g” sound).
In this case, it’s too bad that Steve Wilhite didn’t have a background in linguistics or he would have realized that people would see “gif” and assume a hard “g”. It was a losing fight from the start because he either didn’t understand the assumptions people would have when they saw those letters, or he thought that somehow he could successfully fight the tide all by himself.
Looking at how a word is spelled always takes second place to where it comes from.
Where it comes from matters less than historic pronunciations.
“Lawn-jer-ay” is how most of the English word pronounces “lingerie” even though that’s nothing like how it’s pronounced in French, nor is it anything like what you’d pronounce if you sounded out those letters assuming it was an English word.
“Lieutenant” is pronounced completely differently in the UK vs the US. It’s etymology is also French, but neither English pronunciation is at all close to the French. Somehow the British get an “f” sound in there, which can’t be explained by spelling or etymology, and somehow the American pronunciation turns “ieu” into an “oo” sound.
As for “gif”, the “aol and compuserve” thing shows the problem: text based forums. The first time people encountered the word was by reading it. As an unfamiliar word, they mostly went with the common English rule of finding similar words. In this case, the only other words with “gif” are “gift” and words based on “gift”. Since that has a hard G, from the very start people have been using the hard “G” sound.
English preserves the pronunciation and spelling of loan words
English doesn’t preserve the pronunciation. It approximates the pronunciation while keeping the spelling, and that pronunciation drifts over time and changes in different places. See: Lieutenant, a word that has two wildly different pronunciations in English, neither of which sound anything like the original French word.
“Neat, what’s it called?” and they said “it’s called a gif”
Yeah, and then we all assumed it was pronounced “gif” not “jif” because the only other word with the letters “gif” was “gift” and that had a hard g. Later on, someone claimed it was supposed to be pronounced “jif”, but we all laughed at that idea and kept using the correct pronunciation.
We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name
Neither did we, it was a hard g. There was no debate. Sure, some people claimed it was supposed to be a soft g, but we all laughed at that idea because it was ridiculous.
We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name, the same way you don’t ask a person you just met “Shouldn’t ‘Bob’ be pronounced with a long ‘o’ like the very similar name ‘Job’?
I’m guessing you’re not multilingual then, because I am, and it’s extremely common to change how someone’s name is pronounced. People with the name “David” who are French are used to the French pronunciation of their name being “Dah-veed” but in English “Day-vid”. French people pronounce “Bob” as “Bub”. It’s good to allow people to slightly change how your name is pronounced because it flows better in their language. If they have to pause every time your name comes up to adapt how it’s said, it just makes things more difficult.
As for “gif”, if someone pronounced it as “jif”, we giggled a bit, but that’s it. It was only if someone was really insistent that it had to be a soft g that we really laughed. Some people tried to claim that the creator of the format had wanted a certain pronunciation, but we knew that didn’t matter.
Language is a function of communication, and better communication is what enabled humans to transfer knowledge
Exactly, and part of good communication is good pronunciation, because if you mispronounce things it makes it harder for people to understand you. If you insist on using a nonsensical pronunciation then you’re just trying to make it hard to communicate with you.
There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation
But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft “g” sound doesn’t follow those patterns, so it’s objectively a less correct pronunciation.
the guy who created it
Who cares about that guy? He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce “gif”. If he’d said it was supposed to be pronounced “dug” people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn’t that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.
instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation
It really sounds like you didn’t have friends. The rest of us did.
Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn’t have anything to do with this
Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters “gif” is based on their language. In English, it’s a hard g.
He’s the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.
He’s just the guy who invented the software and coined a name for it, he has no authority over how that should be pronounced. If he came up with a ridiculous pronunciation (as he did) he should be laughed at and people should use a sensible pronunciation.
Pronunciation isn’t based on spelling
Of course it is. That’s how spelling works. In English it isn’t nearly 1:1 like other languages, but spelling is very strongly tied to how a word is pronounced.
the English writing system isn’t consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that
Yes, it is. That’s why people pronounce it with a hard “g”, because they’ve internalized the rules for spelling vs. pronunciation in English and know that those 3 letters in that order has a hard g.
are pronounced wildly phonemically differently
There are slight differences in pronunciation, not wild differences. The differences are so slight that normally you can understand the word someone is using in another dialect without difficulty. And, in every English dialect “gift” has a hard g, as does “gif”.
Linus is the one who got a workable thing out in the public’s hands. He didn’t even want to name it Linux, but someone came up with that name and it stuck.
The GNU project did a lot of great things, but ultimately they weren’t able to get a full-fledged operating system out that people could use, so they lost the opportunity to name it. It really shouldn’t matter to them though. GNU is well known, its philosophies are critical to how the free software and open source communities work, it was basically a massive success in the way almost no other volunteer non-commercial projects ever are.
If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing (fosstodon.org)
I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Yeah, very sorry that this app is Windows only, would love to switch to Mac (feddit.de)
Stolen from Deltachat
Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police (startrek.website)
Success is built through GAMBA (sh.itjust.works)
JPEG (lemmy.world)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/167225794620221228after.png
big deal (jlai.lu)