Yeah, and that's actually an example of another common source of "names for neighbors". In the Slavic languages, the root "slav-'" means "glory". So the Slavs actually refer to themselves as the Glorious People. The other people nearby took the reasonable approach of "Let's call them what they call themselves". In several of the nearby societies, the people who called themselves "Slav" were mostly the ones taken as slaves, so the name took on that meaning in the Slavs' neighbors' languages.

This is a fairly common process for producing names-for-neighbors that are insults.

That's because English-speaking people generally have no idea what "Oklahoma" originally meant.

Going down this path could lead to a lot of problems, though, since the terms in most languages for their neighbors would have to be discarded and replaced by something less offensive to the people described.

Thus, some of my ancestors are Welsh, but they don't call themselves that in the Welsh language, they use forms of the word "Cymru" to refer to their own people. "Welsh" is an old Germanic/Anglo-Saxon word that means "strange" or "foreign" (and still means that in German).

For that matter, the German language has no word similar to "German"; they refer to themselves with various forms of the word "deutsch" (which is related to "teuton" and bsically just means "people"). But my favorite such term is the Russians' word for Germans: "Nemets". Anyone who has taken first-year Russian understands the derivation of this term: it means "no-mind". It's hardly even phonetically reduced; it's just the word "ne" (negative prefix) plus the word "mets" (mind). (The 'n' and 'm' are soft, FWIW. ;-)

While it's hard to be more insulting than that, such names for neighbors are quite common around the world. Often the words go back so far that only a few historians understand the insulting origins. (But the Russian term can't be whitewashed; its meaning is clear to even a beginning student of the language.)

Imagine the fuss if we had to replace all such names that have insulting origins.

'Zat true? I'm aware of several trademarks that include the phrase "Honky Tonk", and a quick google check verifies them. But I don't seem to find a trademark on just "Honky". Of course, I'm not very clear on how to use the USPTO's system, so maybe I'm missing something. Can you point us to the evidence that "Honky" by itself is a valid US trademark? (Maybe you can also teach us a bit on how to successfully look such things up. ;-)

There was also the recent kerfuffle over someone using the term "niggardly", which some people (mis)interpret as derived from "nigger". That was even stupider than this story.

Well, considering that among themselves, US dark-skinned folks do routinely refer to each other as "nigger". It'sonly considered an insult when a paleskin uses the term.

So maybe we'll see a team formed by (mostly) black players called "The <town> Niggers". It could be fun seeing the reaction to that.

As a USian of mixed ancestry, including an Ojibwa great-grandmother, I have a bit of trouble seeing how a team calling itself "Redskins" is disparaging. Even if they mostly don't have Native-American ancestry, it's still hard to see an insult in the name. So far, I haven't read an explanation of this supposed "disparagement".

I also wonder what people who have a twin think of the Minnesota Twins. Is there anyone out there who's a twin, and feels insulted by this?

It's presumably because the finches called "cardinals" are notable for the males being mostly bright red. Catholic Cardinals' formal dress is bright red, and the birds were in fact named after the Catholic dudes who wear similar colors for official occasions.

Granted, this is a rather tenuous connection, and it's not obvious how there's any disparagement to either the birds or the priests in the names. It's just a mental connection based on a superficial color similarity.

But some people can infer disparagement from almost anything you say.

Yeah, but crippled by a crappy GUI designed for a 3" screen and hands that can't touch type or use a pencil.

Doing this with tariffs might be more difficult than US, EU and UN administrators might think. The Chinese management system (government + industry) has a documented history of faked economic reports. This is due in part to the general practice of promoting/demoting managers based on the production figures from their own areas of control, with little or no independent auditing of the data. The fishing example was documented by outside researchers about 15 years ago, but as the (rather well done "neutral" phrasing of the) wikipedia article hints, the catch figures still show numbers that are discounted as "probably mostly fictional" by the FAO and various other international organizations and researchers.

It can be rather difficult for outsiders to collect verifiable data on economically or politically important subjects within China. The same problem will arise with the proposed tariffs. They will presumably be based on available data on emissions, which will mostly come from within China, and will be produced by people whose jobs and pay levels rely on their organizations producing the "right" data. There will be little or no truly independent auditing of the data; auditors will also be similarly rewarded or punished based on the acceptability of their reports to the higher-ups. As with the fishing industry, the pollution-emission data could show decreasing levels while the actual numbers are increasing, and this could continue for decades.

Collecting data on the pollution from outside will be attempted, of course, but China is a big chunk of territory, and there are practical limits to the accuracy of data data collection from outside that territory. Most of the monitoring will have to be done from orbit, and while that's improving, there are still many ways that interested parties can confuse the issue. Just read the ongoing political debates over climate change/warming to get a feel for how easy it is for interested parties to confuse and mislead our political and industrial leaders.

They seem to be saying that, in addition to displaying the content on your screen, your browser also writes a copy into its cache, and that's two copies.

I wonder what they'd say of, say, a RAID1 file system, which makes two copies of the cached page, on two different disks. Would that mean two violations of the copyright? And if, after sending it from the screen to your eyes, the information in your brain is a third violation?

And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.

Lest you think this is a joke, remember that companies did try to claim that computer backups are legally "copies" that must be paid for to be legal.

Actually, I'm surprised they didn't handle it this way from the start. That way the "private citizen" wouldn't even know that another department had "seized" their documents.

But maybe I've just been working on the Internet too long. I tend to be surprised when someone wants to deal with hard copy.

All Your Doors are Open to US.

We're eagerly awaiting your detailed instructions on how we might do this.

Hey, you got all your facts wrong.

First, we still do have the US Constitution. It's kept at the National Archives. To quote from their web site: "The National Archives Building is located between Seventh and Ninth Streets, NW, with entrances on Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. Please Note: The Rotunda entrance, which includes the Exhibit Hall, is on Constitution Avenue." You can go there and see it in its display case.

Second, it's not a piece of paper; it was written on parchment.

Next time, try to get your facts right. ;-)

(How much of it is in effect any more isn't clear. We do pretty much know that all those parts that limit what the government can do are, uh, "inoperative" at the moment. Yeah, that's the word. But it's still useful for social-control purposes, so we keep it around.)

Heh. That doesn't even mean you're safe. I recall a project back in the late 1980s, when I was part of a team hired by a big company (who shall remain unnamed so you'll suspect it was your company ;-). We'd had a few discussions with "top management" who'd hired us, about their problems with the DP department. Their computer folks effectively owned the data, and all access was mediated by the DP department. There was a lot of information that was there, but management couldn't get at it, because the DP folks feigned an inability to provide it.

One evening, a bunch of us decided to stay around after hours. We went to work on their big (IBM of course) mainframe, and in the morning, we demoed to management that we could read any file on their machine. Our demo included a few reports we'd printed out that got wide-eyed reactions. We'd given them access to all of their own data, and they were very happy with us. We stuck around and provided them with a lot more reports ("over the dead bodies" of some of the DP department ;-).

Some time later, we discussed in private the question of what we should tell the IBM folks about what we'd done. Our decision was essentially "Nah; they'll just block our current clients' access to their own data and give control back to the DP priesthood. And we have other customers who'll pay us to similarly break into their own data."

The fact that your own employees can't access their own data doesn't necessarily mean it's safe from outsiders.

(We never did discuss with them the implication that other outsiders might as easily access their data, if they happened to know the things we did. In the late 1980s, managers at corporate computer installations generally had no concept of a "network" other than as a way to connect remote terminals to the mainframe. There's no way we could have got them to understand the wider implications of the security holes we knew about and exploited for their benefit. It's not obvious that most of today's "management" class has such understanding, either. The current story pretty much demos the extent that understanding. ;-)

Indeed, and this is also an excellent example of where we can use the canonical /. automotive simile: There is a long tradition of government agencies (and some corporations) requiring that all purchased vehicles come with complete shop manuals. This is a direct parallel to requiring the source code for software. In both cases, such a requirement makes it possible for the purchasing organization to set up their own repair shop to fix the products when something fails. It also allows the purchaser to make their own mods to handle their special needs.

Many US states (and a good number of other countries) require that shop manuals be available for all vehicles sold in their jurisdiction, not just to the government. This is done to guarantee that independent auto shops can exist, and the vendor can't have a monopoly on repairs and spare parts. The same argument applies to software. With open source, you can hire local independent software contractors to debug (and/or extend) purchased software. Without this, both government agencies and private purchasers are at the mercy of the vendor when problems or special needs arise.

Of course, we can expect to hear from the usual corporate shills (paid or ideologically motivated ;-), pushing their usual misleading claims. But note that nobody much ever claims that open-source software is bug-free. The argument is that, when bugs are discovered, people not working for the vendor can study the code and fix the code. And they can also publicize bugs and fixes, unlike what happens all too often when dealing with secret, proprietary software. This also applies to both software and vehicles.