Facebook is way ahead of us with that. (And the ambiguities of their emoji mod levels fit right in with this topic.)

Or English or Spanish or Esperanto, which are written with a Latin-based alphabet. ;-)

There has been more than a bit of linguistic study of the effectiveness of alphabetic and other writing systems, often dealing with the differences between what can be expressed verbally an in writing. None of our writing systems come very close to matching what can be expressed verbally (though the Unicode phonetic alphabet comes close for many languages).

In one linguistics course I took in college, the prof had a nice demo of the differences between written and spoken English (which he classified as different languages rather than dialects, due to the fact that native speakers have to spend years learning the written "dialect"). He gave us some short sentences, had spoke them with different intonations, and had us discuss the meanings of the utterances. The "winner" was the sentence "They're here." The class came up with 15 readings for which all the native speakers agreed on the meaning, plus a few more that speakers of the same English dialect agreed on but which differed in the different dialects known by classmates. He explained that spoken English is in fact a highly tonal language, with a minimum of 4 tone levels (pitches) and up to 3 tones for some vowels if you want to fully represent it in writing. Length markers are also needed for both vowels and some consonants, but that's a different topic. Linguists have ways of representing such things, but common written English doesn't. And a phonetic system is needed for the phonemes, so that for instance both readings of "read" (present, past) can be distinguished.

So no, you can't use any human language's Latin-based alphabetic representation to fully express the spoken language. OTOH, there are examples in most languages where things can be expressed clearly in writing that are very difficult to communicate by speaking. Many technical subjects have clear examples of this, especially subjects with a mathematical component. In particular, software developers often prefer to communicate via email, because it's so difficult to clearly express your ideas verbally in a way that won't be misunderstood. And there are running jokes going back to pre-computer times about the communication difficulties that groups of techies have when they don't have a blackboard (or whiteboard) to write on.

Excellent example. I read it first on a FF window on a Macbook Pro, where it looked like an o with umlaut followed by a latin capital Y. But I copied it to the "Characters" viewer, which showed me that the first characters was in fact a "LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH". Even enlarging the FF window by several bumps didn't make it look like an eth. So it in fact displayed as a visibly different character in two apps on the same screen on the same computer.

Edit after viewing the Preview: That eth character is displayed by the Preview as a capital letter A with a tilde. But the new edit panel still displays it as an eth that looks more like an o-umlaut, even at a larger font size than I like to use. So it's even more messed up by even this app (Firefox) on this screen on this computer. I wonder what it looks like on other people's screens.

The emojis currently defined by Unicode are beyond hopeless as communication aids. Now if there were only some reliable way to use the ASCII emojis without them being mapped to the little icons on the receiving end. But I guess we've moved on past the stage where emojis are useful for actual communication purposes. The flakey implementations by the major eGadget vendors have reduced them to just artsy decorations with no reliable interpretation.

The rest of the world is slowly "extending" their alphabetic writing systems to a mess that's every bit as poor at actual communication as the mess that is Chinese writing. ;-)

Lessee, I seem to remember that there's a name for the logical error of thinking that the first time you notice something was the first time it ever happened. ... Maybe I should try to dig the term out again and post it here ...

;-)

Hmmm ... The usual version says "... only outlaws will have secrets". But both versions work.

(Actually, both are wrong; they should say "... only outlaws and governments will have ...". ;-)

And also by the sanctimonious language pedants (that others have mentioned) who've been trying to impose their bizarre syntax ideas from other languages on English, rather than the normal (Germanic) syntax that the rest of the native-speaking population uses. ;-)

Actually, the folks who follow the online linguistic forums do get a bit of fun out of mocking the latest attempts by the "peevers" (as they're generally known in such circles) to miscorrect someone else's normal English. And sometimes such things can lead to useful bits of educational material for those interested in how English and related languages actually work.

(The general theory is that most of the bogus syntax rules that the pedants have been foisting arose historically from the time when "educated" people knew and used Latin and/or Greek. Those were "real" languages, while English was a lower-class argot from that obscure island to the northwest of the real Europe. When English became a major language and the older status languages were phased out, it became useful to try to standardize the language somewhat. But the self-appointed experts in the subject knew that Latin and Greek were the only languages with real syntaxes, so they tried to impose their rules on English. It hasn't worked, of course, but that hasn't stopped them.

The other growing source of entertainment on such forums is the large body of bizarre English that is being collected all over the world. There's some really funny stuff there, and trying to understand how the translations came about can lead to insights about the differences between human languages. But that's an entire different topic that isn't really relevant here.

Well, to my knowledge, I don't actually have any porn on my android gadget. (My Macbook has a much larger screen. ;-) But I'd expect that those who do, would find it interesting and useful to know how much of their porn apps' traffic and battery usage is from the ads. The marketers do have a way on inserting their stuff into all sorts of places where it isn't welcome. They're probably even worse than the porn vendors that way.

In any case, the question is general: How do we reliably find out what stuff in our gadget is using the battery and/or bandwidth? To be useful, the software supplying such information should work for whatever apps we have installed, especially those that came with our gadget. The suppliers of the gadgets don't seem very interested in helping us. In particular, Google and Apple are the two major suppliers of "smart phone" software, and neither seems very trustworthy when it comes to learning just what their gadgets are actually doing.

Somehow, with all the attention that the spread of portable Internet-enabled gadgetry, the Internet community seems to have been taken by surprise by the way that the corporate world views it not as a source of information, but rather as a new method for distributing marketing to their mark(et)s.

It's widely believed that ads have taken over (from porn ;-) as the main traffic on the Web. This is rather significant if even close to true, it's likely one of the main reasons that our handy little portable gadgets (that many of us hardly ever actually use as phones) run so slowly and eat up so much bandwidth.

But a problem with even discussing this is that, as far as I've found, there's no reliable app available to actually measure our bandwidth use, classify it, and tell us what's eating it up. I do know that my android gadget is often running warm, eating batter and bandwidth, when it's just sitting "idle" in my pocket.

Yeah, I know; part of that is the tracking software. ;-) But whatever; I can't really say with any authority what's causing its activity. The one thing I can actually see is apps that stay running in the background, and the gadget's power usage app does report that "innocent" apps like mail/message readers and web browsers are using battery when "nothing is happening". Investigating does often show that some of their windows contain video ads that are running. The power-usage app does let me kill apps, but that's not very useful in measuring the source of the power/bandwidth usage.

So is there a good way to actually measure the traffic, classify it, etc., so we can actually determine what's really eating up the battery and bandwidth? Are there good google keywords to learn about it? There are a few good unix/linux tools for examining network traffic, but I haven't found them for android, ios, etc. Anyone know what they might be, and how we might verify that they're not just trojans?

(And yes, I'm also aware that the marketers are going to read this and be major sources of replies that try to reassure us without answering anything. Maybe we can moderate them down? ;-)

Hereabouts, in the Boston area, they're all called Moaning People, since in the local dialect, "morning", "mourning" and "moaning" are homophones. (And the rumors about where they "pahk theyah cahs" is actually quite wrong, since if you pahk yoah cah theya, the Hahvahd police will tow it away.)

(I wonder how many others noticed.)

Yeah; one of the things I've been trying for: I've gotten troll+insightful, troll+informative, troll+funny, and funny+insightful+informative mods over the years, but I've never managed to get a troll+funny+(insightful|informative), no matter how hard I try. Part of it is starting off at level 2, so I have to get exactly 1 of each to succeed. Evicting trolls would totally end this (admittedly pointless) goal. OTOH, if the max rating were raised above 5, I'd stand a better chance of success. I've seen others manage it, so I know it's possible.

(I think I've figured out how to write "insightful" and "informative" messages that get me a "troll" mod from the overly serious or doctrinaire. But I haven't really figured out how to offend the humor-impaired while getting the humor across while talking seriously. It's sorta like trying to juggle one too many balls. ;-)

One of the aspects of this that I've actually seen some partial results for: The current thread layout tends to make it difficult to get beyond the first or sometimes second reply's threads, which fill up many screens, and it's hard to wade through it all to find the non-BS sections of the message trees. It could be a lot more useful if the Nth top-level replies were easier to find, and then also look at the 2nd-level replies to each. I don't think I've seen any really great solutions to this, though I've seen a few that seem to work a bit better than what /. does. Anyway, the problem can be seen in a lot of discussions by starting at the bottom, and noting that most of the messages there have few ratings or replies, meaning that hardly anyone has read them.

Of course, it's possible that something like this is available in the New! Improved! /. UI, and I just haven't recognized it. If so, maybe some more documentation is in order. It's also possible that just adding several more selectable numbers in addition to rating, depth, karma, etc., and provide some easily-accessible config settings so we can tweak them all until we each find a setting combo that we like.

Heh. Remind me of the comments I've seen in assorted places, to the effect that the intelligence of any group of humans is an inverse function of the number of members.

There's dispute about just what the inverse function is. This might be settled, in a sense, by the easy observation that the large body of internet groups show wide variation in visible intelligence, and it's fairly easy to show that this variation is very poorly correlated with a group's size. The conclusion is that there's not just one inverse function between population size and intelligence, there are many such functions.

This opens up what could be an interesting research proposal: Can we collect enough detailed data on populations, including not just their sizes and apparent intelligences, but various other quanitites that might be measurable (and which the groups' leaders will tell us)? If so, maybe we can infer useful information about why some online groups have the intelligence levels that they do.

Or maybe it's all just a hopeless mess. The value of the current IQ tests gives us little hope. But we do have something they don't: many petabytes of comments on all topics by billions of humans, most of it backed up so that repeated access is possible.

OK; it probably really is a hopeless mess. But think of how useful it could be if we could give discussion leaders useful guidelines for improving the intelligence of discussion groups. OK, with things like politics and religion, they'd just use it to drive the level down, but for most other subject, it could lead to an improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio.

Sounds to me like his employer should have provided him with some shelving. ;-)

I've seen this problem in several workplaces, where some employees' jobs involved collecting and often analyzing/summarizing/whatever numerous paper trails, but the managers didn't want to bother (or spend money on) the proper shelving to prevent that sort of stacking. Often, the victims of this sort of treatment eventually found another job elsewhere. Sometimes, they just made the best of a (literally) messy situation.

Perhaps, but the US "security" system doesn't consider the fact that info is openly published to be a reason not to classify the info as "secret".

There was a fun report some time back, about the US Dept of Defense funding a couple of academic researchers to study what could be learned about US military forces solely from publicly-available published sources. They spent some months collecting publications, wrote up their report, sent it to the DoD -- and within a couple of days it had a Secret classification. ;-)

Everyone who read the story got a good laugh, of course, but it does serve as an example of the logic behind the security classification system. It's also a useful counter-example of the old "If you've done nothing illegal, you have nothing to fear" mantra. In the US, it certainly can be illegal to be in possession of information that a government agency has published openly. It can even be illegal to know that it's illegal to have some information. (Google "FISA warrant" for some examples. ;-)