Comment Re:And in the US (Score 1) 815
Perhaps, but man of us who work with computers (where words do have rather rigid meanings,) do so because we are not really very good at dealing with ambiguous wording.
And yet, the computer industry seems to be one of those who tend to produce conflicting uses of words (I have long maintained that to keep up with computers, you have to have the ability to keep multiple sets of conflicting vocabulary in your head, and keep them straight). You even see conflicting uses within the same company (e.g. two different lines of Burroughs minicomputers had conflicting semantics for the terms 'Cold Start' and 'Warm Start: on one line, Cold Start meant to bring the computer up from a power off condition and Warm Start was essentially what we now call a reboot; on the other line, Cold Start meant to erase the disk drive and load the operating system, and Warm Start meant to replace the operating system without erasing the disk. Failing to disambiguate this terminology properly could have disastrous results.). In the computer language arena, it's not at all uncommon for identical concepts to be expressed in different terminology in different languages, and at the same time seemingly identical terminology in different lanaguages refer to slightly different concepts. I begin to understand why Platonism developed. It almost seems like you've got an arena of rigidly defined concepts out there 'somewhere' that we can only access through terminology that is constantly changing and at times in conflict.