Because they don't want to lose their jobs, etc., etc. ;-)

This is hardly anything new. Remember a few years back, when there was a bit of a fuss when people caught msn.com using customers' photos of their children (taken from email and web files "hosted" on msn.com servers) in their advertising? MS's first reaction to criticism was to point out that this was totally legal, since their TOS said specifically that any files stored on one of their machines became the property of Microsoft and msn.com. They were apparently surprised when people were upset by this.

The PR was so bad then that within a few weeks, their reps announced that they had stopped the practice. Some months later, though, people were pointing out that the language was still in their TOS doc.

And, as at that time, MS could logically point out that they aren't looking at any files owned by customers. By uploading email or other files to their servers, customers are legally assigning ownership of the files to MS. So MS is reading its own email files, not customers' email.

Sorry if this upsets you, but this is how US law on such things seems to work. Unless you've got a few spare million or so dollars to challenge it in court, in which case a decade or so from now the court might decide in your favor. Why don't you take it on as a project, and let the rest of us know how it works out? You'd be doing us all a big favor (if you win).

Nah; we don't much bother with the tanks these days. Instead, we keep our drones overhead. They're a lot cheaper, and their operators are far from the scene. And if the terrists should shoot one down, we have lots more to send to their wedding parties.

Oh, c'mon; any first-year math student can tell you how to set up a base-pi system so that the digits represent integers. You start by using the usual Greek letter pi (which /. can't display, right? ;-). Then you simply observe that, being the usual real-number field, we can divide our base number pi by itself, and define the shorthand symbol "1" to represent the result. After defining addition in the usual way, we define the shorthand symbol "2" to represent 1+1. And so on. Similarly, we subtract the base from itself, and define "0" as the shorthand symbol for the result. A couple of our earliest theorems demonstrate that 0 is the identity number for addition, and when we've defined multiplication, we also prove that 1 is the identity for that operation.

Actually, the only difference between this and our usual system is that we no longer call 10 our base; that term is reserved for pi.

Some years ago, I read an even more abstruse definition of the real numbers. It started with the numbers e and pi, and had a couple of axioms (which I've forgotten) defining their basic properties. From these, the writer derived two numbers that were called "0" and "1", and everything else followed from that.

Mathematicians often like to come up with abstruse examples like these, just for the fun of it. But such exercises can come in handy at times, when you are dealing with people who are arguing for an "improved" scheme for something. If you can show that it's equivalent to the usual scheme, you can produce the same sort of argument showing how to derive the usual symbols and axioms, and from then on you're home free.

The same approach has been used to explain why the US has in fact been "on the metric system" since the 1880s. Back then, the US Standards Bureau (whatever it was called that year) redefined all the usual "English" units of measurement in metric terms, on the grounds that at the time, the repository in Paris had the most precise system of measurements available. Thus, the inch was redefined as 2.54 cm exactly, and similarly for all the others. Since then, the legal basis of all units of measurement in the US has been the metric units. We just have an "extended" metric system that has a lot of other units that aren't mentioned in the ISO's standards documents.

And the metric system has been legal in the US for all purposes since some time in the 1840s, by an edict of Congress. So we don't need to "go metric"; we did that long ago. We just need to use the basic metric units more, rather than those goofy (2.54x? WTF??) units that some of us like so much.

Heh. I've noticed that both are quite common, and depending on aesthetic ideals about such things, one or the other is likely to offend most readers. So I try to use both of them, preferably close together.

In any case, the ";-)" one isn't mouthless, since if you lean your head to the left, you can clearly see that the paren is the mouth. Adding the left paren not only gives balanced parens, but also gives the emoticon a forehead. Apparently it's bald, but what can ya do?

One fun part of all this agonizing is that if you include both parens (perhaps in a misguided sense to satisfy picky editing software ;-), the rendering software often converts the ";-)" to an image, but leaves the "(" as is, producing an unclosed open paren.

Ya can't win at such games; the only winning move is to refuse to play. Or maybe to throw a monkey wrench into both attitudes.

We already have a calendar system "For the Information Age": the second counter. Actually, of course, we have a whole series of them, but they differ only in the zero "epoch" second, so translation between them is trivial. The most widely-used such counter is the unix/POSIX time() value, perhaps augmented with a decimal point and a fractional second value.

This "calendar system" has a property that all the others lack: simple arithmetic operations work with it. And once you have the second for some event, there are library routines that can translate it to a human-readable form in any other calendar that you like.

So feel free to invent other interesting calendars; we software types won't be offended. We'll just ask you to be very precise in how you define your calendar, so we can write the routines to produce your calendar from ours. Of course, we'll expect you to pay us for this unnecessary labor, but it only has to be done once for each calendar. And maybe one of your calendars can be the human-readable calendar that supplants the silly Christian calendar, relegating it to use in scheduling your religious holidays.

Just don't ask us to use your calendar (or any other that's not a single number that can be used to any precision) inside our OSs or libraries. The "Information Age" needs a calendar system that works using ordinary real numbers, and aside from the question of when the zero was, we have that already.

(Actually, there's also the slowly-growing problem of different clock speeds caused by relativistic effects, but that's probably a discussion for a much more technical forum than this one. ;-)

Funny example: Recently a (real ;-) doctor recommended a particular plant extract to my wife, to treat a minor skin condition that caused major itching and reddening. She found it at Whole Foods, and I noticed that it was labelled as "homeopathic", with a 1X dilution. So it was actually 10% the active ingredient.

It actually worked quite well; the problem disappeared in a few days and hasn't recurred. Checking online showed that it's one of many "natural" ingredients that can be sole OTC, as long as no specific medical claims are made.

So we might ask why they labelled it "homeopathic" when it has such a high fraction of active ingredient. Our guess is "marketing": The company that packages it wants to sell to the not-insignificant fraction of the population that believes in homeopathic cures. The doctors probably just grin, knowing that it's meaningless, but also knowing that a good number of traditional "folk" remedies are actually useful, as long as the problem is minor and precisely-measured medicine isn't required.

Actually, years ago I was diagnosed with chronic "dry skin" by a doctor, who recommended olive oil. He did explain that it really isn't a medicine at all; it just slows down evaporation and lets the skin retain more of the water it gets from deeper tissues. It worked well enough that he said real medication wasn't needed. I've used it off and on ever since, mostly in winter when indoor air is typically very dry, and it works quite well. I wonder if such plant oils are ever labelled "homeopathic", perhaps at a 0X "dilution factor". ;-)

(That doctor also joked about it being a medicine he learned from his Italian grandmother.)

And here we have someone ("sumdumass" ;-) stating the real behind-the-scenes issue at hand: Employers want to be the ones who control what sort of health care their employees get. In particular, employers want the right to deny contraceptives to their female employees. In fact, they do to a great degree currently have that "right". This discussion is about whether a minor part of it can be taken away from the employers and handed over to the affected employees to decide on their own.

This isn't a religious issue at all, because corporations don't have religions (or morals or ethics or ... ;-); they only have products and sales and profits and losses and employees and owners and other such non-religious (but very business-related) things.

The real issue is the desire for company control over their employees lives, up to and including when or whether employees can have children.

The real solution would be to end the perverse American connection of health care to employment. That's the main reason for the expensive disaster that is American health care. It's tied to a part of the culture that is only concerned with profit, and whose usual approach to an employee with a serious health problem is to fire them. As long as this scheme is continued, things will continue to be as screwed up as to lead to discussions like we're having today.

Or, more generally, anyone who stores anything on a commercial server and expects privacy is a fool.

Yes, this is especially true with "free" services, which must be profitable or they won't exist for long. But one should generally assume that any data that's ever been on any company's machines will be saved (at least backed up) and available indefinitely to any company employee or customer who's willing to pay. Anything else just shows a total misunderstanding of how these companies work.

Actually, some of the jobs I've had has involved maintaining and troubleshooting the email systems. I've had many occasions where as part of fixing a reported problem, I subtly let the people involved know that, yes, I can see the content of all their messages, so they might want to be a bit more careful about what they put in writing. In a few cases, they've even thanked me for this extra warning.

I've found that a good way of explaining this is by telling people that email isn't like a postal letter; it's really more like a post card. Everything is visible to the people who handle the delivery process. Usually they won't read anything, but they can, and with email it's so easy that I often have to carefully avoid reading the content. And in a few cases, I've had to dig into the content itself to figure out why the delivery system messed it up. (I don't like to do this, but some email software does "interesting" things to the content, and the damage can only be fixed by looking at the text itself.)

And, as others have said, with a free service you should understand that you're not the customer, you're the product. Or rather, the content of what you're sending and receiving is their product, which they sell to their actual customers.

Some time back, there was an informative pair of pictures in an xkcd forum. Scan down for "but this" for the images.

There might be a way to include such a search string in a URL, but I don't know how to encode it ...

Yeah, but you violated another well-known of grammer's rules: Don't use commas, which aren't needed.

Um, if that's true, then why didn't the judge cancel Fluke's trademark on this color scheme? As others have pointed out, most (but not quite all) of the multimeters on the US market use the same or a very similar color scheme. I did a quick check of my basement and garage work areas, found three multimeters with dark bodies and yellow edges, none of them a Fluke. (A 4th in a kitchen drawer has a red edge.) The fact that this color scheme is so widely used should have automatically wiped out Fluke's trademark claim.

Anyone know why they succeeded in this one challenge? Why this victim, and not all the other "infringers"?