Blizzard still uses torrents to distribute software updates in their games, right?

From CNet's article:

This is the same committee that wouldn't let any women testify in a hearing on contraception last month.

Apparently, if you know something about the topic at hand, they don't want your input.

It's not about blaming the driver (and if you think the driver is as much or more of a victim than the dead child or the child's parent, you have a really twisted view of reality). It's about giving the responsible driver better tools to more effectively do what he's doing already.

If you don't think the benefit is worth the expense, that's one thing, but you sound like someone complaining that mandating railings on stairways is an abdication of personal responsibility that forces responsible people to pay for those irresponsible people who don't have perfect balance when they climb stairs.

Why assume the kids are unsupervised? Have you ever seen a toddler running around? They're faster than you might expect, and they're not always predictable, even when you *are* watching them.

And in an interesting twist, I read an article about artificial hearts the other day which noted that because of the decrease in traffic fatalities due to all these safety features, the supply of hearts for organ transplants has dropped dramatically, putting more pressure on the effort to build a long-lasting artificial heart.

This is about sight lines. The problem it's trying to solve is backing up over someone who's too short & too close to be seen over the back of the car even if you *do* look in the mirror.

If by "young people without much experience," you mean the toddlers who haven't quite grasped the lesson that they shouldn't walk behind the car to wave bye bye to mommy or daddy or aunt so-and-so because they're too short to be seen over the back of the car using mirrors up at the front, then yeah.

But while that's what the proposal is focused on, that doesn't sound like what you're talking about.

I keep running into local businesses, especially restaurants, that had some designer build the entire site in Flash because it looked cool and they want to make a statement. And then I can't look up their hours or menu ahead of time. With hours you can at least call them, but that assumes you can get at the phone number -- and sometimes *that's* behind Flash as well. Hooray for third-party directories like Yelp.

So who's doing the analysis? Facebook, or Politico?

If Facebook is doing the analysis and handing Politico a graph (or rather the numbers that can be made into a graph), then big deal. Facebook already has access to the information, and nothing personal is going public, even anonymized.

OTOH, if Facebook is grepping for candidates' names, stripping off the usernames, and handing *that* to Politico, *that* would be a breach of privacy.

Not to mention people in taxis, buses, trains...

Can't have someone checking /. on their morning train commute, now can we?

The article isn't about old people being grumpy about the change, or about change in general. The article is about the change itself.

"Language changes" isn't new, but "This language is changing in this way" is.

Thank you - you came up with much better examples than I did.

On a related note, I wonder how long we'll keep using pictures of floppy disks as the toolbar icon for "save."

Even without new spellings, there are plenty of names with long-standing variations just within the traditional English spelling (Katherine/Catherine, for instance) or virtually-identical forms with origins in different languages (Jacob/Jakob). And that's before getting into nicknames. (Going back to the first example: Katie/Katy, or Kathy/Cathy, or Kate/Cate.)

Migration is the obvious explanation for mixing things up, but it occurs to me that large-scale shared culture also contributes: If you know several people named Steven but no one named Stephen, you'll only think of the first variation. If you start reading Stephen King, then you're exposed to the other spelling even if no one named Stephen moves to town.

Maybe, maybe not. People still talk about putting the cart before the horse, but I'd bet most Americans don't have personal experience with horse-drawn carts. Never mind making silk purses out of sow's ears. "Broken record" might fall out of favor, or it might linger on like "the quick and the dead" (pretty much the only place in modern English where "quick" still means alive instead of fast).

Hmm, do TV commercials still say "Don't touch that dial!"?