In the current implementation of the stock market, yes. HFT routinely places insincere bids and yanks them back before a transaction completes. If they REALLY screw up, because of their size they get a do-over where all transactions in a stock get rolled back.

Reminds me of that Oscar Wilde joke.

Wilde comes down to lunch.
"Written another chapter of your book Oscar?"
"No. I spent this morning putting in a comma"

Wilde comes down to dinner.
Sarcastically, "Put another comma into your book Oscar?"
"No! I took out the comma I put in this morning."

RTFA. Changing words and phrases is exactly what this is about.

Whitespace is trivial to "fix". There's only one correct way to do it (one space), so a script to correct all of it (removing the watermark) would be an hour of work, tops.

Changing meaningful whitespace, i.e. linebreaks into spaces or vice-versa runs into the same problem I outlined. As an author, I actually make a choice there and there's a reason for where I start a new line or paragraph.

So that's why I come across obvious errors in books where I thought that if it stands out like a sore thumb at a non-native speaker, why the fuck did the proof-readers miss it?

It depends. If it's done well, it can be fairly resistant to any noise introduced into the system.

As an author myself, I see a very different issue with this. I don't want some robot changing my text. Some of those words it might decide to change because they are similar I may have pained over and decided for a reason to use this one and not the other one. Granted, few authors pick every single word intentionally, but the software won't know which ones are carefully selected.

Often times, there is subtle meaning. For example, I might decide to always use the same phrase in certain contexts, giving a very subtle hint to the reader which things are alike and which ones are different. One he might not even notice consciously.

It also will cause all sorts of trouble to quoting. How will teachers handle this if a student quotes a text but the quote differs slightly from the version the teacher has read? One of the most important things we teach students is that quotes need to be exactly as they appear, with any omissions or changes clearly marked.

That also extends to quotes within the text. If character A reports what character B said, I doubt the system will have enough text understanding to change both texts the same way, so the reader will be left wondering if it is intentional that there's a slight difference and what the author wants to hint at, when there's no such thing implied.

My house, my rules. Same for my blog or my forum.

It is absolutely, perfectly ok to censor anything I run on my servers in any way I want. If you don't like it, run your own server, where you can say whatever you want.

Really, I thought this was so blatantly obvious that it doesn't require explanation or justification. I'm shocked that people even discuss the point.

Or maybe some people enjoy living as a whole human being instead of slicing their life into pieces? He makes it quite clear that his role as a software maintainer and his personal and political opinions are linked and he wouldn't have become the former if it hadn't been for the later.

They are neither Fanboys or Trolls but professional disrupters hired by or benefiting from a relationship with the major propritary software vendors. They regularly change position and identities so as to shut down legitimate discourse.

"GPL isn't a documentation license."

`This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License' link

"The GPL itself isn't licensed under the GPL"

insert brain-fart ...

re-education must have worked :)

I looked up the David Buss evolutionary psychology reference you supplied (TMND) and saw he has one about women specifically, where a key point in the book is that there are many reasons women do what they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Buss

That makes sense when you think about it, because historically, like with some Native Americans, there were sometimes matriarchies where women controlled the land, and in hunter/gatherer societies that was a big deal. Selection for other attributes of men may then have been important.

It turns out I made a slashdot post about a year ago that touches on this issue too:
"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)"
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality. ..."

I then mention some men/women issues related to the themes you raised. Also, I make a point that relates to yours, that men tend to move from high testosterone competition patterns in their teens and twenties to lower testosterone cooperative patterns in their forties and fifties.

Regarding "The Selfish Gene", see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
http://www.amazon.com/The-Difference-Diversity-Creates-Societies/dp/0691138540
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift

Evolution selects for all possible combinations at all possible levels, even if our simple brains may have trouble following that or turning it into math...

Also, regarding being short -- when food or air is in short supply, being smaller can be an advantage sometimes. Being short also helps in Judo, Life is full of tradeoffs, where our characteristics and preferences can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation. That is one reason the world is so diverse.

Good point about how standards change over time, too.

Hope to have time to see those Adam Curtis documentaries someday! Thanks for the recommendations.

Thank you, I believe I actually followed that.

So if it's a union of two mesons, I'm calling it a mesonicule, but I'm hoping for tetraquark, because that just sounds awesome and makes we want to say "10 quatloos on the newcomer". ;-)

this sounds a lot like the visit Kim Dotcom received. I keep thinking about him lately, and wondering if he just wasnt going to play ball, and had the perfect platform for "enemies of the state" to take advantage of.

maybe google just needs to talk about the compiled data, and mention how it may be on a somewhat "internal" server. And maybe screw up the robots.txt file, and maybe accidentally index it to a giant search engine. Or to step back further, they could just talk about having this information somewhere, and anonymous somehow finds it. Or maybe it is a random leak like the kind that illegally came from the white house before the election that never got pursued.

Asking permission is just the first step if they are serious.