I don't think advertising has any impact on ratings unless the nature of the advertisement is mature content and the game is rated for everyone. I haven't seen the ad yet so we'll have to see.

That's nice, but I think the GP's point is that 99% of book authors never touch a typesetting tool, whether that's Latex, InDesign, or whatever.

"Langwidges morfph get ust 2 it"?

Merriam adds new words every year to drum up new sales, it's an advertising gimmick. Most dictionaries are descriptivist, meaning they add whatever the fuck for whatever reason. They list how words are USED, not just what they mean. The downside of this is some semi-educated twat will point to entry 5 for "source"... and people become just a little bit dumber. English becomes a little bit less expressive.

Impact means collide, not change. Its meaning is independent of the ignorance of journalists and politicians who don't know the difference.

The 'languages evolve/change' bit is an excuse for the ignorant or by marketeers and MBAs to justify their buzzwords. Instead of correcting children when they make a mistake, we let it slide lest we hurt their feewings. A gross example of this is Ebonics. By not requiring black kids to learn English, they are automatically regarded as stupid. Condemned to what is effectively baby talk, because whites are either too evil to fund the schools properly, or too culturally thenthative to correct them. Obama would not be president if he hadn't mastered subject verb agreement.

It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or
hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
- George Orwell

Go back to making excuses for your ignorance and laziness.

And stay off my lawn.

I finished my second book earlier this year and provided the publisher with PDFs (as I did with my first book) generated with pdflatex. The books were both written in Vim, and included diagrams, code listings, and so on. I'd hate to imagine what it would be like to write either them, or my PhD thesis, for that matter, in Word.

Yeah, I like this little section from the Wikipedia entry:

Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was 15.34, which appeared later in 1985. Versions 2 to 12 never existed. Earlier versions of GNU Emacs had been numbered "1.x.x", but sometime after version 1.12 the decision was made to drop the "1", as it was thought the major number would never change.

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for all people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." -- Noam Chomsky

now if they could come up with a way to add transparacy and layers in different colors they would be onto something

I most definitely did!

Ok, this is a nice one. Hey, she got her handbag back, with her cellphone, and wallet, etc. But she also brought up an important issue: People can use this to a) stalk people b) By companies, to know exactly where their employees are, to see if they are doing their jobs, etc. I'm sure many people can think of other good and bad things. In my view, the good and bad balance each other, and so I personally wouldn't download this. Would you?

Google would willingly remove any copyrighted item from it's cache if requested. Would TPB remove any requested item from it's website?

Saying the two are the same is at best a very far stretch. At it's worst, it's no better than the legalese that someone like the RIAA would try to use to tie someone who downloads a single song to 1000's of lost sales.

TPB's only purpose is to facilitate finding copyrighted material on the web. Google's purpose is to facilitate finding any content on the web by crawling every website that allows it, BUT with the proviso that they will remove any contested content that may be picked up by a crawler.

They are NOT the same.

No, not like body builders, but there is a continuum between no muscles at all, and body-builders with big bulging muscles.

It is both about looks and about health. My weight training has e.g. been immensely helpful in eliminating problems with my back, which I previously had since I sit down all day at the office (I work as a software developer). In addition, having more muscle mass means that more energy is consumed when I do endurance exercises, which is good since I'm slightly overweight and I would like to reduce that by around 10 pounds.

Someone has to ask: at this point are we really sure that the elected representatives are really in control?

Aye! They were lucky.
there are some open source projects that would give their right arm just for a dollar and a filthy crust o' bread.
But you tell some folks that and they'll never believe you.

Best of all, it can be paid for with taxes on the very wealthy, redistributing wealth to the lower half of our economy and countering the wealth consolidation that caused the recession.

Redistribute wealth? It's better to create wealth than it is to redistribute it.

Falcon