Huh!? I'm not seeing the analogy you're trying to make here...you ARE perfectly free to start up a new (state or federal) political party, one which "provides more features" to its clients. In fact, it's probably EASIER to do that than it would be to start up a new telco and try to gain any traction.

I think that

is conjectural, and probably unproveable. I may well be that transparency always gives one the moral high ground. Of course, that's more or less orthogonal to the degree of umbrage taken (is umbrage taken in degrees?) by John Q. Public. Nobody likes their laundry aired by other people, regardless of how clean it is...even as people put more and more of their lives online for all to see, I suspect that we all want to be the people who control the flow on our personal information pipes.

I wonder whether there isn't a threshold to be (admittedly, somewhat arbitrarily) drawn in terms of "degree of influence". What an average member of the public chooses to divulge or keep secret affects a (comparatively) small group of people. Conversely, the machinery of international diplomacy, or the military, or corporate greed/corruption, etc. are---rightly or wrongly---perceived to affect a much wider group of people...potentially spanning multiple nations. It seems to me that this is the yardstick by which we (implicitly) judge the rightness/wrongness of divulging information. The greater the number of people affected, the more we want transparency (subject to my earlier caveat that agents seek to retain control over their information pipes, where e.g. the military, or Mega-Company Inc. can plausibly be construed as agents).

Hmm. That reads a bit ranty and disorganized. Just fired this off without much thought...

Best. Starve-a-fever-feed-a-cold. Evar.

I'm totally stealing this...

I'm skeptical of the notion that he no longer has Harper's ear, given his role in the Conservatives' rise to power. Moreover, I suspect a goodly chunk of the Canadian voting public (mostly West of Ontario) don't think what he says is really that outrageous.

Given the often controversial/incendiary nature of some of Flanagan's comments (not to mention the content of some of his books), I'd bet the truth is closer to formley publicly aknowledged advisor...

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tom_Flanagan

I would like to think that he recanted because enough Canadians, like me, e-mailed him directly to express outrage and make clear that he---as a [former?] close advisor to PM Harper---made it clear just how out of alignment the Conservative Party is with the Canadian moral compass.

Of course, given the following:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tom_Flanagan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Flanagan_(political_scientist)

I recognize that that's pretty much a fantasy on my part, and that parent is closer to the truth.

*sigh* I'm not super-proud of being a Canuck lately...

Funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in a while...thanks!

THIS. I recently moved to the US from Canada...the law is much clearer here about what kinds of penalties await. I won't be downloading anymore...but I may just turn to petty theft.

(j/k DHS...I'll be a good J-1, I promise!)

FTFY.

Thank you, Zeno.

Q: why do people who either never took, or failed, Cal I get modded Insightful?

This probably should have been modded higher; it's an astute observation. You can, indeed, say "a water", but pretty much only in the context you've highlighted here, you're actually using some kind of elliptical form to say "a [vessel filled with] water", i.e. you're effectively saying something other than what we're discussing above.

Um...thanks?

+5, Informative?...REALLY?!?...

OK, let's start with a handily recent post on the Language Log about Latin plurals (the post is about "syllabus", but "virus/viruses/*viri/**virii" show up in the comments).

Now, onward...

Actually (and ignoring the somewhat startling categorisation of computer virus as "substance"), not in the same way at all. You can't call a single molecule of water "a water" because "water" is a mass noun in English, and those don't (i) take indefinite articles, and (ii) don't pluralize nicely (inter alia). It's possible that this portion of your argument comes from here, which points out that in Latin, "virus" ("poison") was a mass noun. Of course, in English, "virus" is very clearly a count noun in English, since it can be (and overwhelmingly is) used with an indefinite article.

You appear in the preceding to be claiming that the word "virus" doesn't exist in English (or perhaps simply that is has no referent) a claim some information security researchers (and doctors!) might take issue with (cue lambasting for the stranded preposition in 3...2..1).

That being said, this raises an interesting point about...something. Maybe the type/token distinction? When someone says "I wrote a virus", we take him (or her, I suppose) to be making a claim about an implementation of some specific algorithm in some specific language, but not to any particular token of it.

I don't understand the grounds on which you're making this claim.

OK, so the "running program, and its data" counts pretty much as a "single token of the substance" at hand, in my book. So now it sounds like you're contradicting your opening claim.

As I just mentioned, you seem to be contradicting yourself (although I may just be misreading you), so you'll forgive if I take claims of clear thinking only quasi-seriously.

Why is this 'incorrect'? "I wrote a virus. I'm calling it Johnny5." Seems like a perfectly good use of "a virus" to me.

Again, isn't this in contradiction to how you started this comment?

Aside from the impossibility of "some arbitrary subset" of an instance (I'll assume that was just a typo/thinko), now you're just engaged in verbal wankery. I mean, I suppose you might choose to model the spread of contagion in a network of computers as the flow of a kind of fluid, but it's not clear if that's what you mean. And a population of tokens of a virus has no relevant physical expression (pace Wheeler & friends)...it's just a bunch of electrons.

Here, remarkably, I agree with you. "Viri" is a perfectly legitimate neologised plural, especially in the sociolinguistic context of places like Slashdot (although I confess that "virii", by some awful analogy with "radius~radii" hurts my eyes a wee bit). People can say whatever they want (but not without expecting to sometimes ruffle feathers), and use whatever linguistic constructs suit them best.

I don't know what you mean by "the same gooey mess". The reconstructed PIE root "*weis-" (attn: the *-operator is being overloaded here) apparently means "to melt away" or "to flow". Also, to characterise it as a "mispronunciation" reflects a lack of understanding of how sound change works, and ignores the fact that Vulgar Latin was spoken millennia after PIE. Simply put there was no PIE to be "mispronounced" when there were Latin speakers.

I get the point you're making, but I'm not sure it holds. The English word "virus" does come to us ultimately from PIE, but it does so via Latin where it was also "virus", and so it's not entirely arbitrary to stop there in search of a "correct" pluralisation (although the answer we get from Latin is ultimately unhelpful with respect to modern English). In particular, it's unclear whether earlier written forms exist, and earlier forms were in all likelihood different from the Latin (and, probably from the PIE, as well).

Anyway...that was a massive waste of time, during which I should have been coding. Damn you.

Not if you take into account anyone who's got line-of-sight to you, or is within earshot of you...

Linguists to the rescue...Here's an interesting, relatively well-written, and informative read on just that question...

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

and for the shorter version...

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

or

review by Melissa Katsoulis in The Sunday Times