That's an interesting point, and I'm going to try take it a little farther:

Perhaps the reason most people think of "legalese" as something that is nigh unintelligible is because the vast majority of legal matters that ordinary people deal with are the sorts of law that are well-established, and have been for decades or even centuries, which means that the language used for these matters is often boilerplate from long, long ago.

When you get to novel issues of law, such as what the Supreme Court deals with (usually), or the cases considered important enough to be reported, you will still have to deal with (1) weird language when it comes to the procedure that lead to the case being in front of the court, and (2) the fact that a complicated set of facts often leads to complicated sentences.

But otherwise, the opinions are usually fairly clear. They are written in modern language, by a person who probably grew up in circumstances similar to your own. There is the occasional bit of jargon, but it's not like trying to read a different language.

As for the common legalese that people encounter with boilerplate language... I don't really know if there's a good solution to that.

And of course, I'm sure there is some truth to the idea that lawyers use their jargon to stay exclusive, but I think that's true of any profession.

I think the difference in all of these cases is that your example products are all being sold by the same overall company, while Cryptozoic is different company from Blizzard, so the competition, to the extent that there is any, can and will hurt them.

But I don't actually know anything about Cryptozoic. I'm just basing this entirely on a careful reading of what grandparent post said.

I think one of the big culprits here is generated documentation.

Imagine writing some code... you get through a couple hundred lines of code detailing what Wangles are and what you can do with them.

No matter how on-the-ball you are, you're still going to be writing comments and documentation from the position of someone who can see the whole tamale. You know what Throbbing does, and you know why you would want to do it, because you just have to hit page up and *duh*.

Then the doc generator passes through, slurps up the comments (but obviously not the code) and plops it in to some template that was designed to fit the lowest common denominator, and all of a sudden it's completely out of context.

Maybe this isn't how MSDN actually generates its docs, so maybe I'm way off base here, I don't know. But it sure looks that way to me.

TL;DR: closed-source bad, open source good. Come on, mod points!

"I have altered the details of our arrangement, pray I do not alter it any further."

Hmm, now who said that?

I'm a surveyor, and I use GPS to locate points to within a few hundredths of a foot (a couple centimeters, if you will). So, I don't know if my interpretation is exactly what the article intended, but I saw "tens of meters" and immediately thought "really really bad" and didn't even consider the possibility that the range of variation in "tens of meters" would be significant...

It's interesting how our minds immediately write things off like that... In most other circumstances I think I would have went exactly where you did and asked about the precision.

Something like... if you or I heard that it would cost "several billion dollars" to buy out a particular company, we'd just go "whoa, that's a lot"... but there's a select subset of people who would perk up their ears and say "umm, how much is 'several'?"

Yeah, I'm getting that vibe too... He asks "what would you use this bandwidth for?" then when people answer, he says "well that wouldn't be useful to me" in a way that implies it would be *wrong* for it to be useful for anyone else.

To continue your car analogy, he's like those assholes who go 45 in a 55, then speed up to 70 when you try to pass them, because he thinks the world would be a better, safer place if we all drove 45 or under.

Are alcoholics not "alcohol abusers?" It seems to me that they are defining "abuse" as falling outside of medically approved use, not legal standards.

And again, I don't think that "use and abuse" were being used as lexical replacements for "legal and illegal," but rather "healthy and unhealthy." (In the sense that the current medical establishment has fiat to determine what is and isn't healthy.)

Your connection of the evils of the U.S. legislature to the use of the phrase " drug abuse" by a British science publication is tenuous at best.