FriendOfDeSoto

That’s a matter of opinion. I suspect a big university like that quickly spends its budget and does way more than compile a dictionary. And if spelling is all you need, that still appears to be possible in front of the paywall.

For the longest time, it wasn’t free of charge. You had to buy expensive books. I fail to see a justification for the outrage. Also considering that this thread is rife with suggestions for alternatives and more dodgy solutions.

They aren’t under any obligation to provide the fruit of their labour free of charge.

As far as I can see their subscription prices have also only gone up over the years. Why? Do you think a Mr Burns like figure is sitting behind the scenes asking Smithers to relese the hounds? Or because running the linguistic operation, the database, and a website that people all over the world look at as the de facto authority of the language and gets queried thousands of times per day just cost shitloads of money? And they no longer get enough funding another way?

Did they ever put ads on their website? Do you run uBlock or similar plugins on your browser?

I mean, they have to pay the bills somehow. And this shows maybe how bad financially they’re off. Before the internet, you had to buy a copy of the book. I suspect those sales fell off a cliff in the last 25 years. So I may not like this decision but I can understand it.

And as others have suggested, there are other ways to get what you need online. This is a strong atmospheric disturbance in a serving vessel for hot infused beverages.

That’s conventional wisdom for lithium ion batteries. Keeping it between 20 and 80 percent will extend its life. But that doesn’t mean charging or discharging it fully will be bad immediately; the effects are small but cumulative. And while battery tech improves, this guideline will probably be less important.

I would prefer buyer or customer. Not Consumer.

If I could just quickly split this hair: there is a semantic difference. The buyer or customer paid money. The consumer needn’t have. If I buy my kid a Switch 2 I’m the buyer and my kid is the consumer.

I don’t disagree with your take that it gets overused though.

Bert and Ernie

I agree. And I think your idea of personal exchanges is something we should try. All I’m saying is that it’s too early for anyone to have a well thought through, working solution.

At different points in the past, we thought novels, newspapers, radio, television, and the internet would be the end of truth. Truth is still around. We develop systems to sieve through the bullshit. In terms of slop, I don’t think anyone can say for sure how we will deal with it. But if past experience is anything to go by, it will rely on reputation. You trust a certain news source because they have been reliable, so they have a reputation they don’t want to lose. And that keeps them honest or you move on. We will find a way to deal with slop as well that will be based on reputation. In addition to laws and regulations that are yet to be written.

Whether it’s news rooms or TikTubers or something completely new that will gain this reputation, eff knows. But we will get there.

What’s the point of doing something by executive order that will probably be reversed on day 1 of the next administration? A better way is to go through Congress whose legislation is harder to be overturned. So your hypothetical president should lead an effort to find compromise across the aisle. Currently, a fucking budget would be nice.

Given the limited power of the president, I fail to see anything more useful this particular president could do.

Fire the VP and then resign.

Preferably perpetual sleep to drown out all the news.

6 and 24 preferably.

I’ll be glad when he is no longer in power. I’m equally afraid of who will succeed him. Could our angry Americans please use their anger to change the absolutely insane system by which a president is elected and then invest wholesale in education? That’s just two examples I could think of off the top of my head. What’s good about getting rid of the orange only to fall into a fruit salad?

This isn’t but also somehow is a shit post.

Thanks for the correction

I would argue no one could choose one. A lingua franca is silently agreed upon over long periods of time. No committee sat down to make old Frankish the language of trade, modern French the language of diplomacy, and nowadays English the language of internet arguments.

If I had a magic wand though my vote is Klingon as well. Qa’plah.

Lingua franca is technically two words. Lingua franca refers to an old Germanic language lost to language evolution and time, not modern-day French. And using the term to denote a language that is widely understood by different people who don’t all speak it natively is perfectly understood, 20 years ago and today. The admittedly very eurocentric expression fills a useful niche because any explanation in vernacular English inevitably becomes much longer than these two established Latin words. But because it’s Latin the expression is also widely understood on the European continent as well.

We’ll never know until another NSA employee defects to Russia.

Just to add more context: these are good guy hackers who have responsibility shared their findings with the companies affected. It took them around 3 years to translate the signals they intercepted. And as far as anybody can tell, no one used this in the wild. It’s wild but it isn’t Snowden-wild.