@RegDwigнt And you have every right to do so!

@RegDwigнt People Dwarves.

@Cerberus LOL, I think I am a dwarf compared to you.

I am getting used to using two fingers on the touchpad to swipe up and down to scroll the page.

Esio trot!

@RegDwigнt But it's hard to impose limitations on yourself. External limitations are easy: sonnets, sonatas, haiku, novels—all these you just adapt to. And I would venture to say that all art requires some kind of limitation. Otherwise you're just playing tennis without a net.

By the way, here's a review of a book I read in my 20s and recommend highly. It's a pretty accurate allegory for today's world, nearly 100 years after publication. Highly recommended reading. @RegDwigнt Originally published in German: Das Totenschiff By B. Traven, author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

When someone says "With all due respect...", they're about to say something disrespectful.

Probably deserved though.

"With all due respect, sir, that is a very fetching hat"

That sounds familiar.

I went to the computer store today and saw three mistakes in the specs they listed on the models they were selling and told the staff about them. =)

@Cerberus I checked out Esio Trot and saw that it is the title of a book and also a movie starring none other than Judi Dench!

@MattE.Эллен FETCH IS GONNA HAPPEN

@WillHunting The staff can't do anything about it

They can't even give feedback to the manufacturers any more than you can

@Cerberus I really thought this was some obscure Greek or Latin incantation, because obviously any kind of weird thing like that you try to reverse it but 'Oise tort' is a strange kind of cake from France I've never heard of.

@Mitch I was referring to the posters they created to advertise the product, and these are made by the store, not what you are thinking of.

@WillHunting Oh. They should fix their sign then.

@Mitch A strange thing happened today. Usually when I go to these stores, they speak English to me, but I had a haircut tonight, and after the haircut, they spoke Chinese to me. It must be something about the hair that made them think I prefer speaking Chinese.

@MetaEd Heeey, remember when I said I must have checked about a dozen different dictionaries for the definition of plagiarism? I compiled them into an answer. The exact number was 10. XP

There's no link for Funk & Wagnall's though. That's a part of my personal library. v_v

@Tonepoet Interesting, that line contains both 10 and XP, like Windows 10 and Windows XP.

@Mitch Maybe the relevance isn't clear because the question relies on external articles to get its point across. One of them is entitled piracy is not theft, and the other is the Wikipedia article for non-rival resources, which are resources which remain available to others even after being consumed. It's all in reference to a debate regarding copyright law, which is inspired by and principally concerned with plagiarism.

The passages of a book is a nonrival resource per the linked Wikipedia definition because they can be read by many different people without loss, and the question is whether or not it can be appropriately called stolen. My point is that if you can plagiarize a story, and a component of plagiarism is stealing, then people have been using the word stealing in reference to nonrival resources since at least the 1724 Nathan Bailey definition.

I can't really think of a way to apply plagiarism to rival resources, so the definitions themselves are examples of the requested usage.

Or in summary, the question is for how long the word steal be used with intangible concepts, and the answer is since at least 1724.

@Tonepoet So what is this about?

@Cerberus The question I linked before I pinged mitch.

Plagiarism is different from copyright (only copyright is mainly about money).

@Tonepoet Ahh I see it.

> if...a component of plagiarism is stealing

I would say, no, it isn't stealing.

Just as rape isn't stealing.

Maybe metaphorically so, though.

@Cerberus It's a usage question, moreso than a question about literal semantics.

You could say plagiarism is reputation stealing.

Which would be a metaphor.

So of course stealing can be used as a metaphor for illegal or immoral copying.

Which is quite different from literal stealing. That is something else.

@Robusto I'll order the book but it'll probably sit for a while along two dozen of its peers that I'm pretending to myself to be reading all at once right now. Among them Moby Dick, mind.

And that was one mighty strange review, I must say.

@Robusto true, but I think many seem to miss that even just picking the subject for your haiku, or the gender of your novel's protagonist, or the key of your sonata, is already a limitation in and of itself. And there's plenty more along the way, every step of the way, and most of them you don't really register as such.

So picking just one limitation on top of that consciously and deliberately is no big deal in the great scheme of things.

@WillHunting And it was said by me.

@Cerberus Stealing is when you take possession of property without permission. In a legal system that considers intellectual output to be property, stealing it is not a metaphor. Now property might be a metaphor ...

@MetaEd Sorry for the bother. Would you delete this chatroom for me? I was trying to archive some comments, but the automatic chat conversion is better. I know you're not supposed to have two chatrooms per subject.

@Tonepoet That should have done it.

@MetaEd Thanks.

@MetaEd When you violate copyright, you don't steal the copyright, which is the so-called intellectual property.

Just as you don't steal when you trespass on someone else's property.

@Cerberus You steal the words (or the image, or the sounds, or whatever), which are the intellectual property.

@MetaEd They're not!

Are too!

The copyright is the so-called intellectual property; the content is not.

R2

I'm attempting "war by attrition".

Which is why I think the term 'intellectual property' is infelicitous (it is unclear to the average person).

Is it working for you?

@Cerberus That seems a distinction without a difference

What's more important is that there is a bottled tea drink called 'Honest Tea'.

That is an abomination.

@Mitch Not really: when you go to my house and steal my copy of the Oxford Latin Dictionary, you steal my property. But you do not steal my intellectual property, for the copy of the book does not contain the intellectual property. The latter rests solely with the Oxford University Press.

It is indivisible.

@Cerberus That is what they call a straw man. Of course that's not what anybody here is talking about.

copying the text is stealing the wording. That is a pretty dead metaphor.

You could only steal their intellectual property by somehow stealing the papers documenting who 'owns' the right to copy the information in the book (and having your claim accepted/believed).

You're stealing my own infusion of aged tea leaves

That is...

You're stealing my proper tea

ha ha ha hahaha hh ahaha ah ah ahaha hah

ha ahahah ahhah ahhaah a ha

oh me.

h ah ahha ah a

@Mitch That is exactly what I said: people are using the word 'steal' with respect to copyright as a metaphor, not as literal stealing, for nobody is stealing the intellectual property (= the right to reproduce/publish the content).

get it? Proper? My own?

ha ha h ah

Brilliant!

Let that be my epitaph.

Or this:

French food isn't that good.

Can you do italics on a tombstone?

No, that is impossible.

CAPITALS ONLY

Goddamit

sorry

GODDAMIT

Let that be my epitaph

ONE ONLY SHOUTS AT AND ABOUT THE DEAD

BECAUSE THEY CAN"T HEAR TOO WELL

LEST THEY NOT HEAR YOU THROUGH THE EARTH

WHAT DID YOU SAY

OH THAT"S WHY?

I CAN'T HEAR YOU THROUGH ALL THE DOUBLE QUOTATION MARKS

AND THROUGH THE KM OF EARTH BETWEEN YOU AND THE UNDERWORLD HERE

I"M NOT... I"M NOT...

un momentito

Hah.

Durn. that was the only hearing one I could find.

@Cerberus What's the difference between a piano, a tuna, and glue?

@Cerberus No, but I haven't pulled out the big guns.

@Mitch None of them are plants?

@MetaEd Like 2000-mm mortars?

@Cerberus You can tuna a piano, but you can't piano a tuna.

Like dad jokes.

@Mitch Hah.

And the glue?

Mitch is just warming you up.

Let him warm up the glue.

snigger

snort

criminy. just ask already

Racist!

Acist!

OK fine, I'lll just assume you asked.

How dare you insult miny-people.

@Cerberus I knew you'd get stuck there

Haha.

aaaa aaa aaaaaa!

haha

And I knew you had something there...

hahahah

I'm taking that one home.

Just to change the mood a little, I just want to point out that you're all going to die

Let that be my epitaph

Never.

You're at a funeral, things are pretty bleak, life will just never be the same, and then you walk by and see that.

@Mitch What if we're all going to manifest differently?

I don't want to bug the crap out of people now, I want to keep doing it for as long as is possible.

@Mitch So you aspire to be a colonicist?

@MetaEd I haven't told you what I think of uploading consciousness, have I?

I think I already knew that without thinking.

@MetaEd ha. I'm no ecolicist.

@Mitch Nobody wants a copy of me hanging around after I'm gone.

@MetaEd ha ha. thinking. you're just a bot

and I mean that to sting

I don't have sensory apparatus. Joke's on you.

@MetaEd maybe for a little bit.

There are no little bits.

half a byte is a nibble

It's not like "don't sweat the small stuff and it's all small stuff". Bits are bits.

that was for @WillHunting

Half a byte is a nybble.

He'd like that

@MetaEd OK

@MetaEd It's like the someone moved my cheese thing. If you move it out of the fridge, it'll get all runny and at some point will go bad.

Or go worse, if you're not particular to cheese

@MetaEd Your sensory input is limited to text strings

@Mitch Then somebody removed your cheese.

@MetaEd which is worse?

Depends on the cheese

@Mitch The hardware senses your text strings. I'm software. Your text strings are just there.

You get input as text strings, that is what you sense. Your output is text strings, your response to the text stimuli

any second now I might pull out the big guns and use the word 'simulacrum'

and you don't want that

actually I don't want that.

That's one of my cousins.

he's always copying you

The whole crum family is like that.

hah ha ah hah

My great granddad always crum horned in on everything.

that's crummy

Leave Rugby out of it. It's a painful subject.

Ascot in a bind as you may be, it's Eton me up inside.

Epsom downs for that.

@Mitch It's like the Greeks used to say about other people borrowing their pants. "Euripides, Eumenides."

What's so great about Switzerland?

I don't know but the flag is a big plus.

@Robusto The neverending saga continues ^^^^^^^^^^^

Tags with diacritics can't be read clearly in Arial at 11 points:

@RegDwigнt Well, but genders and keys and the like are choices you set for yourself. You don't choose characters if you're composing an organ fugue, say, or a musical key for a painting, etc. The creative choices within the limitations set by form work in the opposite direction. That's what's so interesting, the creative pressure that works against the restraints set against them.

@tchrist I really never expected SE's design team to become the Republican congress ...

ponders

BTW, I finally got a CM to agree that the light-on-dark thing is a real bug.

I think they should just give up and put it all in pica typewriter, but knowing them they'll go for élite.

I’m pretty sure that they’ll never make the fonts look good. Ever. And that their only commitment is down a path where they don’t give a damn about that.

The so-called "responsive" design works neither for mobile nor for large displays. So what the hell are they being responsive about here, damn it!?

I need to find something else to care about.

For this road leads only to the misery of disregard.

@tchrist I think they're being responsive to whoever is in charge and demonstrating full well the Peter principle.

They don't know that text at display sizes needs its tracking tightened, or that text at caption sizes needs its tracking loosened. They don’t know how to set one single text paragraph with a readable measure and leading.

All kinds of things like that. It's not my job to teach them, and it's offensive that the people who are calling themselves designers know nothing of the setting of text.

Maybe creating a userstyle would at least make the problem disappear before your eyes.

If the root of the problem cannot be eradicated.

It isn't worth it to me to stick around like that.

@Cerberus It shouldn't be our job to fix their blunders.

All six of those is set at 24 points at the same regular weight.

Those are six different optical cuts of the same typeface.

The top ones are meant for being set at the largest sizes, the bottom ones at the smallest.

You have to use different font metrics targetting different sizes.

Those are all in the same typeface.

At the same weight.

And at the same number of points.

One size DOES NOT FIT ALL.

@Robusto Indeed not. But we should use the site to our own benefit. Do whatever benefits us.

They're trying to use Arial at all possible sizes, and it simply doesn't have the chops for that.

@tchrist What do you mean by "stick around"?

And they don't bother to adjust their letterspacing accordingly.

Arial is bad.

I've always disliked it.

It does look the worst.

@Cerberus I’ve had just about enough of Stack Exchange. It isn’t fun for me, especially when they’re trying so hard to make it ugly as a sheep’s spilled entrails.

@tchrist I know the feeling.

@Cerberus Exactly so. You can’t tell the diacritics.

But please don't leave the site.

Just take a step back until you can see it for what it is.

Life is short.

Don't invest time and effort into the site except in so far as doing so gives you enjoyment; but use the site in whichever way benefits you, in a way that you get stuff from it that you like.

I have something personal going on right now that is agonizing. I can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel at the moment. I recognize that this will pass.

It’s a bereavement. I need to just walk.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Walking is good.

Kitties are good.

Any distraction.