Especially when either option would be contextually possible.

@Cerberus I love Nexus so far. It's fast, I like the screen, uhh... I like the touch feedback enough that I left it on, whereas I hated it on evo and turned it off (not sure what to call it, but where the screen gives you a buzzy feel for a lot of actions). I can actually play with dynamic wallpaper and widgets that update things without them overheating the phone or killing my battery life... I don't know what to say about it. I'm pretty happy with gmail on it which I use a ton.

@Cerberus yeah, but you're guessing.

hands @aedia coffee

They're making me wait.

@aediaλ Ohhh that sounds exactly like what I had in mind. I want it so badly.

@Robusto To my tea party.

@KitFox <3

I would rather not eat for a day that wait another day.

And that says something.

Aww.

@Mitch I think I don't mean that. I think I'm saying what the OED is saying.

'You can stick your head through this tiny hole in the fence.' 'What, should I do it now?' 'No, I mean it is possible for anybody.''

I'm rereporting their reporting of usage

@MattЭллен Do you remember hearing it used singularly in a situation where plural was contenxtually/pragmatically possible?

@MattЭллен I think you're an (prepares to spit) OEDite. (spits)

@Cerberus I don't live where it's used

I don't hear it

But surely you have heard people use it?

Southerners use "y'all" for singular sometimes.

@KitFox Nope.

Also, "children" for one child.

In videos and such?

@Cerberus sure, in TV sitcoms. I don't hold them in high regard for authenticity

No real people?

not that I recall

1979 for y'all?

@Robusto If you pop over to Chatzy, I'll post a link.

etymonline.com/index.php?term=y%27all

1879.

Hah.

@KitFox (belated jinx) no not at all.

So it's fairly new.

@Mitch Really? Because I've heard it.

@KitFox gah. stupid numbers.

@KitFox yeah, you heard wrong.

Hahaha.

Y'all're pulling my leg.

Who? Just Mitch and I, or Matt too?

lol

I hate waiting.

And if you did, I prophylactically say that they were being polite (!!) or the person who would have made it plural had just stepped out of the room. No true (whoever says these things) would actually mean it as a singular.

Hear, hear.

Sez you.

dixi

After all, what does the OED know?

exactly.

It is hardly Oxonian parlance.

yeah, they only study this stuff for a living

piece crap book

seriously, they don't know everything.

stamps on OED

But I suppose I would say the context in which I heard it would be likened to "Y'all can stick your head through this fence."

and even what they know, they're not printing.

falls down several metres from the pile of OED volumes

@KitFox yeah. maybe you should.

resigned from my job, and posted this: slashdot.org/submission/2112787/…

also, you-uns is apparently a singular/plural pronoun in the Appalachian parts of the US

:-)

@KitFox So as in you impersonal?

Yeah.

F-ck I hate waiting.

But...

F*ck I love boobs though

@Jez Oh, congrats, I guess!

It was a bit outrageous.

Are y'all saying you wouldn't say "you can stick your head through this hole in the fence" to mean "a person, theoretically, could stick their head through this hole in the fence"? Or you would mean that? I'm so confused

@MattЭллен I just really love them.

@aediaλ I would mean that.

@aediaλ I think they mean that using "y'all" there would be possible and it would mean just that.

@Cerberus yeah, but now that Cisco supply an "off-the-shelf" device that performs a MITM attack for you with minimal configuration, I fear more Naziish IT depts will just install them

Bah, the umbrella is on the MultiCollider.

@MattЭллен you'uns or yinz? It's totally yinz

@aediaλ southern applalachia is different from northern.

@Jez It is possible...all the more reason to always use your own installation of FF (preferably portable).

Now I want food.

'yinz' is just a poor but easier spelling where 'you'uns' is closer to what is meant.

Not y'all.

@KitFox OK, in a minute. I'm doing a bit of carpentry just now.

Bye!

@aediaλ OED has it as you-uns, but I've not heard it, and I've only just read it - apparently it's pronounced U.S. /ˈjuənz/

yeah, and I did... but then you have to quit because there is literally no way to get a secure connection (well maybe steganography... :-)

OK. Later!

@Jez How do you mean?

FF = secure?

But I have to go. Later!

did you quit because you were forced to implement it?

@Cerberus Firefox tells you "this isn't a trusted CA", but it doesn't stop them from doing it

you can't get around it

You can't get around the proxy?

Then use a VPN?

no, how could you?

it's a locked-down corporate network

Let them snoop on your VPN.

they open up ports 80 and 443 and push it through their servers

I'm sure some portable VPNs exist?

why would they allow a VPN?

Can they block that?

What if you use it on a portable VM?

yeah?

but they're blocking it at the network level

Hmm...what if you use Teamviewer to access a VM on your home computer?

Teamviewer would get through their firewall securely?

how, if SSL can't?

How secure would it have to be?

secure enough that they couldnt snoop on it

Snoop on what exactly? The only only thing they could see would be the images of your VM's desktop.

And the keypresses that you send to the VM.

also I strongly suspect they would detect that you were double-encrypting something and take measures against you. the SSL snooping is already making their intentions clear: if we can't view it, you can't access it

So what stops them from installing something on your work computer that sees everything you do on that desktop?

You didn't seem to worry about that.

luckily, i discovered they were doing this before logging onto anything through their network, so they probably dont have my password

nor my banking details

yeah, they could do that. it would suck. but why make it easy for them?

also there REALLY ought to be laws against them doing that

Logging into a VM at home would make it really hard for them, I'd say.

@Jez Agreed. There may very well be such a law.

so they can see your desktop? but they cant snoop on you

how does that work

They can see your VM's desktop.

But they can only see images of it.

that's snooping isnt it?

Sure.

But they can't see as much of your VM desktop as they can see of your actual desktop on your work PC.

i find it bemusing

browser makers go to huge lengths to emphasize the security of SSL

a big RED page on chrome if a site isnt 100% legit

Oh, I have another idea.

then they use IE's cert store, and people just accept this

it's like building Alcatraz with a paper door on each cell

You can use something like Autohotkey to automatically transform something like blabla into mypassword111. That way, you can send blabla keypresses to your VM, and the VM itself transforms it into your password and enters it into the log-in page on your VM. So they cannot snoop on your password.

heh

btw they also have a policy of not installing any software they dont approve :-)

You could update the Autohotkey file through Dropbox on your phone.

@Jez Then go portable?

how do you mean

Or can't you execute any executables?

portable?

On a USB drive.

oh, not "Installing" it

No installing.

Yes.

hmm i dunno. you just know they wouldnt like it, they want to monitor you

Cross that bridge when you come to it?

well, i resigned anyway

Yeah you've burned the bridge.

it need to be fought this Orwellian stuff

Agreed.

OK later!

there were other things i didnt like about the job, too, like working basically inside a warehouse

cya

@KitFox: Hmm, not much of a party.

I think it means erectile dysfunction.

giggles

@Robusto that just takes the biscuit

@Jez when you quit, did you explain that you didn't want to work for a company that snoops ssl traffic?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 that was one of the reasons i gave

@Jez Now if only some significant portion of their tech team does the same, then bingo! they'll have to change their policy.

@Kit sings: "I feel pretty, oh so prettty / I feel pretty and witty and gay" (apologies to Stephen Sondheim — except wait a sec, those are the exact words he wrote).

Although I suspect most people just use their personal phones for that stuff and bypass the corporate desktop

hopefully. upper management is pretty stubborn though

I wasn't getting any signal on my mobile, actually

Does she's very kind of you make sense?

I was able to roam, and I get the feeling they were offering a mobile roaming capability too. they may even have been snooping that

luckily i have data roaming disabled

I guess not?

@Gigili no

but you should also be able to disable all roaming, like call roaming and SMS roaming

It's very kind of you, but she is?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Ah okay, thanks.

amazingly you can't seem to do that on an Android device

Okay gays and guls, I'm packing for Turkey, so in case you don't catch me in the next couple hours, CU in eight days and have fun burning down the site.

woohoo, it wont be here when you return

@Cerberus Oh and some languages have a truly genderless 3rd person pronoun, like Mandarin and Farsi (i.e, it's not by default male). Or maybe you'd say they're -really chauvinistic because they don't have a female one (one could say that it is the male one that doesn't exist then too).

@RegDwightΒВB whoo! par-tay!

Hope you have a fab time in Turkey @Reg :)

@Jez It sure wont, but will it? :P

won't

@Mitch Mandarin has a truly genderless 3rd person pronoun?

also i don't think you can use wont without to

yes?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 that's what she said

@Jez well I didn't use it without to. You did.

@Jez whatever you wont.

I also missed out on capitalization and other punctuation

@Mitch whatever your wont :-P

Wevs, Germany is about to kick some Dutch ass, and Ima witness that. So laters. Or laters still.

hm...it's pronounced the same for male and female (but actually you can write it differently for the two)

@RegDwightΒВB while packing?

@Mitch there are actually 5 written forms: male, female, neuter (things), animals, and gods.

No way.

all pronounced the same?

godS? blasphemy!

it's baked into the language

@Mitch yes

for talking about other people's gods.

so it's oK.

for them.

to be clear: I'm not sure how accurately the mandarin word translates to the word "god". People have not been very diligent in cataloguing and labelling the various supernatural entities in all languages.

@Jez I think it is yours.

why do languages tend to have male, female, and neuter in them?

it's in mandarin AND latin

what is the natural reason for that? i don't see one

a noun tends to just have no gender

or want no gender

Natural? that 'gods' is/are plural or that they're gendered?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Read and replied.

mandarin doesn't have grammatical gender.

Anyway, @Mitch: I suppose it's a matter of argument whether the written forms are artificial rules that prescriptivists invented to make writing clearer/more polite/whatever, or whether the different words actually have different meaning. My personal experience is that some chinese people have trouble with he/she pronouns in English because they're not used to encoding gender into pronouns when talking.

writing is not language. done.

@Mitch er...

@Robusto cool! I'll check it out. ebook only?

@Mitch Right, there is that option...but then you don't have feminine and masculine pronouns! Not such great progress.

Well, it's progress in that it's one less thing to worry about when constructing a sentence about a third party you haven't met and don't know the sex of.

But it is regression in that you can't say "she is nice, be he is a douche".

Without risk of confusion or added complexity.

@Cerberus in Mandarin, that sentence would be ambiguous if spoken but not if written.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Ayup.

So that is a loss.

@Robusto drat, I might have to finally cave and start using kindle.

Besides, we have the passive voice in case we really want to obscure the number and sex of the agent.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 You can get a free Kindle reader for your computer.

Free?

@Robusto yeah. But I have made a point of avoiding kindle and other ebook platforms on account of the DRM.

@Cerberus Obscure sex with agents makes me all passive.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Well, for a while it was the only game in town. I intend to publish on Smashwords, etc., as soon as I get up the energy to do so.

Why don't you pop a viagra.

@Cerberus Don't need it. Still working with the original wood.

@Cerberus sure, you can, just use their names.

@Mitch You might not remember them.

Or care to.

following your example, you'd say that the loss of all the PIE inflections means we can't say...well whatever you say with all those inflectins and tenses and aspects.

@Robusto yeah. My book is not available as an e-book because I haven't had the time to prepare it properly. Plus I don't think it'd work well since it has lots of illustrations, some that span two pages.

like losing the dual from Old English to Middle. it just means we can't say it -that- particular way.

I can't talk about two people any more.

It just doesn't work.

oh, about my work - i was amazed at the snacking that went on this afternoon!

no. you really shouldn't need to anyway.

or care to.

I will just say "between one and three people accosted my sister".

first this overweight guy comes in at maybe 3pm with a chocolate bar, fizzy drink, and crisps

"And it is an integer".

then the guy opposite me has an apple.... and crisps

you should spend your energy getting to know just the one person.

then another guy has a packet of these really crunchy crisps

"And I meant that non-inclusively".

@Cerberus wait, we have a number for 2! problem solved

then another guy opened some pork rinds or peanuts or something

non-inclusive?

i mean these people can't go without food for 5 mins! it's amazing

argh...can't read fast enough.

@Mitch But that's so...limited.

@Mitch you're not missing anything

@Mitch By "between one and three", I meant excluding one and three.

mmm..pork rinds.

@MattЭллен That's too easy.

@Cerberus Your face is too easy

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Yeah. Illustrations suck on ebook readers.

@Mitch they look like big dried scabs

@MrShinyandNew安宇 what? I didn't catch that.

Which one?

which scab?

I am a three-faced kind of dog, you know.

@Cerberus the one between one and three, non-inclusively

@Mitch NOU

three faced sunuva bitch

@MattЭллен Oh dear. Not that one!

@Mitch Haha indeed.

no? oh

gah. 1 is not between 1 and three

That will be my next user name.

hm...inclusivel it is.

'gah'?

kinda short.

Gah.

I sort of like the dualis.

I never bothered to memorize the verb endings for the Greek dualis.

I do recognize them, usually.

@Cerberus I don't believe this! How could you not?

Nouns usually end on -oin or -ain.

I recognize that they exist.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Because the Greek verb is beyond anyone's memorization skills.

OK...so the proposal then is to remove all distinctions from the grammar.

-and- the phonology.

and context will sort it out.

@Cerberus I guess memorization is probably beyond your memorization skills.

I know them passively 99.9 % of the time, but actively? Not the less common forms.

@Mitch So we will just all communicate in a uniform buzz?

I bet the Greeks couldn't even keep track.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 I guess.

and it was all either mistakes...

@Mitch In fact they didn't, because each island had its own literary dialect.

or boredom.

Well, not each island.

or fun!

@Cerberus zzzzzz.

See?

But I can read most dialects well enough I think.

Though Doric chori...

@Mitch That sound nice and agrammatical.

Yeah...I misspelled.

Oops!!

But Doric is for loosers.

You weren't steganographically hiding some grammar in that frequency, were you?

@Mitch Not quite...

@RegDwightΒВB Have a great trip!

Attic, Ionic, and Doric are the main literary dialects. And Ionic and Attic are much alike.

No. Context can provide quite a bit more. A raised eyebrow here, a prolonged silence there.

Silences are allowed?

That's exactly what I was saying.

@Cerberus All of my communications are steganographically encoded with hidden meaning.

I feel like a villain now. :-(

Then Morse is possible.

@Cerberus some dialects are like that.

@Robusto Not any more, because you have just revealed yourself.

@Jez why?

@Mitch Sounds like Scandinavia.

@Cerberus only in those dialects...but then yes, nothing is lost.

coz i suddenly resigned and my colleagues might feel it's a slight against them

@Cerberus just because he declares that there is steganography doesn't mean you can find it

@Jez have you been taking candy from babies again?

Where friends meet in a bar and stay silent for prolonged periods, drinking all the while.

@Cerberus Yeah, but you still can't decipher the meaning, so what does it matter?

@Jez is that the job you just started?

@Jez Just explain to them why you quit.

I can't find the hidden stegosaurus :(

I guess talking doesn't help any more when the sun barely clutches the horizon at noon.

@aediaλ you have to print out the transcript and squint at it at a distance

cross your eyes.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Oh, technicalities. waves paw

I'm touching my nose to the screen and backing away slowly, but all that's happening is nose grease on y'all...

ewwww feels greasy

I dare say it isn't successful steganography any more if you know it's there.

@Mitch yep

hunts around for cleaning cloth

swipes at Matt roughly

We're dirty anyway, so what does it matter...

very principled (though I don't fully understand the technical issue). that's tough to find out immediately on starting.

Not too roughly!

@aediaλ ooch! thanks :D

@aediaλ eternalephemeron.blogspot.ca/2010/01/…

YAY!

I did a google image search for "Hidden stegosaurus" and my own picture came up! First time that's happened to me

which one is yours?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Oh that's truly awesome.

Weird, I get yours when I'm not signed in, but not when I am

Oh there it is, it's just in a different place, lower in the results I think?

Huh.

How is that easy to build? Do I look stupid to you?

@Gigili it's easy, it comes with instructions

Can't you get it pre-built?

@Mitch a lego kit, pre-built? what would be the use of such a thing?

I want to grow the biggest bonsai tree ever.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 esthetics

Well that's what I call some fine Dutch ass getting kicked. Keept es ab!

@Mitch still, why pre-built?

@RegDwightΒВB Excuse me?

Deutschland 2, Dutchland 0

Oh, football.

♪ Ohne Holland fahr'n wir zur WM, ohne Holland fahr'n wir zur WM!

I know nothing about this.

@Cerberus yeah, not another war

I gathered.

I shall we glad if we're out of the match.

My friend who works at a public radio station said that major shows were cancelled for this summer due to the stupid football, and that they stand to lose many of their loyal listeners, because their target group hates football.

She said that if we were out of the game, that her programming would be saved.

@RegDwightΒВB Have we been defeated once and for all now?

I dunno you keep resurrecting yourselves every twelve years, in vain.

@RegDwightΒВB that sounds like what you'd get if you crossed a phoenix with a cicada

But I must be going! More ass rampage to be witnessed, and let me tell you, it won't witness itself.

Resurrecting?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 The whole point to lego is...

as advertisements for the movies.

@Mitch um... were you brick-impaired as a child, perhaps? or maybe 3d impaired?

but like ships in bottles...

OMG all my friends had legos...so jealous...we'd have lego parties. (no not really) but we'd spend lots of time building cities.

@Mitch I admit I'm not so fond of how much movie tie-in stuff there is... I would give up the lure of the Star Wars ones if only there were tons more castle and city things

@Mitch But you didn't have your own?

How did you live past childhood?

I have forgotten all but a few of the names of the My Little Ponies I had, but I still remember my little LEGO minifigs and their glorious houses and fortresses (and horses and birds). I even wrote about them for school creative writing assignments when I could. There were wars, murder mysteries, time travel... all the things I couldn't fit in the real backyard