It's been quite enjoyable so far. I am, of course, typing this post from it.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Not too long ago, Stephen Fry appeared in a video for the FSF singing the praises of free software. Later, he extolled the virtues of the iPad. The moral: never trust a pipe-smoker.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
I'm becoming more and more convinced of Apple's apparent evil, especially in the wake of that iPhone thing last week. They're either fanatics or viral marketers, and I don't care for either.
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Kodi, why do people value software being "free" and "open" rather than "good"? That's ideology over pragmatism.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
For the same reason that I wouldn't shoplift even if it would do me more good than it would do the vendor harm. Ethics may be defined as a set of rules that dictate when one should act according to ideology rather than pragmatism.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
Yeah, putting ideology before pragmatism (as you're describing it) is basically how society works. What, are you all Ayn Rand now?
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Restricting yourselves to never stealing, though, is part of ethics because of the results that failing to do so brought about in the past. Eliminating stealing produced beneficial results for society and as such has been adopted into our ethics. Even today the boundaries are still fuzzy, what with illegal music downloads and whatnot.
What good results has restricting oneself to free software brought? I shudder at the thought of a world in which the only available software was "free software."
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
I've never heard of a society that had shops but no rules against shoplifting. Dunno about your ethics, but I include "don't shoplift" in my ethics not on the basis of some historical example but because it follows from the golden rule.
If you're interested in arguments against proprietary software on the basis of product quality, read the writings of proponents of the open-source movement, Eric S. Raymond in particular. I can't vouch for open source; I'm a free-software person.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
And for the benefits of closed source, proprietary software, I lead you here:
http://www.culturedcode.com/
Now picture an entire platform of apps as beautiful and functional as those. Not "free"? Not "open"? Not relevant.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
I'd get an iPad if I had the necessary funds haha.
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Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy, Pokemon Crystal
Currently Reading: Han Solo's Revenge
But without free software, you can't get reasonably priced good software.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Neither beauty nor function justify unethical behavior.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
Also: I was under the impression that ethics are always relevant.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
Good one.
While we're on the topic of Ethics, anyone notice that anarchy pretty much runs solely on the concept?
I feel like beauty justifies unethical behavior, but I also don't maintain the delusion that that statement is novel, meaningful or relevant.
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And what makes using "unfree software" unethical? Where did these ethics come from?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Quoting from http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html:
…the means [of making money] customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.
Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.
The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
Like scientific research, software is infinitely more useful when free, and the only possible justification for keeping it proprietary is moneymaking. The knowledge of the many is more important than the wealth of the few.
Can you imagine a world where, instead of the endless reduplication of effort we see today, every nontrivial program was an asset to the whole human race? Surely that would be a better world than this one.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
Yeah, but who's gonna bankroll that? Programmers need to eat, even if it's just pocky and red bulls.
Actually come to think of it, it'd be a pretty sweet system if there were massive government grants and fully funded research chairs for this sort of thing. Sort of on the same basis that since the BBC is paid for with tax revenue, the people of Great Britain own the programming or whatever, only with GIMP.
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That's exactly what I'd like to see: software for the people funded by the people. You've probably already realized that the free-software philosophy is just socialism applied to software development.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
Software developers create products. They are then compensated for their work by selling them to consumers. Just like car manufacturers, artists, authors...what makes software so different? The ability to make money in software development drives the development of quality software.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
The fact that something is conventional does not imply it is ethical. What makes software different from cars is that pirating a copy of Photoshop doesn't remove a copy from a store's inventory, whereas stealing a car removes a car from the dealer's inventory. What makes software different from art (such as fiction) is that software is useful. (I'm not making any claims about video games, at least not for the time being.) What makes software different from reference books is—actually, I'm against conventional publishing of reference books to the same degree and for the same reasons as in the case of software.
The development of quality software can be motivated by avarice, but other possible motives exist. Surely the Linux kernel, GCC, and GNU Emacs are quality software.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
Interesting argument. I guess it depends on what you think software is or should be. All I know is that in a world with only free software, I'd have to use devices of compromised quality to my 27" Intel Core i7 iMac, or my iPhone. I probably wouldn't be interested in computer science at all.
For what it's worth, I watched a video of Steven Fry congratulating the anniversary of GNU, which of course had to be encoded in some free software format. When I went to switch tabs in Safari to hear in the background, it stopped playing. Is compromised functionality really worth conforming to ideology?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
From: AzumarillMan | Posted: 5/3/2010 11:05:32 AM | #022
All I know is that in a world with only free software, I'd have to use devices of compromised quality to my 27" Intel Core i7 iMac, or my iPhone.
Why should I believe that?
Is compromised functionality really worth conforming to ideology?
Yes. But if you're running Safari, you're not conforming to my ideology, so you can't sensibly complain that the bug you're talking about is a consequence of conforming to my ideology.
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Programmed to fight till the very end.
So which phone that runs only free software should I replace my iPhone with?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
How am I to know exactly what phones would exist in a world with only free software?
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
Are there phones on the market that run only or mostly free software? Should I replace my iPhone with one of them?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
how's that ipad treatin' you, jace?
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"I'm not great at farewells, so uh... that'll do, pig."
Natalie Portman was here
Goodness, I have no idea. I don't have a cellphone. At any rate, the important thing is to not develop or invest in or promote proprietary software. I'm not willing to argue that it's unethical to use proprietary software, especially when one is in some sense coerced. (My college requires me to use certain proprietary programs. Some categories of consumer electronics, like graphing calculators, have no free-software entries. And so on.) The most I believe with regard to personal use is: if there's a free program that does what you need, it's best to use that, even if the learning curve is steeper.
The upshot of this is that if there is no usable free phone, I don't object to your use of the iPhone.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
I pay my rent by developing proprietary software.
So I guess that's out.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Ugh, that explains a lot.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
Not really, I had the same views before I became a developer.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
I'm not sure whether that's better or worse.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
Why shouldn't I be able to have a job as a software developer and get compensated for my work?
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Can I just pipe in that software is fundamentally distinct from other forms of artifice because it's inherently reproducible at (virtually) no cost--it's purely IP. So it's not quite right to liken software publishers to car manufacturers, artists (that is, those who produce discrete physical works) and book/music/etc. publishers*. They produce something with manufacturing, storage, shipping, etc. costs associated, in finite numbers, as well as everything else that arises with digital business models that I'm sure you've discussed to death. But the software developer isn't even really like the musician, because musicians sell more than the reproducible product; an album recording can be fully digitized, but no one would ever attend a live of you coding.
The closest analogue is something like radio or broadcast teevee: if you have the right hardware, right software and access to a distribution channel, you can use it. The only difference is that software developers (like, say, the RIAA) are under the illusion that they are selling a manufactured product. They can keep fighting a DRM arms race and relying on institutional sales and whatever else, but they're probably going to lose unless this internet thing goes out of fashion. The question isn't really "stay proprietary or not," it's "how do we monetize our product without being able to recoup our development costs through license sales."
Broadcast teevee and radio monetize what is essentially a free service by selling advertising, although that's actually also starting to get dicey. Musicians monetize their product through performance--that is, offering individualized versions of the service on a case-by-case basis--so I guess the metaphorical extension would be to offer tech support or work under a patronage system. Or there's always how the BBC and NDA do it. Which is socialist.
But you know what, man? I am as right-wing as they come, and no use of government funds makes me happier than seeing them blown on "blue sky" projects. Governments sponsoring things that will benefit humanity but are unlikely to ever see a profit? Sign me up!
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From: AzumarillMan | Posted: 5/3/2010 8:20:39 PM | #033
Why shouldn't I be able to have a job as a software developer and get compensated for my work?
Because your work is unethical. C'mon, let's not say the same things over and over again.
Willis, I'd
like to believe that proprietary software will just die on its own, but so long as businesses, schools, and governments are using Windows and Office, Microsoft will stay in business. Piracy is easy, but keeping people from reporting your piracy to Microsoft or the authorities is impossible.
From: willis5225 | Posted: 5/3/2010 8:55:49 PM | #034
I am as right-wing as they come…
You can't be serious. You've expressed some conservative opinions on PMS, sure, but we have no shortage of PMSians standing to the right of you.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
Oh, I think it's naive to think any of this is going to go down tomorrow. Again, the RIAA members are still convinced they're going to sell CDs for God's sake.
I'd look at it like the way the sciences have transformed in the last few centuries: it went from weird dudes in their castles using resources they were born with to answer ill-defined questions as a hobby, to codification of a method, to tycoonery, to general interest from a multinational body. I mean, c'mon, it's not like they're putting billboards on the LHC. But that was like 400 years.
And I guess I should clarify "right wing" to be on the civil libertarian continuum: I'd argue that throughout history governmental oversight has been the greatest determinant in the terribleness of a venture's performance. Not to the point of the whole Ronpaul ostrich in the sane the free market will save us extreme, privately owned companies will result in a higher quality of service and greater efficiency than a government-run operation. Except for the BBC. For whatever reason that worked out, and I am not about to knock it and let's do it with Gnu licensed software.
(Basically, software propriety is unsustainable and I'd rather pay taxes to advance free stuff than have banner ads or whatever; also, I'm a scholarship hippie and think every piece of scholarly, scientific or academic writing should be available to everyone free of charge now that there is no inherent duplication cost! Go socialist librarians!)
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Please explain to me how my work is unethical. I fundamentally don't understand.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
To be precise, what's unethical is not the mere fact that you program, or that you make money by programming, but that you restrict the use of your software. Such restrictions are destructive in the way described in post #017: they prevent people from being able to share your programs freely and from studying or modifying the code. Should your software become popular, it will become one more obstacle in the way of popular adoption and support of free alternatives. End-user inertia is in fact the single largest obstacle to widespread adoption of free software.
(Needless to say, I could probably be more specific if I had some idea of what software you write or what license you release it under.)
From: willis5225 | Posted: 5/3/2010 10:35:17 PM | #036
I'm a scholarship hippie and think every piece of scholarly, scientific or academic writing should be available to everyone free of charge now that there is no inherent duplication cost!
Amen.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
To be precise, what's unethical is not the mere fact that you program, or that you make money by programming, but that you restrict the use of your software.
I only intend for people to use my software, not modify it in anyway. The software is my artwork and I have a grand, personal vision as to exactly how each component should be put into place. I deserve nothing more than full control over my art. I am passionate about the software I create in a way that others who may simply modify it could never be, as it is no personal extension of themselves.
Such restrictions are destructive in the way described in post #017: they prevent people from being able to share your programs freely and from studying or modifying the code.
The current project I'm working, Trees, is a suite for creating natural language grammars and modeling sentence structure and linguistic phenomena in an animated way, under the formalisms of Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program, and Tree-Adjoining Grammar. It's built in Cocoa using Objective-C and runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and later. The software has yet to be released since it's quite a large scale project, but as Mac software, it will not be released under any sort of formal license. It's readily available for download from its official website and will work for 30 days as a demo before the user must purchase a license key; upon purchasing the user receives a file that unlocks the application when opened.
In no way should the program be able to be shared freely. I deserve to be properly compensated for my work as I am providing a service to users that they can only obtain with this application. I simply can't afford to spend the time I am spending in developing this application and have it be able to be distributed freely, which eliminates my compensation; in order to pay my rent and my bills, I'd have to find another job, and I wouldn't develop software at all. The ability to make a living developing software allows people to do it full-time and place all their resources into it, allowing for the highest quality software possible.
In no way should anyone but me be able to modify its source code. Every design decision was made deliberately by me after careful planning and research of UI/UX principles. As the only one who is intimately and personally linked with my art, I am the only one appropriately suited to make these decisions. If a user is dissatisfied with a component of the software, they can report the issue through one of the support mechanisms I provide. If it's a bug, I will fix it; if it's a design decision, I will think about if it is appropriate to consider and if it is, I will implement it.
I also do consulting work as an iPhone developer for several other companies as well as run a partnership that creates software for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. We also develop small iPhone frameworks whose source code we sell. I have no future plans to develop for any non-Apple platform as it makes it excruciatingly difficult to write quality software.
Should your software become popular, it will become one more obstacle in the way of popular adoption and support of free alternatives.
Interestingly enough, I was commissioned to develop Trees because of the poor quality of existing, similar tools, most of them free software. It would make no sense for users to keep to these free alternatives as much of the functionality required simply isn't there.
End-user inertia is in fact the single largest obstacle to widespread adoption of free software.
And among those who are not ideologues, when faced with the decision, they often realize that the proprietary software they currently use in fact functions better. Finding the issue of being open to be irrelevant, as I do, they continue to use it.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Not my cup of tea, but glad you're enjoying it, Jace. New gizmos are always lots of fun.
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Ocarinakid
Oh yeah, Nick, Fred, it's nice so far. I'm getting a lot of use out of it when I'm at work. I even used it during the lesson today to display a graph with better technology than the calculator, and I used it while tutoring a kid as a convenient notepad.
I can see how it's not for everyone, but as someone who lacked an iPod (save a shuffle), a smartphone, and a laptop, it works for me.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
cool, cool; that's pretty much the response i was looking for. from what i'd heard it didn't seem practical but i can see the value in it now.
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"I'm not great at farewells, so uh... that'll do, pig."
Natalie Portman was here
Ah, yeah that makes sense then. I'm 2 for 3 in terms of possessing those things.
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Ocarinakid
Jace, I'm sorry AMan and I completely derailed your topic. :(
AMan, there are a lot of things I could reply to in that post, but I think it's best to remain focused. Here are some things that, if I'm interpreting your post correctly, you believe justify your creation of proprietary software:
- Your right to artistic freedom.
- Your personal commitment.
- Your desire to be paid for your work. (Actually, you say you deserve payment, but I regard the concept of deserving things (rewards, punishments, whatever) as a bogus concept, because, as I understand it, it contradicts some basic assumptions of psychology.)
- Your expertise.
- The poor quality of existing free software that's supposed to serve this purpose. (I don't know whether this is a fact, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is.)
I don't know how your ethics works, but in my ethics, none of these are valid excuses for restricting free exchange of knowledge. Proprietary scientific software (which Trees counts as, correct?) is even more damaging than ordinary proprietary software, because proprietary code is antithetical to the reproducibility and public availability of results that is so crucial to making science work.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
Quite alright, Kodi. It's been an interesting read.
A benefit of it over, say, a laptop, is that it has 3G (which is why I waited until now to get one). This is particularly useful when I'm at work because, since I work at a school, the network has a lot of filters in place. Using 3G lets me bypass them all.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
From: Kodiologist
Proprietary scientific software (which Trees counts as, correct?) is even more damaging than ordinary proprietary software, because proprietary code is antithetical to the reproducibility and public availability of results that is so crucial to making science work.
Sing it!
Also, let me throw out that the notion of single authorship is a fairly recent phenomenon. There was a really good post on GotMedieval on the subject from what I thought was within the last month, but I can't find it; anyway, the point is with books before the age of IP, you didn't have ownership of the story, you had ownership of the book, and you could take this element from this story and pop it into your book, and then leave the rest off. If you didn't like a digression from the thing you were copying, you would just leave it out because it was stupid. There's whole fields of manuscript and early book studies devoted to figuring out why person X composed this manuscript, and in almost every case it turns into a couple of vague threads followed by "well... and they were kinda into it. That was the stuff they felt like writing down so they could read it later."
It's understandable to
want sole control over a piece of IP, but it's historically aberrant and egotistical. That said, I've flipped at my fair share of periodical editors for exercising editorial control over their publication to which I was a mere contributor, but it's worth noting that the natural state of information in human history is not to be informed by a single individual. Taking the conversation there may be gilding the lily, but it's there.
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Also, James: Cool. Good luck with the whole iPad thing.
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That is interesting. Now, in the cases where you "flipped… at periodical editors for exercising editorial control over their publication", am I right in thinking that what got your goat was the misattribution—that is, the fact that the editors had changed your words and made it seem as if the resulting piece was wholly your own work? More broadly, when in days of yore people would copy books and change them as they pleased, who would they name as the author, themselves or the person whose work they'd copied?
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
I've got the next level! It's MaxiPad! Cheap and comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, super absorbent too!
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Milt, the other white beverage!
Well, in large part, stuff was anonymous or "traditional." That's especially true if you're excerpting something: if I just wrote out for personal use the coolest battle scenes from some text, even an authored text like Lagaman, there'd be no onus on me to write "7 Thisse ich yfonded in La3amannes bok ff 12v-14r." It just wasn't done.
If a complete manuscript has been copied, generally speaking they make an attempt to leave things in place, although you do see instances of editorializing, but they're usually pretty limited. A great example is in the major variant of Fóstbrœðrasaga because the older versions tend to include a couple of passages that are cut out. They tend to be either out of place allusions to high literature--a swineherd jealous of the protagonist making time with his woman quotes Hávamál--or bizarrely articulate anatomical descriptions--a guy sees the other protagonist heft his axe and he quakes "throughout all 217 bones up through his veins, arteries and little arteries and into each of his 82 teeth." The predominant view is that these are an early and ill-received attempt at parody, so somebody, although he or she* copied the complete saga, said "that stuff is stupid and I don't get it. I want more room for hewings!"
Sometimes you do get pretty major alterations, though; some transcriber added an extra scene 'cause the whole tragic thing wasn't doing it for him/her. The sworn brothers (the protagonists) have parted ways because (basically) one of them was a dick, and although the story continues to follow them individually, they don't meet again. Except in this one totally out of place scene that has them meet up during a lull in the action, with the one who's kind of a dick hanging over the side of a cliff hanging onto a giant mushroom, and the other one saves him and they have a couple of beers and catch up. So somebody wanted closure and added this extraneous thing and scholarship is now generally of the opinion that it's stupid and they hate it.
Now, in neither case does somebody come forward and go "oh and I totally altered this text, I would like an editor's credit," it's just sort of implicit that you're generally faithful to what you copied it from, but you could add stuff 'cause dude it's your book.
Anyway, those are anonymous, but things aren't necessarily better if we have an authorial presence. Let's take Wace's Brut, a middle English translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain for Welsh people (kinda). In the preface it says something like "Wace wrote this, he is a monk from wherever." And he lists a number of sources, some of which we know (Geoffrey) some of which he lists, but we know that he got no new information from them because Geoffrey also used them (Nennius) and some of them that he clearly made up ("this book that my friend the archbishop showed me, but I don't remember which friend and y'know what, he probably wouldn't show you if you asked anyway and it was in French which is a language no one in the world can read"). So you know, an undergrad's term paper.
Now, there's two things here: first, this preface may or may not be included in a given MS copy, depending on whether or not the transcriber cared who Wace was, and there isn't really (to my knowledge; this might make an interesting paper, actually) a strong correlation between the level of deviation in an MS and whether or not the preface is included (that is: whether the same guy who didn't care who Wace was also didn't care about about the story of King Leir or something, and his disinterest in the first part indicates a willingness to act on the second). The second thing is that the way that medievals viewed authorship and citation is fundamentally different from ours. An author of note would lend a text authority (auctoritas) and a text citing that one as a source or borrowing from it would get some of that auctoritas: "St. Augustine said this thing that I agree with, and he wouldn't lie to you, would he?" For Wace, it was "Geoffrey of Monmouth said this and he's an upstanding chap" except of course that Geoffrey didn't say a lot of that stuff. The point wasn't to give Geoffrey credit for coming up with the stories (Geoffrey, of course, tells us that he got them from Bede (no he didn't), Gildas (no he didn't) Nennius (okay he did a little bit) and his friend the bishop's book) but to establish himself as someone using credible sources.
In the same way, Aelfric's and Wulfstan's homilies aren't demarcated as Aelfric's and Wulfstan's because they exercised editorial control over the spread of the homilies or because they wanted credit, it was because these guys were already such famous theologians that the text took on auctoritas from association with them. And I guess we still have that today (especially in scholarship) it's just been systematized to the point that you need to do more than name drop.
But anyway, these are the two principles under which William Caxton, the first English printer, exercised all sorts of editorial control over his texts (splitting up chapters, updating spellings, publishing his own translations etc.): (1) **** you I'm making them they're my books, (2) who cares about the details, I'm *basically* getting this from Malorie/this anonymous romance writer/etc. These are distinct from the principles under which editors of college newspapers take a brilliant synesthetic metaphor like "the bleached walls look as though they ought to reek of Barbicide" and replace it with "the place seemed to have a funny smell." What the hell?
Tl;Dr: The guys I'm talking about who were copying stuff for personal use didn't write down authors because they didn't care. Also, medieval authorship wasn't something used by the actual author for anything, but by later writers to establish the legitimacy of their own claims.
*Also note that I'm not using "he or she" blithely; medieval Iceland had a pretty good rate of female literacy, thanks in part to a pretty good rate of literacy in general.
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A wall of text as entertaining as it is informative! And I can now die in peace knowing that I've posted in a topic that mentions Emacs, tree-adjoining grammar, and the Fóstbrœðrasaga.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
^--And sanitary napkins.
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I've been reading this topic and enjoying it, seeing validity in both sides of the argument, but certainly leaning more towards the free and open side. Then earlier tonight I was sitting around the computer with my friends while one was showing the other a program/website he's been making for our university's physics department. It's basically an online test taking site, as well as a tool for professors to create tests, database tests and answers, and some other junk. He explained, unprompted, how taking and modifying other software helped him build it, and build it better. I'm certainly not nearly as knowledgeable about this stuff as you guys, but it was sort of an illuminating moment.
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Ocarinakid
Oh hey it's free software that increases the mean knowledge of humanity:
http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Willis, are you intentionally creating asterisks that indicate a footnote and then leaving out the footnote? You've done it twice and I wonder if it's some kind of subtle razz.
artists (that is, those who produce discrete physical works) and book/music/etc. publishers*
ill-received attempt at parody, so somebody, although he or she*
Oh wait, you cleared up the "he or she" on the next page.
Oh, yeah, my bad about the earlier one; the text of the footnote made its way into the actual post during revision, but I missed the asterisk.
In other news, I've been doing question marks in quotations wrong for decades and didn't find it out until some jerk on LUE called me on it because my point was otherwise unassailable. Decades.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
You mean you used to put them outside the quotes and now you put them inside? The latter style is much more popular in American English, it's true, but I use the former. As I see it, the only characters that belong in quotes are the one that are part of the quotation. When you're writing about programming, in fact, the punctuation-outside style is absolutely necessary, since "int." generally means something quite different from "int".
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir
To be clear, question marks go inside when they are part of the quotation and outside when they are not. For example, we could say "Ghostbusters" is the proper response to the question "Who ya gonna call?" We can also ask, didn't FDR once say "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"?
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Yeah, I had been operating under the assumption that they always went inside the quotation marks because it was some weird counterintuitive convention.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Semi-colons and exclamation points can also go outside, but, if I recall, regular colons are like periods and commas, which always go inside.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Unless there's a parenthetical citation afterward.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Oh, of course.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Semi-colons and exclamation points can also go outside, but, if I recall, regular colons are like periods and commas, which always go inside.
Well, my mind is blown.
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Shake your windows and rattle your walls.