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#46
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 01/01/2019 02:44, nospam wrote:
you cannot accept that 'every call is recorded' means something other than what you think it does, which is making an audio recording of every call, not a log of who called whom and when. All the kings horses and all the kings men, Couldnt put Humpty together again. Words do not mean what you alone intend them to mean. If you are only talking to yourself you can say what the **** you like If you are attempting communication (as against egotistical browbeating) with other people it behoves you to use words as others expect them to be used. -- When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. Frédéric Bastiat |
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#47
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 01/01/2019 01:42, Wolf K wrote:
(1) E.g., how many meanings of "horse" do you know of? I have four top-of-mind, three nouns and one verb, but the dictionary close to hand gives six nouns and four verbs, and none of the verbs is the one I'm thinking of, because it's part of a North American slang phrase, and the dictionary is British. Total (so far): 11 usages. All determined by context. You're welcome, Words are approximate metadata for experiential data. Philsophy gets into very deep waters if it attempts to assign concrete entries to words and make them identities. German tends to do this, which is why Germans can be such total ****s. Language is by consensus only. Since its purpose is communication *between* individuals. Standards are necessary to ensure that it IS such. And lawyers make fortunes out of ambiguity, Consider 'I leave my diamond necklace to the sons of my daughters who have red hair' -- Labour - a bunch of rich people convincing poor people to vote for rich people by telling poor people that "other" rich people are the reason they are poor. Peter Thompson |
#48
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
"Wolf K" wrote
|And pronouncing "herb" as "erb" is a | solecism. "I'd like to H-onor this salad with H-erbs", said the British cannibal, as he sprinkled colorful flakes into a bowl and I began to speculate about how far it might be to the nearest pizza place, in case I might need to ightail it out of there. |
#49
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 2019-01-01, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2019 02:44, nospam wrote: you cannot accept that 'every call is recorded' means something other than what you think it does, which is making an audio recording of every call, not a log of who called whom and when. All the kings horses and all the kings men, Couldnt put Humpty together again. Words do not mean what you alone intend them to mean. If you are only talking to yourself you can say what the **** you like If you are attempting communication (as against egotistical browbeating) with other people it behoves you to use words as others expect them to be used. Except other people, which includes individuals other than you, have different districts of meaning surrounding words, because they have different experience with the language and with life. It is that spread of meaning which makes poetry possible. (But then you probably hate poetry). |
#50
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
In comp.os.linux.misc nospam wrote:
In article , Wolf K wrote: what you intended to say and what you actually said are not the same, but what's really odd are the lengths to which you are going to justify it. [...] what you said was ambiguous, and that's being generous and polite. You are correct here, the original phrase had a level of ambiguity about it. the meaning that the vast majority of people will think when hearing the phrase 'every call is recorded' is *not* what you want it to be. Unfortunately here, for you, you have, and continue to have, a weak argument. Yes, taken out of context, the bare phrase 'every call is recorded' would likely mean, to most listeners, exactly what you argue it means. But the origional phrase was not the bare phrase 'every call is recorded'. Unfortunately for your argument, and what causes it to be very weak, is that English is a highly contextual language [1], and to decide what meaning should be assigned to the words, the relevant related context of the phrase has to be analyzed. The phrase, in the context of the full sentence in which it was used, was: And for billing purposes (even prepaid), every call is recorded. And, of course, the full context of the phrase in the entire posting, was: For a cellphone to work, it must have a unique ID, and be within range of at least one cellphone tower. In most of the USA and Canada, the cellphone user is are within range of three towers, which means the location of the phone can be triangulated to within a few meters. And for billing purposes (even prepaid), every call is recorded. Tracking you is therefore relatively simple. That's why smart crooks buy (or steal) a phone, use it once, and toss it. For the sentence context, the meaning assigned to "recorded" and "every call is recorded" has to be weighed against the full context within that sentence, which was "for billing purposes". There are two possible meanings that can be assigned for "recorded" in this context: "record metadata" and "record call contents (audio)". When considered within the context of "for billing purposes", at least the meaning "record metadata" must be used, because without metadata, billing is not possible. But metadata is all that is necessary for billing (i.e., full call contents is not necessary merely to bill) so the meaning "record full content" is much less reasonable because it goes far beyond that which is reasonably required for billing purposes. So the reasonable meaning to assign "recorded" in the context of this sentence is the meaning "record metadata". Repeating the above contextual analysis for the entire posting provides even further weight towards selecting the "record metadata" meaning as the most likely intended meaning of the sentence. And in fact, when I read the original article, this was exactly the meaning (record metadata) I read into "recorded" when reading the sentence. Was the sentence ambigious, yes. Would it have been better had it been worded as: And for billing purposes (even prepaid), **metadata of** every call is recorded. Yes, it would have clearly been better this way, because this explicitly removes the ambiguity from the sentence. But it is also unreasonable to take the last four words out of context and argue that the intent of the full statement was to mean "record call contents". Doing so ignores the contextual nature of English [1] in the decoding of the most likely intended meaning for particular words used in a sentence. [1] Context-Dependent Interpretation Of Words: Evidence For Interactive Neural Processes https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2577612/ An interesting property of words, however, is that their meanings are highly context-dependent. In fact, most English words are ambiguous: they have multiple meanings that vary in how much they overlap. Many words have multiple semantically-unrelated meanings (e.g., watch: a time piece, to look; rose: a flower, past tense of rise); others have multiple semantically-related senses (e.g., twist an ankle vs. twist the truth); and some have both (e.g., one of the meanings of rose is the name of both a flower and a related color). Even the meaning of a seemingly unambiguous word such as piano depends on the context in which it occurs: moving a piano brings to mind different concepts than playing a piano; |
#51
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2019 01:42, Wolf K wrote: (1) E.g., how many meanings of "horse" do you know of? I have four top-of-mind, three nouns and one verb, but the dictionary close to hand gives six nouns and four verbs, and none of the verbs is the one I'm thinking of, because it's part of a North American slang phrase, and the dictionary is British. Total (so far): 11 usages. All determined by context. You're welcome, Words are approximate metadata for experiential data. Philsophy gets into very deep waters if it attempts to assign concrete entries to words and make them identities. German tends to do this, which is why Germans can be such total ****s. Language is by consensus only. Since its purpose is communication *between* individuals. Standards are necessary to ensure that it IS such. And lawyers make fortunes out of ambiguity, Consider 'I leave my diamond necklace to the sons of my daughters who have red hair' Or, an extreme example: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffal... ffalo_buffalo |
#52
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
In article , Wolf K
wrote: your still trying to justify your incorrect usage. crazy. Nah, I'm just poking you to see how far you will go in insisting that there is one, and only one, correct usage. Or alternatively, that it's forbidden to extend usage beyond a word's "specific meaning". i never said there is only one correct usage. you are once again wrong. |
#53
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
In article , Wolf K
wrote: So you haven't come across "check the record..." I have. Many times. It tends to be British usage, and it means what you would phrase as "Check the log..." check the record is not the same as every call is recorded. My whole discussion has been an attempt to get your head around the fact that context is always necessary for meaning. But meaning in one context doesn't forbid different meanings in other contexts. i'm well aware of that. you, however, are not. you are insisting that every call is recorded means logging the metadata. If I tell you that I'm about to fix dinner, does that mean that we can't say that we are about to fix the clogged drain? fix dinner *usually* means prepare & cook, but it *could* mean something else, such as if a particular recipe did not come out properly and had to be 'fixed', i.e., repaired, before the guests arrived. as you say, context matters. |
#54
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
In article nospam wrote: In article , Wolf K wrote: your still trying to justify your incorrect usage. crazy. Nah, I'm just poking you to see how far you will go in insisting that there is one, and only one, correct usage. Or alternatively, that it's forbidden to extend usage beyond a word's "specific meaning". i never said there is only one correct usage. you are once again wrong. |
#55
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 01/01/2019 15:45, William Unruh wrote:
On 2019-01-01, The Natural Philosopher wrote: On 01/01/2019 02:44, nospam wrote: you cannot accept that 'every call is recorded' means something other than what you think it does, which is making an audio recording of every call, not a log of who called whom and when. All the kings horses and all the kings men, Couldnt put Humpty together again. Words do not mean what you alone intend them to mean. If you are only talking to yourself you can say what the **** you like If you are attempting communication (as against egotistical browbeating) with other people it behoves you to use words as others expect them to be used. Except other people, which includes individuals other than you, have different districts of meaning surrounding words, because they have different experience with the language and with life. It is that spread of meaning which makes poetry possible. (But then you probably hate poetry). Poetry is a different way to use words. To describe emotional states. "I wandered, lonely as a cloud" is pure nonsense if taken literally,. Thats is the point. It is therefore obviously not supposed to be taken literally. However in this case we were in the contxet of definite factual statements about something: there should be no place for wolly ambiguous interpretation. We have very pricse langauge to use in this case, as IT professionals, To record a call is not the same as to record a call's *metadata*. Since it is perfectly clear to all except weasels attempting a reverse ferret that there is a difference, your attempts to pretend they mean the same are somewhat more indicative ne suspects of the childlike desire to cover a mistake by claiming you meant it all along... -- Gun Control: The law that ensures that only criminals have guns. |
#56
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 01/01/2019 17:26, Wolf K wrote:
If you insist that it can't mean what I intended it to mean _in that context_, that's not my problem. It bloody well is. If you say 'I think I will shoot you' and wave a gun in my face, and I am also armed I will make a BIG problem for you evcen if you say, assuming you surbvive 'I didnt mean actually SHOOT you'. If others act on your communications and their actions impinge on you, that IS your problem. You appear to be a solipsist or a narcissist. -- "What do you think about Gay Marriage?" "I don't." "Don't what?" "Think about Gay Marriage." |
#57
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 01/01/2019 17:31, Wolf K wrote:
On 2019-01-01 07:09, The Natural Philosopher wrote: On 01/01/2019 01:15, Wolf K wrote: And pronouncing "herb" as "erb" is a solecism. or affectation to speak french. Where it emans 'grass' IIRC. It's the accepted pronunciation in the USA. "Herb" is considered, um, down-market. In Englsih, erb is considered vulgar affectation. Attempting to sound what you are not. But then so is most Amerian. Use three syllables where two will do Burglarize! Honestly! Its BURGLE (3=2) 'Going forward'? In Future! (4=3) -- "What do you think about Gay Marriage?" "I don't." "Don't what?" "Think about Gay Marriage." |
#58
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 01/01/2019 17:34, Wolf K wrote:
So you haven't come across "check the record..." I have. Many times. It tends to be British usage, and it means what you would phrase as "Check the log..." I am 100% brit and I have NEVER heard ANYONE ever say that in an IT context. Outside of IT we might says 'look up the record(s)' but that would not be about phone calls or their logs. You seem to be addicted to making up stuff that justifies your position. -- The lifetime of any political organisation is about three years before its been subverted by the people it tried to warn you about. Anon. |
#59
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
On 2019-01-01, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2019 15:45, William Unruh wrote: On 2019-01-01, The Natural Philosopher wrote: On 01/01/2019 02:44, nospam wrote: you cannot accept that 'every call is recorded' means something other than what you think it does, which is making an audio recording of every call, not a log of who called whom and when. All the kings horses and all the kings men, Couldnt put Humpty together again. Words do not mean what you alone intend them to mean. If you are only talking to yourself you can say what the **** you like If you are attempting communication (as against egotistical browbeating) with other people it behoves you to use words as others expect them to be used. Except other people, which includes individuals other than you, have different districts of meaning surrounding words, because they have different experience with the language and with life. It is that spread of meaning which makes poetry possible. (But then you probably hate poetry). Poetry is a different way to use words. To describe emotional states. "I wandered, lonely as a cloud" is pure nonsense if taken literally,. Thats is the point. It is therefore obviously not supposed to be taken literally. However in this case we were in the contxet of definite factual statements about something: there should be no place for wolly ambiguous interpretation. We have very pricse langauge to use in this case, as IT professionals, To record a call is not the same as to record a call's *metadata*. Both can fall under the term "record a call" in casual speech. There was not attempt made to be precise. in the original. Since it is perfectly clear to all except weasels attempting a reverse ferret that there is a difference, your attempts to pretend they mean the same are somewhat more indicative ne suspects of the childlike And for someone concerned with accuracy, what is "ne suspects"? And I think you have to give the benefit of the doubt to someone interpreting they own words, than to someone who likes being tendentious. desire to cover a mistake by claiming you meant it all along... For someone who claims to be concerned about precise use of language, you do not read very well. I am not the person who used the original phrase about recording. I entered because of some incredibly wolly and wrong claims being made about language which you seem to have agreed with in your opening paragraph here. (and it is not just in conveying emotion that poetic use of language is used. It is in all uses of language. Go read both of Witgenstein's books, the first, Tractatus espousing basically your position, and Philosphical Investigations admiting he was wrong in his Tractutus, and that the use of language is far richer than he first thought. |
#60
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Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
In article
Wolf K wrote: On 2018-12-31 21:44, nospam wrote: In article , Wolf K wrote: what you intended to say and what you actually said are not the same, but what's really odd are the lengths to which you are going to justify it. [...] I'm not justifying it. I don't have to. I said what I said, and I meant what I meant. If I'd thought twice about whom I was talking to, I might have rephrased it. But probably not. what you said was ambiguous, and that's being generous and polite. the meaning that the vast majority of people will think when hearing the phrase 'every call is recorded' is *not* what you want it to be. So? If I read what I think is nonsense, I try to figure out what the writer probably intended. If I think it's important enough (egf, if the apparently intended meaning leads in even weirder directions), I may ask for confirmation. What I'm trying to do is educate you about how language works. Which has it backwards, because langauge is not an object. It's a behaviour that people engage in. So I'll rephrase that: no. what you're trying to do is not admit that it means something other than what you want it to mean. There' nothing to admit. I used a phrase to express what I meant in a specified context. If you insist that it can't mean what I intended it to mean _in that context_, that's not my problem. I'm trying to educate you in how people actually use langauge. You seem to believe that you know all there is to know about that. You don't. Neither do I. But I know a hell of a lot more than you do. straw man. Oh no, you're the one You also hold a widespread conceptual error: that words "have" meanings. they do. sometimes more than one. If you intend "people use words to express meanings", sure,. If you mean "words have meanings the way apples have coluiur", you're simply wrong. An apples' colour is objectively measureable as a mix of wavelenths of lightb the apple's surface abosrbs and refklects (it's appearnec i eonthing else). Hence you believe that there are correct and incorrect words for things. there are. sometimes more than one. if the meanings of words were arbitrary, as you want them to be, then it would be impossible to communicate. we rely on specific meanings and choose words accordingly to communicate with each other. If only it were that simple. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/abraham_lincoln_107482 How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg. hence your comment that "recording calls is illegal", which it is, when you intend "record the content of the call". But not in every jurisdiction, so your "correct" meaning is limited by geography and law. recording a phone call without consent of at least one party, which would be the case if the phone company is doing the recording and not either participant, is illegal just about everywhere (there could be an exception, but it's extremely unlikely). It's legal in jurisdictions inhabited by most of the human race. A long way from "just about everywhere". what you're thinking of [...] No, I ain't. In fact I'm not quite sure what I was thinking of. Probably the fact that in US law even the police have to get a court order to record phone call without consent, while in jurisdictions governing most of the human race, the police can record whatever they want. [...] your still trying to justify your incorrect usage. crazy. Nah, I'm just poking you to see how far you will go in insisting that there is one, and only one, correct usage. Or alternatively, that it's forbidden to extend usage beyond a word's "specific meaning". I find it interesting that you've snipped my reminder of how dictionaries are constructed, IOW, how we parse/construct meaning. UI find it even more interesting that you are in the habit if snipping without marking the snip. Have a good day, Off-Topic. |
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