statue of limitation

That sounds like it’d be Futurama joke.

The source is some old “Top 10 Oldies Myths” article from About.com. Never cite wikipedia. Cite the source. https://web.archive.org/web/20140711194805/http://oldies.about.com/od/oldieshistory/a/oldiesmyths.htm

And that source doesn’t say anything about light sensitivity.

Roy did have eyeglasses to correct his vision, but they were quite normal; en route to an Alabama concert, however, he accidentally left them on the plane. The only other pair he had were prescription sunglasses, so he wore those instead. The very next day Roy was scheduled to open up a European Beatles tour, and there was no time to go find his old pair, so the dark shades stayed on him throughout the tour. The resultant frenzy of Beatlemania ensured that the singer would be seen throughout the world in that pair; by the time he returned home, it was a trademark.

Not that I necessarily believe anything in such an article.

In all my years, I’ve never heard a single person say they ever thought he was blind. I have a really hard time believing this was ever commonly believed.

I’m not disputing that you might have believed it and that some other people might have believed it, too. It’s just, I doubt it was a common thing.

Yes, we know Google is blind, duh.

You’ll never guess where nevertheless comes from!

Diaereses don’t indicate stress. They indicate separately pronounced vowels.

When you say OP, who are you talking about? The author of the post was talking about hyphens, and nothing about stresssed syllables, and I’m the one who brought up diaereses, and I wasn’t referring to stressed syllables, either.

Good catch. I fixed it.

Also, by your coöperative pronunciation example, people would be mispronouncing reëlect.

I’m not sure what you mean.

It’s pronounced co-operative and re-elect. Coöp needs it to not sound like “coop” as in chicken coop. Reëlect needs it to not sound like “reel” as in fishing reel.

It’s vowels only, and that’s funny. I hadn’t thought about it for my hypothetical “lineofsight” word.

I like to use them when words create a unit of thought. Like line-of-sight, and such. It really helps readability. It prevents people from having to think too hard about certain sentences when it’s ambiguous which words belong to what part of the sentence. Especially when the expression contains function words like “of”.

However, I’m a fan of just making multiple words into compound words, like bumblebee. That doesn’t work well with something like lineofsight, though.

As a side note, I wish we would bring back the diaeresis in favor of hyphens in words like co-op. It used to be coöp, and that is so much more fun. Or words like reëlect. Even when it’s not abbreviated, the diaeresis makes it more obvious to readers how coöperative is pronounced. Or any other time where two vowels in a row are pronounced separately.

The power required to do it is impressive to say the least.

That’s not how the attack worked. He didn’t drown out the tower. He simply overrode the the studio-to-transmitter link signal. The studios used microwave line-of-sight transmitters to communicate a signal from the studio to the tower. All the attacker had to do was override that signal. That signal was 50W max. You could override it with maybe 200W as long as you were also in line-of-sight of the microwave receiver. Probably less since some microwave trasmitters were as weak as 1W. They don’t need to be strong since they are line-of-sight directional transmitters. So, that’s not particularly impressive.

Oh, cool. Thanks!

Chromite passed the EFF test for trackers. I had a unique fingerprint, though. Not surprising. It’s really hard not to.

How do you feel about DDG browser? It’s another chrome based option. I’ve been using it when the some rare website won’t work in a Firefox fork, and I’m curious to hear other people’s opinions about it.

I like their free email forwarding service for throwaway accounts. Obviously, the emails aren’t private in any way.

My musket says otherwise!

Brits who say “Microsoft are doing a thing” are poking knitting needles into my ears every time!

It’s not plural. Microsoft is a company. A. One!

It doesn’t matter that it’s a company of individuals. Next your going to tell me my person is plural because I’m made from many cells. “CrayonRosary are mistaken about language!” No!

Bonus: Math is singular, too, because mathematics is singular. It’s not the plural of mathematic!

We overthrew your rule specifically because of this one language issue!

But there is a smallest unit, which is called a bit. Data can be broken down into smaller, countable units.

That’s not a particularly compelling argument. There’s a smallest unit of sand, too, but we still use a mass noun for it.

Besides, dictionary researchers agree it’s both a mass noun and a plural noun. People use it both ways. Here’s what Merriam Webster says about it. (I’m going to rework it to reduce the wordiness because it was so dense!)

Data leads a life of its own quite independent of datum, of which it was originally the plural. It occurs in two constructions:

1. as a plural noun (like earnings)
   • taking a plural verb and plural modifiers (such as these, many, a few), but not cardinal numbers
   • serving as a referent for plural pronouns (such as they, them)
2. as an abstract mass noun (like information)
   • taking a singular verb and singular modifiers (such as this, much, little)
   • being referred to by a singular pronoun (it).

Both constructions are standard. The plural construction is more common in print, evidently because the house style of several publishers mandates it.

So OP’s post is only half right, if even that much. In common speech, data is a mass noun, but many scientists and publishers still treat it as a plural noun. I would even venture most do.

Working as a programmer, most people I’ve interacted with use it as a mass noun, but not all. Language evolves, and the mass noun version is just as acceptable in most circles, but it certainly isn’t worthy of a “you should know” or “today I learned it’s actually a mass noun.”