ferzul

Thae's a nice ideal, but if you need to get something working, nothing beats searching for the error message.

The original package maintainers could write instructional materials that start from the errors, but I suspect that's too hard. Without specific training, it'll always be easier for third parties to provide ad hoc than first parties to produce as part of release.

I don't want to disagree with your sentiment, but it's for the companies who benefit from Babel to donate, not individual techies.

Canada seems to use a lot of traditional measures. Australians from the country seem to measure in feet and inches - not just peoples heights. And a foreigner might think an Australian asking for a pint of beer is asking for a measure of beer, although a pint is just the name of a size of glass (like a schooner or pot).

I have heard it described that -ed is used more often when the speaker is conceptualising the time it took, but -t is used as a default.

That would mean “it burned” brings to mind images more like “it was burning” and “I burnt it” brings to mind images of having something that is burnt.

Neither of your examples are passive btw.

that will happen regardless, since you will die and your grandchildren are “other people”

tire vs tyre - apparently “tire” is older, but when pneumatic tyres became a thing, the spelling “tyre” caught on in England. So that's not an option.

kerb vs curb (n) - again, curb is older, but somehow a spelling error^W varient caught on in England. In this case, it is unfortunate since Scottish people allegedly pronounce “curb” but write “kerb” (they pronounce ur like u+r and er like e+r, not as a single sound). So this one is not just not an option, it's actively hostile to many British peoplee

-or vs -our: unless you will spell governour and use other like spellings, you have no historical leg to stand on so you might as well allow both variants.

program is the older spelling, programme is preferred by those who are jealous of the French.

I never understood the logic of swapping -re to -er in theatre, centre tho. I mean, why only -re but not -le? why don't Americans tickel and cuddel? Surely the logic is the same. So I think you can mount your high horse here.

You have ignored the questioner's question. Why?

The fact that something has always been done is not a reason to do it again.

Alternative pov that may help your snobbery: There is not yet an Australian English standard; it is just British. Therefore, Australians are free to create our own standard using parts of the existing standards or innovations of our own.

In particular, you are not propagating our own tradition by strictly adhering to so-called Australian spellings, which are really British spellings. On the contrary, you are declaring linguistic subordination. At this stage, the best option is tolerance of diversity, not snobbery.

If you look at an American book that has an edition produced by an Australia publisher, it may have American spellings, but most Australian editions (i.e. British editions, since their publishers claim Australia as a dependency) use British spelling.

A spelling reform could keep “mention” and still significantly improve the orthography were it to simply apply the rules more consistently. And when words are genuinely different, like “ask” or “of” it's not going to hurt to spell them differently.

a spelling reform cud[] keep “mention” and still significantly improov the orthography wer it to simply aply the rules more consistently. And when wurds ar genuinely different, like “ask/aask” or “uv/ov” it's not going to hurt to spell them differently.

[] although how to spell put/putt is an open question. here I have sided with northerners and decided to spell them the same.

Fortunately it is not a claim in the text you quoted. If a change is necessary, it has already happened everywhere. So neither t-flapping nor th-fronting are necessary, but both are more likely than [t] > [k]. There is no specific reason that one of them advanced through one country and the other spread through another, even if there is a good reason the third change hasn't happened. Or equivalently with the abandonment of “reckon” vs the substitution of “autumn” for “fall”.

Australian would have been counterproductive, as there was a time when it could be said Australia uses -ise; Britain prefers -ize and America use -ize.

Nowadays I have no idea if there'r any distiction - maybe just permitting one to spell “program” correctly?

Before computer dictionaries one Australian newspaper used “color, -ise” as its spelling which I find preferable.

> So one could say that the '-ize' ending may have a more Germanic feel to it. In a similar way "metre" versus "meter".

although one shouldn't, since West Germanic didn't have a z sound or a letter to spell it with - it had become r (hence was/were, where “was” originally had an s sound and were originally had a z sound).

Later, when Germanic languages developed z again, it has mostly been spelt with s as in “was”, since it comes from s.

In English no matter the origin of the word, z is spelt s in core vocabulary. Borrowings from Greek have z but they are mostly learned. If there were no zoos, z would feel entirely odd.

although the Australian visa deemed to match the US work visa for Australians is available without regard for nationality. I think reciprocity is common, but many states work in their own self interest first.

See my comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23880582

in the olden days, i could walk into a newsagent/video shop, pick up a product, exchange some plesantries, put down some coins, and walk out. no-one would know my name or anything about me.

nowadays, if you want to pay for a newspaper article or a video, you have to fork over all your pii and oblige yourself to paying a certain sum in the future unless you do something to cancel it.

there is no fairness in commerce any more. they treat us like hostiles, and we have to treat them like hostiles.

the current choice isn't between paying for it or pirating it, it's between handing over your identity and future income or actively hiding.

one party to this commercial transaction doesn't need to eat and has an income the size of hundreds of thousands of the other side.

NewPipe doesn't need to be trusted where Google actively requires you to trust them - yet repeatedly acts untrustworthily.

If they want me to happily give them money, let me do it without trusting those who do not deserve my trust. I shouldn't have to trust corporations.

can you do that on a phone?

i was once told vision impared people can do much faster than that if it's a flat computerised voice. so i started reading articles like that for a while. i had to do a bunch of manual/automatic handling, but i got it up to super fast speeds and i could read it thrice in less than the time it took to read it once. not bad!

security updates? i don't need no stinking security updates!

i think monotised videos die easier than non-monotised ones. leave it long enough and they all die.

I was experiencing it. Then I realised f-droid just hadn't updated in a while - no doubt it's that Google battery saver feature where the programs I want my phone to run to achieve some background task get banned.

Since updating manually (in f-droid) i have been a happy camper.

analogies are great, but there's just literally nothing that corresponds to vitamin c on the internet. the analogy just goes into completely unchartered waters and crashes against the rocks when it pretends that it is a life or death matter. the internet can't stop you getting scurvy - in fact, since it's effective at reducing exercise, it seems to run in the opposite direction from the truth and it's just alarmist nonsense.

they were downvoted. downvoting costs reputation and can lead to a dead post. downvoting means, “don't argue this position again”. fair to say they were cancelled i think.

you can reply below; you just need to click on the post's time to get the post in a new page.

so how does that work? i cannot think of a workable solution short of an end to the world wide web, and the beginning of a system of national internets and data ports (as in, places you send your data to to export them from one country and import them to another).

otherwise, the democratic oversight will just be whatever the u.s can manage.

the internet is already falling apart; i notice many u.s media sites are inaccessible from europe. i guess national internets are less painful in europe, where almost every country has its own language, than in the anglosphere, where there are many smaller countries that use english.

it solves many problems - it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance. but is it right? i doubt it.

the why do i have to “download” my document in libreoffice if i want to keep it?

if the merchant doesn't charge a creditcard surcharge, and using a credit card is worth 1€ to me, and costs 1.01€/transaction to the merchant. but only 90% of transactions are by credit card. well, then i am better off paying by credit card, since 10% of transactions are subsidising my 1€.

(strangely, in australia, card surcharges became normalised just before cash payments fell off a cliff. credit card transactions have also declined; it's visa/mc debit that have skyrocketed.)

> 1: as you’ve said, the quality of such completion depends on habits; if you’re just shifting to the browser, it doesn’t have the full details with which to do good completion.

i've used firefox ever since galeon bit the dust (or maybe since epiphany switched to webkit). it knows my habits. but it still suggests urls i don't want instead of just offering to switch to an open tab. (frankly, i want open tabs to match enthusiatically. i would rather switch to an open tab than open a new tab to the same site, which is redundant.)

many companies did targeted advertising in the pre-web days and made a profit. you can advertise without knowing anything about a consumer - except that they like reading this kind of article. so there is no tradeoff between privacy and profitable advertising; both are possible at the same time.

It's not an American cultural norm. It's just English grammar.

Things which are written as compounds in other languages often have a space in English, and English does not distinguish between word classes so that Noun-Noun compounds and Adjective-Noun phrases are ambiguous.

But if you hear “white nationalism” five times, when you hear “white nationalist” you don't hear it compositionally as “(white) (nationalist)” but as “(white nation)alist” - someone who advocates for a white nation.

“White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong. For instance, a person could support a multi-party white nationalist pseudo-democracy like the US during slavery. But nazism is going to be a form of dictatorship.

> Mac & Windows did away with always-visible menu bars just fine.

is this sarcasm? it appears disjointed from your comment and disagrees with your thesis.

> Remember how Windows 8 tried to hide the start menu and how it had turned into the worst UX experience in the last decade ever.

part of that is surely that trigger start in windows 8/8.1 closed (hid/whatever) you were working on before, forcing an unnecessary context switch. i can't print or save documents in office anymore for the same reason - if you choose “File”, it closes your current file.

note that mac os, windows, and to a much greater extent iOS and Android have abandoned the visibility principle. having a dedicated button vs a “force click” feature? i'd prefer the button.

your objections to dnd depend on it not being well implemented. but when it's core, it is well implemented. i use dnd, even sometimes to copy/paste on windows.

° "Drag & drop to open" has other issues too. For one, there is no orthogonality between open & close. Do I drag away the icon to close the file or is there a standalone "close" option without an open?

i don't understand your objection here. is there orthoganality between open/close on other systems? i have never thought so. i close by clicking x (windows, gnome) or just going back home (android). but i open by doubling click the file (linux) or doing something ad hoc (windows, android)