How to uncompress a VOB file? (Win XP)

[Chris Angelico]

Please use `[...]' or `[…]' to indicate omission instead. I could have
written `politeness...' myself.

Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help? Can a reader know
that you put square-bracketed dots and that I didn't omit a lengthy
quoted string? Perhaps you said "Please use `m4-style quotes rather
than matching ASCII quotes' or `something else' to indicate omission
instead".

ChrisA

 

[Chris Angelico]

People have the right to ask to be known by a particular name, but they
are obliged to be reasonable about how successful their request will be
when they ask.

Reminds me of what Torhelm said during one of our Dungeons and Dragons
campaigns:

Ancient D&D saying: "People who don't like nicknames shouldn't pick
multisyllabic names."

ChrisA

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Eh?

I'm guessing that's a reference to something that I'm not familiar with?

It was a joke, implying that my mother uses the same "truly unique"
handle as you.

With over 7 billion people on the planet, and no upper limit on the
number of handles anyone can take, together with the lack of any
definitive central registry, I wouldn't put money on any one of them
being unique.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that now you have claimed Rosuav is
unique to you, some wag (or wags) have rushed out and registered it on
whatever Internet forums you haven't already done so on and are already
posting "I am [insert childish insult of your choice]" in your name.

 

[Chris Angelico]

It was a joke, implying that my mother uses the same "truly unique"
handle as you.

With over 7 billion people on the planet, and no upper limit on the
number of handles anyone can take, together with the lack of any
definitive central registry, I wouldn't put money on any one of them
being unique.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that now you have claimed Rosuav is
unique to you, some wag (or wags) have rushed out and registered it on
whatever Internet forums you haven't already done so on and are already
posting "I am [insert childish insult of your choice]" in your name.

Ah. Sure. I get that.

But "Rosuav" is, as far as I know, unique to me in the entire English
language. (I checked once, and there's something in Italian that uses
the same letter combination. Not a person, though.) Yes, it's entirely
possible that someone will deliberately try to sully my name like
that, but I can't imagine that anyone would accidentally hit on it as
an internet username, given that it hasn't happened yet. And sure,
someone might be using it offline that I'm unaware of. I'm prepared to
chance that.

So yeah, I probably shouldn't have said "truly unique", but
"effectively unique". Pretty much anything you find on google.com or
duckduckgo.com with the name "rosuav" has come from me, or is
referencing me (and this would include the wag/s you describe, though
I've not seen that happen, and I've been using and claiming this name
for a decade or so - and that's only counting on the internet).

ChrisA

 

[Chris Angelico]

Please use `[...]' or `[…]' to indicate omission instead. I could
have written `politeness...' myself.

Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help?

They are a long-standing convention for marking an editorial addition or
clarification.

Square brackets – also called simply brackets (US) – are mainly used
to enclose explanatory or missing material usually added by someone
other than the original author, especially in quoted text.

<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket#Square_brackets_.5B_.5D>

Right, as is often done with dangling pronouns. "[Square brackets] are
a long-standing convention..." would be a valid way of quoting your
above statement. What I mean is that putting brackets around the
ellipsis adds nothing, and certainly doesn't eliminate ambiguity; the
only advantage is that [...] cannot be confused for a written-in
pause.

ChrisA

 

[Ian Kelly]

Please use `[...]' or `[…]' to indicate omission instead. I could have
written `politeness...' myself.

Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help?

The square brackets clarify that the ellipsis was not part of the
original quotation but was added at some later point.

Can a reader know
that you put square-bracketed dots and that I didn't omit a lengthy
quoted string?

Irrelevant. Why would an author adhering to common principles of
style ever use square-bracketed dots in a statement that he authored
himself? And if instead your quotation had been of Thomas also
quoting a third party, then it would not be important whether you or
Thomas had added the omission -- the main point is that it wasn't
there originally.

Be that as it may, the MLA no longer requires square brackets around
an ellipsis of omission, so at least from a scholarly standpoint
you're off the hook.

 

[Chris Angelico]

Irrelevant. Why would an author adhering to common principles of
style ever use square-bracketed dots in a statement that he authored
himself?

You mean exactly the way he did in the post you quoted me as quoting?

ChrisA

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

You mean exactly the way he did in the post you quoted me as quoting?

That's the usual problem with markup. How do you distinguish markup used
as markup from the same characters used as text?

English has a bunch of ad-hoc rules like sticking things in quotation
marks, square brackets or angle brackets, but no systematic way of
escaping markup in general. There's no standard way to distinguish my
writing [...] deliberately (as here) from an editor trimming it, except
from context, and that is notoriously ambiguous.

"Godel, Escher and Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter discusses this sort of
quoting, meta-quoting, etc. in detail. A good read if you want your brain
stretched to the point it starts leaking out of your ears.

 

[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

And my signature has less information than the headers. So you're not
deprived of anything.

With NNTP and IMAP4 it is possible to retrieve only the message header.
Therefore, messages are easier to filter by message header than by message
body. So the former is done, to keep one's input stream's S/N high.

Of course, my bad. The difference is obvious, I should have known
which without asking.

<http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

 

[Grant Edwards]

Please use `[...]' or `[?]' to indicate omission instead. I could have
written `politeness...' myself.

Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help?

Because that's the standard method for denoting text that was inserted
by an editor and not written by the original author.

Can a reader know that you put square-bracketed dots and that I
didn't omit a lengthy quoted string?

Generally, yes. That's the convention for Usenet and mailing lists.

 

[Dan Sommers]

When I've got these antlers on I am dictating and when I take them off I
am not dictating.

 

[Grant Edwards]

When I've got these antlers on I am dictating and when I take them off I
am not dictating.

Well done!

 

[Alex Strickland]

When I've got these antlers on I am dictating and when I take them off I
am not dictating.

Very good.

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

Well done!

Guess the antlers are off then, if we're serving venison...