Article about Herb Schildt accepted at comp.risks

[BruceS]

Speaking of rhyme... How do you pronounce C if you have to read it for
some reason?  

[s-ee]

Is "char" pronounced like the verb "char",

that's what i do

[kar] I've heard

only scousers would do that

and Yanks. There's more to this Earth than BG, you know.

with my accept (northern uk) there's no trace of an "h" in character
[kar-ak-ter]

None in mine either, but in my case that first syllable is
indistinguishable from the verb "care".
<snip>

 

[spinoza1111]

news:57172bd2-f09f-448a-bc98-b17deaced9da@v29g2000prb.googlegroups.com.... [snip]
Well, I suppose it was too much to expect that an exquisitely sophisticated
/boulevardier/ such as yourself would be familiar with the No. 16 hit of
1926:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Bye_Blackbird

A veritable earwig of a song, at least for we of the unwashed masses.

EPIC FAIL, Eddie!

Bruce, are you here for the sole purpose of taunting (and thereby
encouraging) one of our resident trolls, or do you have any interest
in the C programming language, which is what we try to discuss here?

According to Jaron Lanier ("You Are Not a Gadget"), a "troll" is
anonymous, so I cannot be one, since I take responsibility for what I
say, and you know who I am: wrote a published a successful Apress
title, lives in Hong Kong, is now a teacher, etc.

I can only conclude that you use this word because you're too cowardly
to fashion a racist label.

The "troll", like the Muslim, is the new "Jew". It "scans" in the same
way, and it defines the person who need not be the recipient of common
decency and courtesy, and who others laud or befriend at the cost of
being likewise labeled. Furthermore, like the "Jew", the "troll" is
sourly viewed as a free spirit by artisans and clerks chained to
meaningless jobs.

I have contributed too much for free to this newsgroup in the form of
on-topic technical discussion to be the subject of your cowardly
label. If you continue this name-calling I may contact your employer.

 

[spinoza1111]

[...]

Bruce, are you here for the sole purpose of taunting (and thereby
encouraging) one of our resident trolls, or do you have any interest
in the C programming language, which is what we try to discuss here?

I plead guilty to taunting, but with an explanation, your honor!

Over the last decade I've watched as EdNilgesin his various USENET avatars
has poisoned  and in at least one case (comp.programming), almost
single-handedly destroyed one NG after another.

The best response to Ed would be to totally ignore him, but even people who
should know better treat him seriously.

Short of pretending he doesn't exist, the best way to handle Ed is to drown
him in mockery. Unfortunately, as this thread has demonstrated, even that
has no effect on the Edster. When it comes to self-absorbed, fulminating
vileness, the man is a force of nature.

To repeat what I said else-thread, my ISP is about to pull the plug on NGs.
Knowing that my time here is short, I felt the need to tie up this
particular loose end. I forget what the psycho-babble buzz-phrase is for
this; sorry.

As I've said many times in other NGs, the best and most humane way to handle
Ed is to IGNORE HIM! I will now proceed to follow my own excellent advice..

One more thing: Do I have any interest in C programming? Why, C is my middle
name! :-D

Note that these tirades *contra* Nilges never name specifics, but only
propagate abstract charges: that I am deliberately disruptive person,
ignorant, and incompetent.

Whereas when I talk about Seebach I take care almost always to
enumerate specific charges germane to his standing here:

1. He has not taken any computer science classes at the university
level, yet has attacked an author with the MSCS and BS in computer
science,

2. And, he is not an untutored programming genius such that we could
ignore his lack of preparation, for he made silly errors in the attack
(claiming that one should not use the concept of "stack" to explain
runtime) and posted incompetent vanity code, which makes it clear that
he's an autodidact.

3. The vanity code includes an off by one strlen, a search for %p
that also finds percent anything, and unstructured switch statements

4. In trying and failing to demonstrate that it's not anti-Islamic to
be discourteous to Bangladesh posters because they are not Muslims,
Seebach showed a stunning lack of international culture

I do not like to have to constantly inventory Seebach's failings, but
he has a nasty tendency to excuse his own errors while calling into
question other people's competence and sanity.

The tirades against me are the result of communitarian hatred, where
the inadequate members of the community seek reassurance in the
proposition that no matter how deeply inadequate they feel they are
they at a minimum aren't like "Nilges".

This communitarian hatred is triggered by outdated human responses.
One is showing solidarity with another for no reason, out of the blue.
Many posters are amazed that I would defend Schildt because in the
corporate world, such behavior is nonexistent and/or frowned upon;
nobody stands up to management on behalf of another save (rarely) for
technical reasons, as if computers were so important that the only
people deserving of common decency are "skilled" programmers.

Another is speaking as the one to the many: in the corporate world,
it's often dangerous to discuss ideas since one might find one's
advocating the negation of a hidden "corporate direction".

But it's always safe to find an outlet for one's rage against the
machine by savaging another person.

My responses to Internet bullying have been constant since 1987,
because computer networks used as tools of the rich have created a
constant situation, in which bullying is useful in keeping people in
line. I have gotten results, including the cleanup of the Kathy Sierra
and Herb Schildt articles and a situation here at work.

The fundamental insanity is the collective belief in being "special"
individually owing to one's "knowledge" of the right sort of technical
arcana. Too many people, holding programming sinecures so structured
today as to ensure that they don't make a mess (such as Seebach's bug
finder pseudojob) demarcate a false community consisting of people
given respect and recognition because on the one hand, they know the
same arcana, and on the other hand, their competence and independence
is not such that they are, in the mythos, "prima donnas who don't
write code like normal people".

News flash. Everyone is entitled to respect and recognition. And,
indeed, I have called people Nazis and faggots, in cases where I
recognize someone subhuman clearly, and my initial gestures of respect
(such as sending email to Seebach requesting offline discussion) have
been treated without respect. Even in this context, I have been quick
to praise Kiki for doing well as in the case where he replied
courteously and accurately to Sandeep. But mutual respect and
recognition does not preclude self-defense...something the Mama's boy
will never understand.

One reason I got out of programming was the facile scorn of
programmers for people who they thought were not as smart as they. In
actuality programming exclusive of computer science is a nasty and
trivial skill of which no one should be proud.

 

[blmblm]

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.06.html#subj12

This shall shortly also be on the Digest, to where people may respond
to it. However, responses are competently moderated.

I'm mildly curious about whether anyone has attempted to respond and
what happened to the response if so. I'm mildly tempted myself,
but only mildly.

I now question, however, any previous claims that posts to comp.risks
are checked for technical accuracy; if nothing else, the comment
about why "void main()" might be questionable strikes me as incomplete.

 

[blmblm]

On May 24, 7:10 pm, "Bruce C. Baker" <[email protected]> wrote:

news:6bd6d2d2-b8cb-4c16-8a55-646a5a57b203@j12g2000pri.googlegroups.com...

[snip usual festering effluvium]

'Round and 'round and 'round he goes
Backing Schildt is all he knows
Bye bye Nilges

Spewing insults snide and vile
Interlaced with Marxist bile
Bye bye Nilges

No one here attends to what you're saying
They just hear a small sad jackass braying
Can't get past your hate for C
Poor pathetic wannabe
Nilges, bye bye

You've done it now. He's going to complain that (1) your work is
derivative and therefore inferior to his; and (2) the derivation
implies rampant racism on your part. At first the source eluded me,
right at the edge of memory, but then I remembered GIYF and had the
obvious answer. LQTM.

That ain't my complaint
Although the work is inferior:
What doth it attaint
Is...it hath no metre.

It appears that you missed the reference that I noticed but had to
look up. It scans fine when you know what you're looking for. GIYF.
HTH.

Fortunately the other Bruce finally supplied a reference, so I'm
not left wondering! I'm curious, though -- I tried Googling,
but in this instance GWNMF. What search terms did you use?

 

[blmblm]

On 2010-05-26, Keith Thompson <[email protected]> wrote:

[ snip ]

Speaking of rhyme... How do you pronounce C if you have to read it for
some reason? Is "char" pronounced like the verb "char", the noun "car", or
the verb "care"? (I'm pretty close to "care", with just a hint of an h in
there, because I pronounce it like the first syllable of "character".)

What are the names of the punctuation marks? Are those "braces" or "squiggly
brackets"? Is it "open paren", "open parens", or "open parenthesis"?

In my usage, the { and } are either "curly brackets [braces]"
or "squirrely brackets [braces]", depending on -- something.
(It was mostly the latter when I first learned C, coming as I
was from a background that was mostly FORTRAN and IBM assembler,
with a bit of Pascal for good(?) measure. The way I remember it,
those braces looked pretty strange!)

 

[Seebs]

I now question, however, any previous claims that posts to comp.risks
are checked for technical accuracy; if nothing else, the comment
about why "void main()" might be questionable strikes me as incomplete.

I would imagine that the moderator assumed that people would recognize that
the substantive issue is "it is hard to be totally sure that information
about people on Wikipedia is accurate, so it could harm a reputation or
something", and that apart from that, it's a wall of text, why read it?

-s

 

[spinoza1111]

I'm mildly curious about whether anyone has attempted to respond and
what happened to the response if so.  I'm mildly tempted myself,
but only mildly.

I now question, however, any previous claims that posts to comp.risks
are checked for technical accuracy; if nothing else, the comment
about why "void main()" might be questionable strikes me as incomplete.

This is because your level of expertise hasn't gotten to the point
where you're able to identify important issues versus Trivial
Pursuits. This is connected to your level of English.

I did notice that below a certain level, in computer applications, my
verbal facility was a positive defect in that it created
misunderstandings; this is why I'm glad to be out of the field...and
teaching English, history and philosophy.

My experience commencing in the 1960s was that underfunded schools
failed to teach English but to continued to graduate students; we have
people here who seem proud to have earned Ds in English.

These failures expected to find middle class jobs in factories but the
Nixon administration started a Thirty Year's War of
deindustrialization and union busting, so many of them were redirected
into computer programming owing to a widespread misunderstanding
(which Dijkstra challenged) that verbal facility was optional in
programming.

Therefore I discovered that with significant exceptions (a supervisor
at Baxter-Travenol, Whit Diffie, Bob Gaskins, and my supervisor at
Princeton) I had to keep my verbal facility under wraps. People not
comfortable with complex sentence structure would get "offended" to
use a word from business which I find itself offensive, since it
actually names a generalized resentment having to do with
subordination, which is then "taken out" on targets of convenience.

Complex sentence structure, you see, violates the business-survival
law of one-dimensionality, in which ideally, we handle stress by
making cardinally ordered bullet points; Herbert Marcuse called this
thinking "one-dimensional".

However, artists realize that most real-life situations are n-
dimensional and in this case, it's literally impossible to sort things
in a simple list of priority. They also realize that this is used
primarily to oppress people, from academic rankings to the Holocaust.

For example, if you build a program as you should, out of small
functions, you actually have the choice as to which to develop...and
this choice, in my experience, bothers managers.

In the case of computer applications, I realized that the ordering
rule needed to be what mathematicians call a "partial ordering" that
generates what mathematicians call a tree, and (this is critical)
complex sentence structure (using indirect reported speech, wh-
clauses, parentheses and so on) can best explain a complex programming
situation. But this collided with the lack of preparation in English
of many programmers.

I also discovered, at a Chicago consulting firm founded by a
University of Chicago graduate, that a separate class of academic
washouts had been created by the defunding of university education;
these were people who had mastered advanced English in grad school,
but who failed to get jobs in their terminal degree, and wanted to
become Yup-assed managers and use the lower class for their own
purposes. Because ability to think at the higher level had been
privatized, they imposed a strange "sumptuary law" on written and
spoken discourse: if you simultaneously used post K-12 English BUT
retained an interest in actually programming, this was "disruptive".

My point about main() is simply that it's a trivial and nasty issue
with all the appearance of being devised to make C and Linux
programmers feel good about themselves even when they can't program,
as seems to be the case with Seebach. Not knowing complex English
makes one able to emotionally select what you like and ignore what you
don't like, and it turns your prose and thought into a series of
emotional signifiers...in which you can switch from inane technical
discussions to the worst kind of personal trashing with no moral
order.

I don't think you think much above this level. I think in the past you
may have, but working either for corporations or for corporation-
dominated universities forces people, in my experience, to self-
moronize and to simplify their speech and thought patterns to fit in.

For this reason, you're ready to trash Peter Neumann for accepting the
post. The problem being that he's accepted thirty posts from me over
time.

When people lose the ability to partially order and instead replace
partial ordering (with its implication that you retain some freedom of
choice) by one-dimensional thinking, they usually use personalities
and transitive axioms such as "Nilges is an asshole, therefore any one
who accepts him is an asshole" to flatten the tree of partial moral
ordering into the brutal, if time-saving, list of who's in and who's
out, to be used, ultimately, to load the train for Auschwitz.

 

[spinoza1111]

I would imagine that the moderator assumed that people would recognize that
the substantive issue is "it is hard to be totally sure that information
about people on Wikipedia is accurate, so it could harm a reputation or
something", and that apart from that, it's a wall of text, why read it?

It's a wall of text, why read it
There's so many things better to do
All these weary words...all this shit
How dare he make such a to-do.

And so the Marines stood down while the Baghdad library burned.
And so, the UN stood down while the library in Sarajevo burned.
And so, the Romans stood down, while the library in Alexandria,
burned.

Where are the simple answers in all these books
Let us open them at random to find heresy.
Here Hypatia questions whether the earth is at the center
Obviously this is a mistake.

Hound her for fifteen years, strip her naked and kill her for these
errors.

The world is a wall of text destroy it
People are words. Kill them.



Peter, Neumann reads what's submitted and has the courage to get in
touch with the people who submit posts when he has questions. You
claim to moderate clcm but you don't read posts and you don't contact
submitters, because you're a pansy, basically. You do so to create the
fraudulent impression that you're an expert in C. You're not: no
expert would have submitted the code I've seen from you.

 

[spinoza1111]

It's a wall of text, why read it
There's so many things better to do
All these weary words...all this shit
How dare he make such a to-do.

And so the Marines stood down while the Baghdad library burned.
And so, the UN stood down while the library in Sarajevo burned.
And so, the Romans stood down, while the library in Alexandria,
burned.

Where are the simple answers in all these books
Let us open them at random to find heresy.
Here Hypatia questions whether the earth is at the center
Obviously this is a mistake.

Hound her for fifteen years, strip her naked and kill her for these
errors.

The world is a wall of text destroy it
People are words. Kill them.

Peter, Neumann reads what's submitted and has the courage to get in
touch with the people who submit posts when he has questions. You
claim to moderate clcm but you don't read posts and you don't contact
submitters, because you're a pansy, basically. You do so to create the
fraudulent impression that you're an expert in C. You're not: no
expert would have submitted the code I've seen from you.

Update: in Risks 26.07, Peter apologizes for publishing my note. I
have asked him to retract the retraction, since I feel he has been
deluged with your spam, and needs to reconnect with the better angels
of his nature.

We all can become mob members. We become mob members when we forget
the grace notes...such as thinking "hey, maybe it isn't for me to
attack Schildt since I don't got no degree", or "hey, maybe I should
confab with Nilges before embarassing him on comp.risks".

And: I make no apology for my response to the lack of decency by
inviting people to get fucked. This is what happens when you start
treating silly programming languages as more important than people.

 

[blmblm]

[ snip ]

In the case of computer applications, I realized that the ordering
rule needed to be what mathematicians call a "partial ordering" that
generates what mathematicians call a tree,

I'd have said a directed acyclic graph rather than a tree, but --
there I go again, picking apart some detail, right?

and (this is critical)
complex sentence structure (using indirect reported speech, wh-
clauses, parentheses and so on) can best explain a complex programming
situation. But this collided with the lack of preparation in English
of many programmers.

[ snip ]

For this reason, you're ready to trash Peter Neumann for accepting the
post.

No. There is, in my mind at least, quite a difference between
saying "I think a bit less of this person than I did before this
incident" and trashing him, and indeed, I'm not sure I'd even go as
far as saying the former in public -- I don't think I know enough
about the situation to slight him publicly. The claim that all
posts are checked for accuracy -- that was *your* claim I had in
mind, though I admit I don't remember its exact wording, and yes,
I do think his accepting of your post casts some doubt on that.
I also am curious about whether he was aware when he accepted your
post of the discussions you've engaged in in other public venues.
I would stop well short, though, of claiming that any of this
casts doubt on his competence as a moderator.

The problem being that he's accepted thirty posts from me over
time.

"Fascinating"?

I've been reading, or at least skimming, comp.risks for several
years, and generally I figure what I read there is credible, but
perhaps I should be reading more critically. (It's also kind
of curious that I don't remember noticing any of your posts,
given that I have a pretty good memory of your participation in
several Usenet newsgroups I follow, but -- <shrug>. I guess
if I'm really curious I can check the archives.)

[ snip ]

 

[spinoza1111]

[ snip ]

In the case of computer applications, I realized that the ordering
rule needed to be what mathematicians call a "partial ordering" that
generates what mathematicians call a tree,

I'd have said a directed acyclic graph rather than a tree, but --
there I go again, picking apart some detail, right?

No, you're just wrong. If the set is finite it's a tree. Furthermore,
I said it's a tree to clarify the definition, but you use language
less to come to common understanding (cf Habermas) than to create a
partial ordering and score points, right?

and (this is critical)
complex sentence structure (using indirect reported speech, wh-
clauses, parentheses and so on) can best explain a complex programming
situation. But this collided with the lack of preparation in English
of many programmers.

[ snip ]

For this reason, you're ready to trash Peter Neumann for accepting the
post.

No.  There is, in my mind at least, quite a difference between
saying "I think a bit less of this person than I did before this
incident" and trashing him, and indeed, I'm not sure I'd even go as
far as saying the former in public -- I don't think I know enough
about the situation to slight him publicly.  The claim that all
posts are checked for accuracy -- that was *your* claim I had in
mind, though I admit I don't remember its exact wording, and yes,
I do think his accepting of your post casts some doubt on that.

He's accepted about 30 posts over the years, and agreed to be a source
for my book. However, I shouldn't have to play the game of describing
my (limited) association with prominent people such as Nash or
Neumann. If you people had common decency and used this ng for its
intended purpose, I would have no need. As it is, because I know far
more about computer science and am far more literate and broadly
educated, I am forced to continually establish credibility.

Neumann's cowardly retraction lowers HIM in MY view and that is what
counts.

I also am curious about whether he was aware when he accepted your
post of the discussions you've engaged in in other public venues.
I would stop well short, though, of claiming that any of this
casts doubt on his competence as a moderator.

The fact that I am a target for bullies is independent of the worth of
the post, unless you're an Israeli...or something like that (cf the
disgusting news about the attack on the Mavi Marmara). It could mean
that the "rough consensus" is right, or it could mean that the
"cybernetic mob" is wrong.

"Fascinating"?  

I've been reading, or at least skimming, comp.risks for several
years, and generally I figure what I read there is credible, but
perhaps I should be reading more critically.  (It's also kind
of curious that I don't remember noticing any of your posts,
given that I have a pretty good memory of your participation in
several Usenet newsgroups I follow, but -- <shrug>.  I guess
if I'm really curious I can check the archives.)

And so she goes, not with a bang but rather a whimper.

[ snip ]

 

[Willem]

spinoza1111 wrote:
)> > In the case of computer applications, I realized that the ordering
)> > rule needed to be what mathematicians call a "partial ordering" that
)> > generates what mathematicians call a tree,
)>
)> I'd have said a directed acyclic graph rather than a tree, but --
)> there I go again, picking apart some detail, right?
)
) No, you're just wrong. If the set is finite it's a tree.

False, for two distinct reasons.
- There doesn't have to be a single root in a partial ordering.
- There can be multiple paths leading from one item to another.


SaSW, Willem
--
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
made in the above text. For all I know I might be
drugged or something..
No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
#EOT

 

[blmblm]

[ snip ]

No, you're just wrong. If the set is finite it's a tree.

We must be using different definitions of at least one of the relevant
terms. According to what I was taught (and indeed what I teach):

A partial ordering is a binary relation (call it LE) that is
reflexive (a LE a), symmetric (if a LE b and b LE a, then a =
b), and transitive (if a LE b and b LE c, then a LE c). A binary
relation in turn is simply a set of ordered pairs of elements of
the underlying set. If the set is finite, one could represent
the relation in the form of a directed graph. The transitivity
and symmetry properties preclude there being cycles in the graph
(aside from the trivial ones defined by the pairs required for
reflexivity). But I'm not thinking of anything in this definition
that implies a tree structure (maximum of one incoming edge per
node). ?

As an example of what I have in mind, consider a set with elements
a, b1, b2, and c, with a binary relation LE defined by the set of
pairs (a, a), (b1, b1), (b2, b2), (c, c), (a, b1), (a, b2), (b1, c),
(b2, c), (a, c). A pictorial representation of this would be a
diamond shape.

(I notice that while I was composing this post Willem posted
something that seems to agree with my definitions.)

Furthermore,
I said it's a tree to clarify the definition, but you use language
less to come to common understanding (cf Habermas) than to create a
partial ordering and score points, right?

Yes and no. I *am* a pedantic nitpicker, true, but as for whether
I put that to use only to try to score points -- no, I don't think
so, though there certainly *are* situations that seem to tempt me
to try to score points, bad idea though I know that to be.

[ snip ]

And so she goes, not with a bang but rather a whimper.

"Whimper"? Whatever.

(I *was* curious, and I find that the history goes back to .... 1988.
Good heavens. Some familiar themes, though, in those early posts.)

 

[BruceS]

[snip usual festering effluvium]
'Round and 'round and 'round he goes
Backing Schildt is all he knows
Bye bye Nilges
Spewing insults snide and vile
Interlaced with Marxist bile
Bye bye Nilges
No one here attends to what you're saying
They just hear a small sad jackass braying
Can't get past your hate for C
Poor pathetic wannabe
Nilges, bye bye
You've done it now.  He's going to complain that (1) your work is
derivative and therefore inferior to his; and (2) the derivation
implies rampant racism on your part.  At first the source eluded me,
right at the edge of memory, but then I remembered GIYF and had the
obvious answer.  LQTM.
That ain't my complaint
Although the work is inferior:
What doth it attaint
Is...it hath no metre.

It appears that you missed the reference that I noticed but had to
look up.  It scans fine when you know what you're looking for.  GIYF.
HTH.

Fortunately the other Bruce finally supplied a reference, so I'm
not left wondering!  I'm curious, though -- I tried Googling,
but in this instance GWNMF.  What search terms did you use?

I started with "song bye", and Google did its nice little auto-fill
bit, then I just followed the first suggested search to confirm.

 

[Phil Carmody]

spinoza1111 <[email protected]> wrote:

Why are you wasting our time arguing with this moron?

[ snip ]

No, you're just wrong. If the set is finite it's a tree.

We must be using different definitions of at least one of the relevant
terms. According to what I was taught (and indeed what I teach):

A partial ordering is a binary relation (call it LE) that is
reflexive (a LE a), symmetric (if a LE b and b LE a, then a =
b), and transitive (if a LE b and b LE c, then a LE c).

For values of 'symmetric' equal to 'antisymmetric'.

For a DAG you clearly want an irreflexive partial order.
But if you're the bilgemeister and want a tree, then your
best bet is a lobotomy, or frequent disappointment.

Phil

 

[blmblm]

Why are you wasting our time arguing with this moron?

Good question, and one for which I don't have a good answer, except

[ snip ]

In the case of computer applications, I realized that the ordering
rule needed to be what mathematicians call a "partial ordering" that
generates what mathematicians call a tree,

I'd have said a directed acyclic graph rather than a tree, but --
there I go again, picking apart some detail, right?

No, you're just wrong. If the set is finite it's a tree.

We must be using different definitions of at least one of the relevant
terms. According to what I was taught (and indeed what I teach):

A partial ordering is a binary relation (call it LE) that is
reflexive (a LE a), symmetric (if a LE b and b LE a, then a =
b), and transitive (if a LE b and b LE c, then a LE c).

For values of 'symmetric' equal to 'antisymmetric'.

Indeed. I even looked up the definition to remind myself what
the names of the various properties were, and yet somehow I *still*
got the names wrong. Sigh.

For a DAG you clearly want an irreflexive partial order.

Now that you mention it -- yes, since reflexivity means you have
an edge from each node back to itself?

But if you're the bilgemeister and want a tree, then your
best bet is a lobotomy, or frequent disappointment.
Phil

I've never been quite sure what your quote here means, but it *might*
apply, and might even sort of answer your "why are you doing this?"
question earlier.

 

[blmblm]

On May 25, 11:51 pm, BruceS <[email protected]> wrote:

On May 24, 7:10 pm, "Bruce C. Baker" <[email protected]> wrote:

news:6bd6d2d2-b8cb-4c16-8a55-646a5a57b203@j12g2000pri.googlegroups.com...

[snip usual festering effluvium]

'Round and 'round and 'round he goes
Backing Schildt is all he knows
Bye bye Nilges

Spewing insults snide and vile
Interlaced with Marxist bile
Bye bye Nilges

No one here attends to what you're saying
They just hear a small sad jackass braying
Can't get past your hate for C
Poor pathetic wannabe
Nilges, bye bye

[ snip ]

I started with "song bye", and Google did its nice little auto-fill
bit, then I just followed the first suggested search to confirm.

Hm! I just tried typing the same words into Google's search box,
and I got a different result -- first, no magic auto-fill stuff,
and then when I just pressed "enter" for a list of hits, nothing
on the first pageful seems like it would take me to the actual
song being parodied(?).

If I didn't already have too many things on my "I wish I knew
more about this" queue, I'd add to it some questions about what
exactly, or even approximately, Google is doing with the words
one types into its search box, because sometimes the results do
*not* make sense to me. !

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

Good question, and one for which I don't have a good answer, except
that it seemed like a good idea at the time. <shrug>

Have you considered the possibility that the technical errors are there
to get a rise from people who won't respond to the insults? Can anyone
be that wrong that often?

A partial ordering is a binary relation (call it LE) that is
reflexive (a LE a), [anti]symmetric (if a LE b and b LE a, then a =
b), and transitive (if a LE b and b LE c, then a LE c).

[Phil's correction edited in]

Now that you mention it -- yes, since reflexivity means you have
an edge from each node back to itself?

Yes, and antisymmetry must go as well.

For every partial order LE, there is a corresponding "strict partial
order", L, that is irreflexive (not(aLEb)) and transitive. As a result
it is asymmetric (if aLb then not(bLa)) rather than antisymmetric.

The terminology is odd (hence the scare quotes) because a "strict
partial order" is not a partial order by the usual definition. However,
because of the 1-1 correspondence between them, there is a natural DAG
induced by every partial order -- it's that DAG that represents the
strict version of original order.

Just to be clear: not a tree.

<snip>

 

[BruceS]

[snip usual festering effluvium]
'Round and 'round and 'round he goes
Backing Schildt is all he knows
Bye bye Nilges
Spewing insults snide and vile
Interlaced with Marxist bile
Bye bye Nilges
No one here attends to what you're saying
They just hear a small sad jackass braying
Can't get past your hate for C
Poor pathetic wannabe
Nilges, bye bye

[ snip ]

I started with "song bye", and Google did its nice little auto-fill
bit, then I just followed the first suggested search to confirm.

Hm!  I just tried typing the same words into Google's search box,
and I got a different result -- first, no magic auto-fill stuff,
and then when I just pressed "enter" for a list of hits, nothing
on the first pageful seems like it would take me to the actual
song being parodied(?).

Interesting. I'd expect Google to do the same thing no matter who
typed in the query, and to not change significantly for something like
this over the course of a day or two. I just tried it again with the
same results, from both Firefox and IE. Are you just using a Google
toolbar, or something like that, or are you actually going to www.google.com
and typing into the entry field there?