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Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

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Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#231

Post by dqpb »

School-Cotton wrote: post #193
dqpb wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dictionary lists all the words people use. It does not curate the words people should use. Therefore, a words presence in a dictionary is not proof of anything other than the word has been used before.

Whether people “should” use a particular word is your subjective aesthetic judgment.

Is it subjective in this case? There is a logic to how this word is constructed: regard-less means without regard. Irregardless violates that logic: ir-regard-less, not without regard?

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#232

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

School-Cotton wrote: post #224
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of language is to communicate. Adding words which mean exactly the same thing as existing (shorter) words consumes cognitive resources without enhancing the language's ability to communicate. Therefore, objectively, people shouldn't use them.

So you’re categorically against the existence of synonyms?

There are very few true synonyms. Most have some cases where you'd want to use one or the other.

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#233

Post by School-Cotton »

rzzzt wrote: post #226
School-Cotton wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are prescriptive and descriptive schools of linguistics That’s not true. There are no “prescriptivists” whatsoever in the modern science of linguistics.

Interesting to hear! What happened to those guys?

What guys? Did they ever exist? Can you name a prominent “prescriptivist linguist”?

I’m pretty sure there was never a “prescriptivist school” of linguistics, or if there was it was never mainstream. There have been prescriptive grammarians of course but AFAIK they never called themselves “linguists”.

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#234

Post by judge2020 »

thefz wrote: post #218
pretext-1 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They know airtags can be used for crime and don't care. So can iPhones. Or Androids. Or ski masks, lock picks, tape. Should we stop selling useful items when they can be abused? Apple did way more to stop the abuse of AirTags than the competition and I don't see anyone complaining about Tile. Almost any tool can be abused or used to hurt someone. Stop trying to shift the blame from the perpetrator to the tool being…

> Should we stop selling useful items when they can be abused? No. My points above are: 1: people go out of their way to excuse Apple of any wrongoding, part of it is because of the "cult", part of it because Apple is very good at PR and painting themselves always in a good light 2: Apple has, as usual, done the bare minimum to arginate the problem and hand-waved at it.-

And yet GPS trackers people can slap on cars have been a thing for over 2 decades. My point in the second paragraph is that regardless of how good or bad the safeguards the big company implements are, someone will be able to either abuse it or repurpose/reimplement the technology to perform malicious acts.

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#235

Post by School-Cotton »

dqpb wrote: post #231
School-Cotton wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether people “should” use a particular word is your subjective aesthetic judgment.

Is it subjective in this case? There is a logic to how this word is constructed: regard-less means without regard. Irregardless violates that logic: ir-regard-less, not without regard?

It’s true that you can’t logically predict the meaning of “irregardless” from its smaller components.

However, that’s true of virtually all words. Ones where the etymology makes the meaning obvious are the exception.

Human languages aren’t math or programming languages; you can’t apply the same kind of logic to them.

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#236

Post by School-Cotton »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #216
School-Cotton wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice that while “etymonline” may not like it, serious dictionaries like OED give its meaning without any value judgments. Because scientists who study language seriously understand that trying to stem the tide of random language change is futile and pointless.

When a word is nonstandard it means it is “not conforming in pronunciation, grammatical construction, idiom, or word choice to the usage generally characteristic of educated native speakers of a language."[0] [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless

You proved my point. That says it doesn’t correspond to the usage of a particular social group (educated people), which is a scientific statement. It doesn’t say it’s “wrong”, which is a value judgment.

Obviously, linguists don’t dispute the existence of more or less prestigious varieties of languages.

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#237

Post by GekkePrutser »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #221
GekkePrutser wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AirTag transmits constantly yet it manages to last 6 months too. They do not wait for phones to ping them, they just beacon all the time. Not saying this is what Tesla do. For privacy reasons it would be way better to not transit until it sees the car. But battery life isn't proof of this.

All the time? Or at intervals? At what interval and what is the expected distance at which they can be detected?

All the time, as in several times per second. I have a bluetooth sniffer and these beacons are very very chatty. I didn't test the AirTags myself but it can't be lower than once every 5 seconds or so. But really I think they are like the other battery-operated BLE beacons with several times per second. BLE really is really low energy, they got that part totally licked.

The expected distance is pretty high. Officially up to 10m (like a keyless entry) but they can reach much higher distances. Because I often leave my AirTag in the house and it gets detected very often despite me not even having an iPhone :)

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#238

Post by rzzzt »

School-Cotton wrote: post #233
rzzzt wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to hear! What happened to those guys?

What guys? Did they ever exist? Can you name a prominent “prescriptivist linguist”? I’m pretty sure there was never a “prescriptivist school” of linguistics, or if there was it was never mainstream. There have been prescriptive grammarians of course but AFAIK they never called themselves “linguists”.

This is definitely my ignorance showing, so you'll have to bear with me, but what is the difference between grammarian and linguist?

I did find a linguistics course note which does seem to indicate that such a debate existed, even if in the past: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/prescription.html

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#239

Post by kjreact »

thefz wrote: post #218
pretext-1 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They know airtags can be used for crime and don't care. So can iPhones. Or Androids. Or ski masks, lock picks, tape. Should we stop selling useful items when they can be abused? Apple did way more to stop the abuse of AirTags than the competition and I don't see anyone complaining about Tile. Almost any tool can be abused or used to hurt someone. Stop trying to shift the blame from the perpetrator to the tool being…

> Should we stop selling useful items when they can be abused? No. My points above are: 1: people go out of their way to excuse Apple of any wrongoding, part of it is because of the "cult", part of it because Apple is very good at PR and painting themselves always in a good light 2: Apple has, as usual, done the bare minimum to arginate the problem and hand-waved at it.-

Likewise some people go out of their way to disparage Apple because they belong to the anti-“cult”. Comment histories can be damning…

Maybe adding something useful to the conversation by recommending a possible solution to the problem that Apple could implement to alleviate the problems would be more constructive?

Here let me start such a conversation: Apple could spearhead a standard to make their trackers communicate with surrounding devices and allow blocking to occur if someone doesn’t want to be tracked. But on the flip side the blocker is then recorded by a central authority to prevent bad actors from stealing and blocking tracking.

Re: Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

#240

Post by 411111111111111 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #207
411111111111111 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government was not involved in the patents anecdote.

All schools are government schools because the government license them and will shut them down if they do not comply.

So the UK doesn't have private schools which can set whatever house rules they want unless they're challenged in court about them?

Yeah true story bro.

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