Actually, yes, I know quite a few people who routinely speak of (and in) hex digits and the like. Now, of course, they all tend to be programmers. But how many people do you think, if it happened, would wake up, call their friend, and say "WOW! Did you hear they discovered a new allotrope of carbon called blabitychasomethingblehwhatsit?" I can't imagine very few people would use such a name, if our fictional allotrope existed. (I strongly doubt most people could tell you what a fullerene is either, and that's a very real one.) We quite often use technical and scientific terminology that very few people would use in day-to-day conversation. In this case, the number has a great significance. As to "breaking text", yes, we should only write it -once-. But we shouldn't fail to write it that once, because we're scared that the Big Bad Lawyers will Come And Get Us. The worst they'll do is send a DMCA notice, and we'd have to take it down temporarily. They likely won't even do that.
On 5/2/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 03/05/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
You can't honestly be serious, Doc. We don't write an article about "that company that starts with an M and made the popular operating system that starts with a W", we write about Microsoft and Windows. When we write about The Pirate Bay, we don't say "Well, there's this one website out there that distributes pirated software", we identify and name them, despite the highly-questionable legality of what they're doing. When we write about things, we identify and mention them.
Tell me this, please. Is there *anyone* in the world who would walk up to a friend and say - hey did you hear the news about [string of hex digits]? We can write an article which is perfectly explanatory, covers this whole fracas, and doesn't ever mention the actual value of the key; indeed, it would look and sound perfectly natural unless you were explicitly looking for the value.
(Consider a brief thought experiment: a long numerical string is unwieldy and clumsy; it breaks the flow of text. Any article on it would rapidly become one mention of the number and "the key" or "the value" or "n" elsewhere in the text, and the article would be titled something accordingly - here, "HD DVD key" or the like, but I don't know what for our thought experiment. The number itself has no intrinsic numerical significance*, so there wouldn't be a section devoted to discussing it as a number. Leave this article to be edited for a month; someone quietly takes the value out, along with all the other usual alterations. I'm really not sure you'd even notice when you came back to look at it again...)
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
- though we all remember the "proof all numbers are interesting", I'm sure!
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