[WikiEN-l] HD DVD key mess - OFFICE/Foundation?

[Andrew Gray]

On 03/05/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen at 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 at dunelm.org.uk

* though we all remember the "proof all numbers are interesting", I'm sure!