h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

unfortunately, in a few survey's a few years ago, it was found not only did people really misunderstand how rocketry worked, but most of them thought that the sun went round the earth.

A lot of scientists were not only surprised and disappointed about this but also deeply shocked at the poor level of communication between the scientific community and the population at large.

on another point, ion, your position that the internet is a wider society than a rocket club is completely irrelevent. when you talk about common language and society, you are largely right, but when you talk about hacking, you are not talking about the society at large.

you are talking about a detailed technical subject with it's own terminology and methodology. people who don't share this can feel free to use their own language with their own friends as much as they like. once they try talking to experts in the field, they need to adopt the correct terminology, or they look like fools, and act like them as well.

the terminology has usually drawn the lines where they have because it is at the very least highly usefull to draw them there. when you start trying to bend technical language out of shape to use it for purposes that it was never intended, it starts to make it increasingly hard to say anything that isn't just noise.

this is why every so often a completely new terminology is invented which restores the similarity between the thing you are talking about and the language used to talk about it.

by trying to impose "common usage" on the technically aware, you try and invalidate large areas of a subject which they know a lot about.

this is why when it started to get hard to talk about hackers and crackers, they had to coin the terms white hat hackers and black hat hackers to replace them.

I am sorry if you don't understand the fundamentals of technical language, but when you do understand the linguistic necessities, we will still be out there talking about the subject, using correct language for the subject.

There are parts of the bible belt which are trying to force their terminology on university level biologists and geneticists, so that they have to talk about creationism and evolution as equally valid explanations of the subject. where they are succeeding, the people finishing the degrees are finding it impossible to get a job, because they don't speak the language.

Which I've heard about, and find a bit scince it's no explanation at all, why can't they just have 2 classes, Biology and 'The biology of god'

I've also heard of the White hacker and Black Hacker, I understand that these terms have been used by people to explain the difrance between people who use there knolage for there personal gains or show offs, and people who are gueniunly security awear. your position is not under consideration in this point. but the word hacking as it has been used to term, an atempt at securty over a network by a crimial, is misleading and is incorect. the media twist should not guide the life of a lanuage. it is an atempt to group people, to use a common word to describe them, to point the finger of blame and skew the debate by adding intent to a word. Thats what I find offensive.

Oh Look, it's them! *replace with any swearword here* (piest mentality)

-- DoctorMO --

I dislike the misuse of the technical terminology by people who not only don't understand it, but won't learn why they are wrong either.

in the case of the press, it is even worse, as most journalists are not computer savvy, and lump script kiddies (who don't usually understand what they are doing), virus writers, security hole announcers, tiger teams and system administrators all under the same banner.

it is unhelpfull and gets in the way of talking about quite serious and important issues. the actions of most of these people who don't know what they are talking about would in any other subject be regarded as trolling, but when you talk computers, that fact that they use microsoft word occasionally seems to be taken at face value as a reason they should be beyond criticism.

a very strange way of thinking indeed.

The way of the world.

-- DoctorMO --