It’s just a joke. A pun, and a light-hearted jab at anyone who likes their terminal so much they play games in it, or design games for it.

Some people are terminally in the terminal.

I was making fun of you…

You don’t even know how to use “you”, and you have the audacity to be pedantic about OP’s use of “we”?

You weren’t replying to OP!

And at this moment, you’re not talking to the person who commented above. I just thought I would explain that to prevent your further confusion.

The source is some old “Top 10 Oldies Myths” article from About.com. Never cite wikipedia. Cite the source. https://web.archive.org/web/20140711194805/http://oldies.about.com/od/oldieshistory/a/oldiesmyths.htm

And that source doesn’t say anything about light sensitivity.

Roy did have eyeglasses to correct his vision, but they were quite normal; en route to an Alabama concert, however, he accidentally left them on the plane. The only other pair he had were prescription sunglasses, so he wore those instead. The very next day Roy was scheduled to open up a European Beatles tour, and there was no time to go find his old pair, so the dark shades stayed on him throughout the tour. The resultant frenzy of Beatlemania ensured that the singer would be seen throughout the world in that pair; by the time he returned home, it was a trademark.

Not that I necessarily believe anything in such an article.

In all my years, I’ve never heard a single person say they ever thought he was blind. I have a really hard time believing this was ever commonly believed.

I’m not disputing that you might have believed it and that some other people might have believed it, too. It’s just, I doubt it was a common thing.

Yes, we know Google is blind, duh.

You’ll never guess where nevertheless comes from!

Diaereses don’t indicate stress. They indicate separately pronounced vowels.

When you say OP, who are you talking about? The author of the post was talking about hyphens, and nothing about stresssed syllables, and I’m the one who brought up diaereses, and I wasn’t referring to stressed syllables, either.

Good catch. I fixed it.

Also, by your coöperative pronunciation example, people would be mispronouncing reëlect.

I’m not sure what you mean.

It’s pronounced co-operative and re-elect. Coöp needs it to not sound like “coop” as in chicken coop. Reëlect needs it to not sound like “reel” as in fishing reel.

It’s vowels only, and that’s funny. I hadn’t thought about it for my hypothetical “lineofsight” word.

I like to use them when words create a unit of thought. Like line-of-sight, and such. It really helps readability. It prevents people from having to think too hard about certain sentences when it’s ambiguous which words belong to what part of the sentence. Especially when the expression contains function words like “of”.

However, I’m a fan of just making multiple words into compound words, like bumblebee. That doesn’t work well with something like lineofsight, though.

As a side note, I wish we would bring back the diaeresis in favor of hyphens in words like co-op. It used to be coöp, and that is so much more fun. Or words like reëlect. Even when it’s not abbreviated, the diaeresis makes it more obvious to readers how coöperative is pronounced. Or any other time where two vowels in a row are pronounced separately.

The power required to do it is impressive to say the least.

That’s not how the attack worked. He didn’t drown out the tower. He simply overrode the the studio-to-transmitter link signal. The studios used microwave line-of-sight transmitters to communicate a signal from the studio to the tower. All the attacker had to do was override that signal. That signal was 50W max. You could override it with maybe 200W as long as you were also in line-of-sight of the microwave receiver. Probably less since some microwave trasmitters were as weak as 1W. They don’t need to be strong since they are line-of-sight directional transmitters. So, that’s not particularly impressive.

Nice! I’ve been looking forward to this.

My musket says otherwise!

Brits who say “Microsoft are doing a thing” are poking knitting needles into my ears every time!

It’s not plural. Microsoft is a company. A. One!

It doesn’t matter that it’s a company of individuals. Next your going to tell me my person is plural because I’m made from many cells. “CrayonRosary are mistaken about language!” No!

Bonus: Math is singular, too, because mathematics is singular. It’s not the plural of mathematic!

We overthrew your rule specifically because of this one language issue!

But there is a smallest unit, which is called a bit. Data can be broken down into smaller, countable units.

That’s not a particularly compelling argument. There’s a smallest unit of sand, too, but we still use a mass noun for it.

Besides, dictionary researchers agree it’s both a mass noun and a plural noun. People use it both ways. Here’s what Merriam Webster says about it. (I’m going to rework it to reduce the wordiness because it was so dense!)

Data leads a life of its own quite independent of datum, of which it was originally the plural. It occurs in two constructions:

1. as a plural noun (like earnings)
   • taking a plural verb and plural modifiers (such as these, many, a few), but not cardinal numbers
   • serving as a referent for plural pronouns (such as they, them)
2. as an abstract mass noun (like information)
   • taking a singular verb and singular modifiers (such as this, much, little)
   • being referred to by a singular pronoun (it).

Both constructions are standard. The plural construction is more common in print, evidently because the house style of several publishers mandates it.

So OP’s post is only half right, if even that much. In common speech, data is a mass noun, but many scientists and publishers still treat it as a plural noun. I would even venture most do.

Working as a programmer, most people I’ve interacted with use it as a mass noun, but not all. Language evolves, and the mass noun version is just as acceptable in most circles, but it certainly isn’t worthy of a “you should know” or “today I learned it’s actually a mass noun.”

What’s a tree?

It’s not about being normal. This data is for scientists. The denomination was a deliberate choice given the various sizes of the data. It might be as low as single digits in some cases.

We use decimals all the time. We’re not dumb. But when making direct comparisons of values, it’s a simple fact that comparing 5 to 20 is easier than comparing 0.05 to 0.2. This is a scientific fact. It’s easier for your brain to parse. You can’t deny that. Go ask a psychologist. In addition, the data is cleaner. It’s easier to print “5” than “0.05”, and then you mention the denominator under the graph or table of data.

Every engineer and scientist in the US uses metric, and it doesn’t matter what the average person uses. Proper home cooks find bread recipes with metric weights for ingredients, for example. Woodworkers use feet and inches. People who use the Imperial system are just people using what they know. It’s entirely moot to this conversation. I don’t know why you keep bringing up fractions and the Imperial system as if that adds any weight to your argument about the actual topic at hand. The topic being scientists using a deliberate unit of measure to make it easy to print values and compare them at a glance.

Who said anything about fractions? Whole numbers are easier than decimals and fractions.

And no, this isn’t just a US thing. I’m certain your country uses things like “parts per million”.

Because it makes the numerator whole numbers for all data for easy comparisons by human minds. Comparing 300 to 5 is easier for people than comparing 30 to 0.5. It’s the same reason machinists use inches per minute over inches per second. It’s so values are between 1 and 600 and not between 0.0176 and 10. It’s easier to reason about whole numbers than decimals.