Hello! With all the stir caused by recent development release name (that I shall not name again not to insult someone, let us just remind you that it referenced some genitalia that usually come in pairs), I began to think about other potential sources of insults in GNOME and concluded that the release names were but a minor insult potential. There is much bigger hazard in all the translations that we have! You see, GNOME is translated in about a zillion different languages, with most people using GNOME speaking only one or perhaps two of them. So, my GNOME user, all those translations that you don't speak might contain nothing but myriads of insults aimed at you, your race, sex, your family, your dog, the way you live, your sexual orientation and anything else in your life you can imagine. The obvious, philantropic solution is to start an educational campaign, financed by the GNOME foundation, to have all the GNOME users learn all the languages that GNOME is translated to, thereby eliminating the chance of some perverted translator sneaking an insult into GNOME via an obscure language. Of course, such a campaign seems unlikely due to its financial and organisational implications, so I suggest we take a shortcut and simply _dump all the translations_, thereby eliminating possible insults in them. After we dump these, the problem of insults in the default C locale remains - as the C locale is usually written in English, we could have a number of purists scrutinize all those C strings and remove potentially insulting ones. But, as the very term "insulting" is inherently subjective, these people might skip some strings insulting to some group of people, achieving nothing at all. I thought of replacing the C locale with randomly generated strings bearing no meaning at all, but there is still the problem that one of these strings might actually be insulting in some language that I don't speak (let me remind you, we didn't start that eductaional campaign). Ok, so let's generate random strings without vowels. There are no insulting words written without wovels, are there? No can do: we might end up with a Hebrew insult. So what now? Use pictograms? These are ubiquitously understood, even voyager carries pictograms... the idea might seem OK, but when you think about it twice, you realize that the problem of subjectivity of an insult remains. So pictograms are no good. All this said, the obvious solution is to dump not onyl translations but _all strings_ and replace them with whitespaces, preferably a single whitespace or an empty string (otherwise those whitespaces might constitute an insulting code in the whitespace programming language, see http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/). I know this is no time for such a massive change since string freeze is in effect and the 2.6 release looming, but I urge you to carefully consider it for the upcoming GNOME 2.8! Yours insultingly, jaKa -- email: jaka gnu org w3: http://fish.homeunix.org/people/jaka
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