I told myself that I wasn’t going to comment on the latest Steve-job that humanity as a whole is giving itself. Sadly, I was unable to resist. Hence, my latest post on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

I, like every single freaking person on the planet, have an about Steve Jobs, and the things he has done in his life. I’m not going to share it with you right now, because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.

When most people blabber about Steve Jobs, they’re rarely flapping their lips about him, personally. After all, most people in the world don’t actually know Steve Jobs, nor have they ever even met him in passing. The things about which most people yammer are the effects and consequences of Apple, Inc.’s product releases and business practices.
[...]
It’s those trends and issues that matter. But the fact that Apple, specifically, was the company to catalyze all of them doesn’t. And it especially doesn’t matter that His Holiness Dalai Lama Steve Motherfucking Jobs happened to be the CEO and founder of the company that did all of these things.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

I imagine that this is because I have over 3000 frames of animation occurring from multiple camera angles with several different audio clips in one single project file. This is a different approach from the one I took with the very first scene I animated, in which I created different project files for each “shot”. Unfortunately, that meant if I tweaked a piece of the background in one project, I’d have to go back to all the others and make the same change. Oh, and also that didn’t do jack shit to prevent Motion from behaving like a snail. Anyway, I was hoping that I’d just be able to animate the entire scene in one project file, render each camera angle separately, and not have to deal with any hassle.

In fact, I’m even animating the characters in a separate project file from the 3D background. The walls, windows, and city graphics are in a completely different project this time.

And yet, despite my best efforts, Motion still manages to choke. Dear god. I may not have the most state-of-the-art hardware, but really? I’m not even doing anything all that complicated. What a terribly optimized piece of software.

As a consequence, I wasn’t able to make up for yesterday’s lack of productivity, and could only eke out another script page’s worth today.

I think I only have one page to go, but I have some things I need to take care of tomorrow that will limit my working hours. Perhaps this scene won’t be finished this week.

In any case, I’ll use a new project file for the remainder of this scene.

It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.

Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.

Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.

So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).

It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.

So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?

Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.

So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.

You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.

I mean, like, duh.

Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.

My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:

It’s all about function. Am4 means nothing in the key of A Major.

Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.

Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.

The iPad is the first device to use an Apple-designed processor. This is something one could easily have predicted when Apple bought PA Semi in 2008, but now that Apple’s finally gone and used their newly acquired chipmaker to actually make their own chip, the potential ramifications begin to sink in. Now that Apple makes their own processors, what’s to say they’ll still be putting Intel’s in their Macs?

One can see why they wouldn’t want to. Intel Macs are much better for Apple customers than Apple shareholders, because they A) allow people to install Windows or Linux on their Macs, and B) allow people to install Mac OS X on whatever the hell they want. Both are things that Apple would probably like to make more difficult or impossible.

But wasn’t installing Windows on a Mac one of the big features that Apple used to promote? Of course it was, five years ago; back then, it was entirely possible that the average user might still need some of their Windows apps. Well, okay, it probably wasn’t, but over the last five years, millions of people switched to Macs, more and more of what we need computers for has become web-based, and the amount of software for the Mac has grown exponentially. It’s more evident than ever that to the average user, OS X and Windows (and Linux) are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. There is nothing you can do with one OS that you can’t do with the other, and it all comes down to personal preference. Even I, a power-user, have no reason whatsoever to boot into Windows except for gaming, and the PC gaming market isn’t perceived as large enough for most companies (like, for example, game publishers) to care very much about.

Apple can drop its commitment to Windows-on-the-Mac at any time, and it would have no adverse effect on their business.

So what of the Hackintoshing issue? It’s not legal in most countries — much like torrenting copyrighted movies, going 70 mph on a 55 mph highway because everyone else is, or clicking the “I’m 18″ button on a porn site when you’re actually 17 — but that’s hardly stopping people from doing it. In fact, I’ve long been considering building some Hackintoshes; my Macbook Pro isn’t great for HD animation and video editing, and buying a Mac Pro and a few Xserves for rendering could be almost triple the cost of building equivalent machines. That kind of thing, I would bet, frightens Apple very much: independent filmmakers who will cost-cut as much as they can to get their projects done without blowing all their rent money.

It’s not that Apple wants to bankrupt millions of starving artists. It’s that they’re a publicly-traded corporation, and they have a duty to their shareholders to make the most money that they can. By ditching Intel processors for a proprietary chip, and eventually phasing out backwards-compatibility with Intel chips, Apple could make Hackintoshing virtually impossible.

So, Zacqary, basically what you’re saying is that you’re upset because maybe now you can’t illegally install OS X on a cheaper computer?

No, Helvetica Bold 10 Maroon, not exactly. I’m upset because Apple has gotten used to taking away their customers’ control over the computer-like-devices they purchase, and it’s not inconceivable to imagine them doing just that for Macs too.

Admittedly, building Macs with Apple processors wouldn’t necessarily change the Mac experience all that much; you just wouldn’t be able to run Windows on it anymore. But if they get away with that, what’s to say they’d stop there? Why not move OS X to a locked-down, App Store-ish model? Why not ban Adobe Premiere from OS X because it competes with Final Cut? Hell, why not ban Photoshop because with the amount of Apple vs. Adobe fighting there’s probably a Photoshop competitor being worked on by Apple right now?

But that would piss off the pros, right? Mere “consumers” might be dumb enough to take that lying down, but graphics and video professionals would never stand for such things. Surely Apple couldn’t do that, right?

Of course they can. They’re Apple. They can do whatever they want. And they seem to want to be in complete control of everything, from the moment it is sold until the moment it deteriorates due to planned obsolescence.

Obviously, it wouldn’t work, and Apple would completely fall apart as people begin to remember why openness was a good thing. That doesn’t mean they won’t try. And that very real possibility that Apple might pull this crap is making me very interested in Linux-based alternatives to the Final Cut suite.

How inspiring. I’ve been wanting to do more of these. Thus, without further ado:

Yesterday, MG published an article called “An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus One“, because apparently there aren’t enough reviews which compare the Nexus One to the iPhone. Actually, there’s no shortage of them, just like how there’s no shortage of MG Siegler’s use of the phrase “no shortage of”. Speaking of MG Siegler’s predictable writing, let’s see what he’s predictably done wrong this time:

Last week, I attended the Google Android “Nexus One” event. As you may have heard, they gave many of us in the audience the device to try out. I decided that before I wrote anything about it (other than saying on television that it’s a “nice little device“), I would give it a real shot. So here I am, a week later, with my thoughts on it. To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a full review or overview, for that, see our review here. Instead, I’m going to come at this from the perspective of a pretty hardcore iPhone user of the past two-plus years.

A quick skim of this first paragraph may lead you to believe that MG has miraculously managed to finish a single paragraph without screwing anything up. Unfortunately, the second-to-last sentence falls apart if you’re the sort of person who actually reads things. MG is trying to make the sentence read like this, but read it aloud:

To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a full review or overview, for that, see our review here.

It sounds like this.

MG, have I frightened you into using commas instead of semicolons or em dashes? It’s not that you should always use a comma instead of a more “sophisticated” punctuation mark, it’s that you should use each one correctly. Those bold words were the chance you’d been waiting for to flourish a semicolon or em dash — in fact, either could have worked there. But you missed it. Fear overcame you, and you cowered behind the perceived safety of a comma, huddling for warmth and whimpering like a puppy. Alas, the comma was not safe this time, and now nobody will adopt you from the animal shelter and give you a loving home, where you can frolic and chase frisbees and get Siegly treats when you’re a good boy.

You’ve been very bad this time, MG. Stop chewing my shoes and get your muddy paws off the couch.

Moving on:

And to start off, I’ll come right out and say what everyone will want to know: Do I think the Nexus One is better than the iPhone?

I don’t care what you think, because you’re not supposed to capitalize the next word after a colon. It’s not two periods on top of each other, it’s a mid-sentence indicator of logical consequence. I’m not going to waste time explaining the big words to you, so concentrate on the mid-sentence part: colons don’t end the sentence. The only time you should send a big hulking capital letter barreling into the reader’s visual cortex is, other than proper nouns or names, at the beginning of a sentence. Otherwise you might cause people’s perceptions of reality to break down and turn their lives into the plot of Vanilla Sky. You are transforming millions of innocent TechCrunch readers into Tom Cruise, MG. Is that something you’d wish on anybody? Do you want that on your conscience? I thought not. Now fix it.

As the article continues, MG’s performance is remarkably passable. There are moments like this:

It’s hard to describe just how great Google Voice is on Android. When I set it up, I had to confirm maybe three or four things, and I was all ready to go. In two minutes, my Google Voice number completely took over my Nexus One. This included getting not only all Google Voice incoming calls and voicemails, but doing outbound calls with my Google Voice number as well. This is absolutely the future of number portability, and that no doubt has the carriers — and likely even Apple – spooked.

The end of this paragraph nearly brought a tear to my eye. It doesn’t really matter to me that the preceding sentences are choppy and mediocre; MG used em dashes to convey an emphatic pause, just like I taught him. He’s all grown up now!

Maps offers a number of features on the Nexus One that aren’t on the iPhone native version. This includes Latitude (which can run in the background), and Navigation. Other Google apps, like Google Sky Map and Google Goggles are also pretty cool, and useful to varying degrees, and again, only available for Android.

Or maybe not.

I’m aware that the Oxford comma is a matter of preference. Whether you choose to use it, or choose not to use it, there’s usually no problem. But for god’s sake, be consistent from one sentence to the other!

Now, there is, of course, a difference: the first sentence, in which MG did use the comma, had those pesky parentheses to make matters confusing. The problem with that is that no, there’s no difference at all, because you don’t just randomly insert a comma after a closing parenthesis for no reason. “Latitude (which can run in the background)” is the first item, “Navigation” is the other, and if you’re going to put a comma before the separating “and,” then you should also do that in the very next fucking sentence where you do the very same fucking thing.

Obviously, this issue (background apps) has been talked about in the past ad-naseum, so I won’t dwell on it here.

First of all, there’s no hyphen. Second of all, it’s “ad nauseam.” Christ, MG, you’re destroying Latin too.

Fortunately, MG continues the article for about 1200 more words without breaking things ad nauseam, no longer distracting the reader from his rather well-thought out arguments with slippery linguistic banana peels. In fact he manages to finish the whole article without another punctuation debac— oh, wait…

And it’s good to have two companies that can play off each other and push innovation — while at the same time, changing the industry.

I didn’t tell you to use em dashes instead of commas all the time, MG! Ugh, this is going to turn into an endless back-and-forth whack-a-mole game with you, I know it.

Fuck Tweetdeck so hard that I’m not even going to do that middle-of-word-capitalization thing that its creators insist on (It’s supposed to be “TweetDeck,” which is fucking stupid so fuck that, you fucking fuckers).

Normally, I’d just switch to another Twitter client that doesn’t suck, like Nambu, except I switched away from Nambu because the one thing that did suck about it ended up driving me nuts: multiple account support. Tweetdeck, however, solves the problem with Nambu by being a piece of fucking shit.

Recently, I signed up for a second Twitter account, @omgpurplefox. If you click that link, you’ll notice that it’s a protected account, and you need to request my permission before any of the things I post there are visible to you. You see, sometimes I feel like shooting out 140 character blasts of information I don’t want my mother to read. Oh, and about 99% of the planet, too, don’t forget them. Now, naturally, since I’m used to updating and reading Twitter via a client, I’d like to be able to manage the private account from a client as well.

Nambu allowed me to do that, but that, in turn, made one of its best features a pain. It tells you, in numbers, how many tweets from people you follow you haven’t read yet. But if you have it track two accounts which follow some of the same people:

If I have Account A and Account B following Person C, and Person C sends one tweet, Nambu tells me that I have two tweets unread. Thus, I have to mark things as read about 39725686 times, which becomes a chore. This problem was annoying enough to force me to switch to Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck, on the other hand, doesn’t inform you of the same tweet twice. It just doesn’t tell you anything:

Well, okay, it does. Whenever it determines that you have unread tweets, it shows you a message in the upper right corner of the screen saying “(number) Tweets) or something. This goes away after about five seconds, so if you’re not staring at your computer right at that moment, there is no fucking way to know if there are any new tweets.

Oh, and it pulls the exact same crap for your @Mentions and Direct Messages, which, for Twitter purposes, are basically the equivalent of email addressed to you personally. You kinda want to read them when they come.

Actually, I’m lying. Tweetdeck does tell you if you have any unread tweets. Here, see if you can guess which of the tweets in this Tweetdeck column are marked as “unread”:

The unread ones are the first two. The ones with the tiny dot next to all that tiny text. WOW, HOW OBVIOUS. Now imagine five columns of that, each seven boxes tall. Yeah, it’s totally easy to see which ones are new at a glance. Real easy.

Now, Tweetdeck does have some other nice features. You can create “groups” of people you follow, for instance. Except about 10% of the people I follow are inexplicably not available to be put into groups, while about 50% of people I followed in the past but unfollowed are still on Tweetdeck’s list. And there is no way to fix that.

Ultimately, I hate Tweetdeck, and wish I could use something much, much better. But I need a Twitter client that lets me:

• Tweet and send DMs as either of my two accounts
• Track people I follow, as well as @Mentions and DMs for both accounts
• Notify me, in a way that actually works, how many tweets and messages I have unread
• Not drive me insane when the two accounts follow some of the same people

Because I prioritize necessity number 4 over number 3, I’ve had to abandon Nambu in favor of Tweetdeck, which is the only other client I’ve found that achieves my other needs satisfactorily. Seesmic Desktop is, from what I can tell, more of the same, so there’s no point in switching. So until Nambu at least gives me the option to fix its redundant notification system, I’m stuck with this crappy thing.

In closing, what the fuck is this shit that keeps popping up:

I keep getting that fucking thing for no reason and it takes 3656867357 presses of “Continue” to make it go away.

To clarify, the word I am referring to is not “kun-TENT,” which is an adjective (or less often, a verb) related to a state of peaceful satisfaction. I am referring to “KHAN-tent,” the noun, which is quite appropriately pronounced similarly to an evil dude that makes William Shatner scream loudly. This word, a bastardization of “contents,” is a generic term for some generic thing that you shove into a generic container, generally speaking. But lately, as part of media conglomerates’ transformation into Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, this generic product term has come to refer to cultural works: music, movies, news, games, photos, and anything else containing some form of digestible information and/or artistry.

It groups together everything creative in this world as some mundane product like a dishwasher or a lampshade. Casablanca is not a lampshade.

Well, of course it’s not. Isn’t that obvious? Nobody who watches movies thinks of them as generic objects, nor do they think that of news articles or Facebook photos. So why is anyone referring to them as if they are?

Perhaps from a business standpoint, it makes a lot more sense to consider something you’re trying to sell as a product or commodity. That jives with economic theories of supply and demand: you have a supply that you sell to meet the demand, at a price determined by whether demand is higher or lower than supply.

This makes sense.

Uhhhhhhh...

But again, this is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the business of “content creation”. That is the preeminent reason why this horrible word needs to stop being used: it doesn’t make sense in any context.

So what generic lump-together term should we use instead? How about we, uh, don’t? A video is a video, a song is a song, a film is a film, an article is an article, and a photo is a freaking photo, god dammit. And in the context of video games, it is not “downloadable content.” It is add-on levels or skins or models or whatever.

“Media” is a word guilty of most of the same things, but it’s not nearly as awful. “Media,” after all, refers to something that’s in a medium (i.e. film or sound or pixels or words or the ashes of your dead grandmother), as opposed to the “content” of some shipping crate in a warehouse. It’s still not great, but at least it’s palatable.

Keep in mind there are appropriate uses of the word “content,” such as “explicit content,” “violent content,” etc. This use is permissible; it’s more dignified than the word “stuff,” and it’s used to describe something that is harmful to our children.

As the web matures, it’s also getting more complex. Yet much of it is still fundamentally based on things like HTML which are 30 years old. A new startup, FasterWeb, aims to bring these old technologies up to speed — as it were — making the web faster, by optimizing the old standards for doing new things. [Emphasis added]

The second sentence (red) reads like it was said in one breath, with no pauses at all. Read that sentence out loud without pausing. Does it sound right? No, not really. Any normal human being would say it as if there was a comma between “HTML” and “which,” so MG is either a space alien or a sloppy writer. The former can get him a well-paid role in a Hulu commercial, while the latter merits endless shame. Meanwhile, MG’s em dash mishap (blue) isn’t as egregious as his previous one, to be fair, but it makes the sentence read like it’s being said by William Shatner. The appropriate pause length would be indicated by commas.

If you click through to the article, you’ll notice MG wields the em dash slightly more proficiently one sentence later. While he should have used a colon instead, and a comma could have worked better as well, the em dash doesn’t completely mangle the sentence this time. I’ll chalk that up to luck on MG’s part.

Moving on, MG almost manages to complete a paragraph without any glaring mistakes, but botches it in the last three words:

And that’s why his firm had no hesitation in pouring an undisclosed amount of money into the Israeli-based venture.

I did bring this up in the article’s comments section, but since I’m covering the whole thing now, I might as well take the opportunity to mock it even further. The company MG is referring to in this sentence is based in Israel, and it is run by Israelis. MG disagrees, though, asserting that the company is headquartered inside the body of an Israeli person and staffed by blood cells or bacteria or nanobots or something. TechCrunch’s own database, however, describes the company as “Israel-based,” which makes quite a bit more sense. It’s possible that MG is a rabid Osmosis Jones fanboy, thus distorting his fact-checking, or he just doesn’t know how to use adjectives.

On second thought, owing to the fact that the last sentence of the article does call the company “Israel-based,” MG is either making an avant-garde artistic statement against the bourgeois prison that is consistency, or he knows how to copy and paste something from a press release.

After this, MG goes an astonishing three paragraphs without breaking something. He does begin a few sentences with the word “and,” which might cause a few amateur, wannabe grammar Nazis to cringe, but that’s just a stylistic choice and doesn’t compromise the article’s readability. That’s how many people talk (including me), after all. But two words into the sixth paragraph, he screws up yet again:

Obviously, a two to ten fold increase in speed is a big difference, but Leitersdorf notes that the more complex a page is, the higher the magnitude of optimization will be.

It may seem nitpicky and genuinely fascist of me to point this out, as it makes the article only minimally more awkward to read; I congratulate MG for his restraint in fucking things up. Nonetheless, “tenfold” is one word, as is “twofold,” thus the bold text would be written “two-to-tenfold” by an individual without a prehensile tail and less fond of bananas.

MG’s next two paragraphs both start in a way that indicates TechCrunch pays him per sentence:

The business model for the project seems sound as well. FasterWeb has a multi-pronged approach depending on the situation of the website or ISP.
[...]
He also notes that in their research, YL only found two companies even come close to doing what these guys are doing. But Leitersdorf declined to name them.

Both pairs of sentences were meant to be together, but were torn apart by the iron fist of MG Siegler’s ineptitude. Their forbidden love lives on in the hope that someday, a hero on a white horse will ride into the realm of TechCrunch and copy edit this chimpanzee’s work.

The former pair of sentences should be joined with a colon. Nothing fancy, just replace the period with one. A semicolon might work as well, but MG has already proved that he has no idea what to do with one of those. As they are now, these two sentences aren’t astronomically bad, but the latter pair absolutely requires a comma instead of the first period. Separated, they cause the reader’s IQ to go down by several clichéd insults.

From that point on, MG doesn’t screw things up anymore, closing his article with a grammatically sound, if unremarkable, set of six sentences. But alas, the damage has already been done, and not a soul with access to the article’s “Edit” button gives enough of a crap to take thirty seconds out of their day to fix any of it.

I hope that someday MG Siegler learns the error of his, well, errors and commits to writing articles that aren’t confusing and read like an actual person talking. But in a way, I also hope he never changes, because he’s certainly a great source of material for me.

Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off.

Three sentences in, and writer MG Siegler — a man featured in the New York Times at one point, according to his bio — has already misused both the em dash and the semicolon. Perhaps this is an attempt by Siegler to sound intelligent through the use of esoteric punctuation; both sentences call for the use of boring, everyday commas.

Yes, I know, I’m being a grammar Nazi, and relatively few people care about this kind of thing. The problem, however, is that punctuation communicates ideas that words alone cannot. Letters represent the sounds we make when speaking; punctuation represents the pauses we make in between.

If you think it’s limiting to have only 140 characters to express a thought, try eliminating 90% of the English language. If people stop caring about proper use of punctuation, it will lose its meaning entirely. This will destroy a writer’s ability to communicate voice; without the range of punctuation we have available to us, it’s impossible to read anything as if an actual person might be speaking it. It’s not eliminating 90% of the English dictionary, but it’s certainly eliminating 90% of the spoken language.

Of course, this may be a by-product of the questionable literacy of Internet users. Perhaps very few people still know the difference between a comma, em dash, semicolon, or paragraph break, and thus it no longer matters; every writer is the same to people who don’t know how to read for voice.

To be fair, none of my English classes ever mentioned proper use of the em dash or semicolon; if I recall correctly, I learned both through a combination of my father and Wikipedia. So, yes, this is a complex, deep-rooted problem with all sorts of causes and effects. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed.

Okay, now I’m going to finish reading that TechCrunch article.