Pakistan Bans 1600 Words and Phrases For Texting 356
Hugh Pickens writes "In a move reminiscent of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has handed down a ban on about 1,600 terms and phrases it has deemed obscene and told carriers they have seven days to block the words on their networks, or face legal action. 'The filtering is not good for the system and may degrade the quality of network services — plus it would be a great inconvenience to our subscribers if their SMS was not delivered due to the wrong choice of words,' says an official at a one of the telecoms. The list includes such words and phrases as 'idiot,' 'monkey crotch,' 'athlete's foot,' 'damn,' 'deeper,' 'four twenty,' 'fornicate,' 'looser,' and 'go to hell,' among others. There are also various double entendres included in the ban such as 'beat your meat' or 'flogging the dolphin.' Mohammad Younis, a spokesman for the PTA, says the ban is 'the result of numerous meetings and consultations with stakeholders' after consumers complained of receiving offensive text messages. 'Nobody would like this happening to their young boy or girl.'"
Looser? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's going to make giving instructions difficult. I hope no-one's working with an IPL over IM over there.
Re:Looser? (Score:5, Interesting)
Animal lovers will appreciate the banning of the words "Cockfight," and "Pussy Cat." Rich people will get behind "Deposit," "Penthouse," and "Showtime." Reporters will love "Hostage," "Kill," "Murder," "Suicide," "Sniper," and presumably "Stupid." Construction workers seem to get the best with the banning of "Deeper," "Back Door," "Laid," "Banging," "Dome," "Harder," "Hole," "Joint," "Period," "Slant," "Screw," and "Budweiser." Everyone else will get behind the banning of such horrible words as "Creamy," "Jugs," and "K Mart." And pretty much all feminine hygiene is, by definition, unhygienic.
Strangely, they banned both root words and modifiers of root words... like calling out ass AND ass clown, ass banger, etc. It's like they don't know how filtering, or words, work. Also, they banned the phrases "XXX" which is, itself, a censor word to represent something else.
Re:Looser? (Score:5, Funny)
Strangely, they banned both root words and modifiers of root words... like calling out ass AND ass clown, ass banger, etc. It's like they don't know how filtering, or words, work.
Kind of a shame they didn't use regex-based word subsbreastutions, though perhaps they didn't feel enbreastled to make any bumumptions.
Re:Looser? (Score:5, Informative)
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Because its Pakistan I can't tell if they meant loser or if they were serious, it makes it even more difficult since they also seem to deem athlete's foot offensive.
Reminds me of some very bad porn a work colleague at a former employer I won't name showed me. Hint: Feet don't belong there, you're doing it wrong!
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OK, I get it now. It becomes looser after an athlete inserts his foot there.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority seems to have a weird taste for porn...
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Seemingly a random and disassociated list. Obvious purpose make it more palatable as more politically aligned words are added to the list. Silence private communication between individuals associated with the political opposition. After texts comes voice.
Re:Looser? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because its Pakistan I can't tell if they meant loser or if they were serious...
As soon as I saw 'looser' on the list, I thought that they can't be all that evil. We do need a concerted effort to eliminate this example of stupidity. It seems rare these days to find anyone spelling "loser" correctly. Ignorant loosers!
But seriously, this list seems a bit dubious to me. Why would a country so paranoid about having bad things said about the Prophet Mohammed only include Jesus Christ on the list as a blasphemy? Why would a country that was once a part of the British Empire (and as such, still has English as on of its official languages) have one word on the list with the British spelling "arse", and 71 words with the American spelling "ass"? Why would there be no attempt to include the deliberate misspellings, abbreviations and contractions that are typical of texters?
It could be that they simply sourced a list of words from elsewhere, but it seems strange that they would not tailor it to their own country's requirements.
Re:Looser? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would a country so paranoid about having bad things said about the Prophet Mohammed only include Jesus Christ on the list as a blasphemy
Ummm...because if they censored the words "Prophet" and/or "Mohammed", that would be censoring a pillar of the Muslim faith? How would the righteous and moral doublegood citizens of Pakistan discuss the most important person in their lives? Or is this a test....?
Jesus is a prophet but not THE Prophet in Islam, so that's OK to make sure the infidels don't get to sell that silly concept outside of their strange cult.
More importantly though, this is actually a good thing. Why? Because we can look to Urdu - the national language of Pakistan - becoming the source of an entirely new and titillating orgy of euphemisms and slang that will defeat this list and that can never adapt effectively to counter it. The authorities have unwittingly introduced chaos and creativity into the very evolution of their national language. In less than a year, I make a gentlemen's bet that there will be their equivalent of the Number 1 Top 40 hit by their equivalent of Justin Bieber or Duffy belting out lyrics about "big tracts of land" and "brown roses with small petals" that will have the older generation pleased at the agricultural bent of the song.....and the young'uns practically creaming themselves in laughter.
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At 7-11 doesn't that mean the same thing as sell tuna?
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IPL = Initial Program Loader
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monkey crotch? (Score:2)
well, all I can say to that is:
newsletter. immediately.
(wonders what I have been missing all these years)
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Bumfuckistan!
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Oh that's sure gonna work (Score:5, Funny)
After all we know how ppl using txt spel pfectly an don abbrev any wrds.
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After all we know how ppl using txt spel pfectly an don abbrev any wrds.
I'm sure they anticipated that... that's why the 1600 word/phase list is probably 1600 variants of the phrase "F**** the PTA" or "The Pakistan Telecom authority sucks"
Re:Oh that's sure gonna work (Score:5, Insightful)
And as we all know from the early attempts of the MAFIAA to curtail the sharing of music by disallowing the names of certain songs to be part of a file being shared, people will invent creative ways around it. 1600 or 16000 variants, people will find some that will slip through and the info will get shared quickly.
Censorship doesn't work. People route around it.
Troublesome words (Score:3)
I was going to put every word on the list in a poem, but words #1072 to 1074 are impossible to rhyme.
If only we used English Curses in the First place! (Score:4, Informative)
The weird thing is, we don't text in English! We "txt" a bizarre 1337 Roman Urdu, with lavish sprinkling of punjabi curse words.
Awesome language, that Punjabi, it has both, some of the very best poetry *and* curses.
So yeah, our dear president, we will still continue to crude messages about you, good luck stopping us. (I could swear one in ten messages is something disparaging about the president, given my inbox)
This is, of course, if the list *is* real. First of all, it's unlikely PTA would have revealed it, and secondly, I don't think they would dare censor something like Jesus Christ. All the churches would be in uproar, and the Supreme court would rip them a new one.
(*BTW*, just to give an idea, Pakistan has one the highest rates for text messaging in the world. We have six companies offering extremely competitive sms packages, and we don't have incoming charges bullshit that you have there, so good luck filtering those tens of millions of messages sent every day.)
Didn't work in China (Score:5, Insightful)
Pakistani users will have 1600 new euphemisms by the end of the week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_crab_(Internet_slang) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Didn't work in China (Score:5, Funny)
Pakistani users will have 1600 new euphemisms by the end of the week.
How are we going to replace "flogging the dolphin" though?
Abusing the porpoise?
Whipping Flipper?
Chasing the white whale?
Shaking hands with Shamu?
Strangling the Baird's Beaked Whale?
Grinding the narwhal?
OK, I've done my part. But we still need to come up with another 1594 new euphemisms for masturbation by Friday.
Re:Didn't work in China (Score:5, Funny)
But perhaps the better euphemisms are the ones that would have normal meanings--
Shifting into third
Grabbing Some Lamb
Avoiding Traffic
Out Shopping
Hailing a Cab
In a Meeting
Discuss it over lunch
Spinach
If your mind just made up a whole bunch of messed up meanings for those euphemisms, then you might need serious help.
Though enough words as euphemisms, and nobody will be able to reliably text..
Re:Didn't work in China (Score:5, Funny)
Occupying Wall Street
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Re:Didn't work in China (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.sex-lexis.com/Sex-Dictionary/masturbation-male [sex-lexis.com]
My favorite: Warming up the alter boys dinner.
Re:Didn't work in China (Score:4, Funny)
As a grammar Nazi, I request that somebody kill me now, please!
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They are doing it the wrong way. For total security, you don't ban threats proactively, instead you whitelist only the safe stuff. E.g. woodworking terminology is safe, unless you need to polish some rods, and so is cooking, unless you need to choke a snake or two for that aphrodisiac soup.
Even the loosers win when they apply the tried and tested best security practices.
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you don't ban threats proactively
Or retroactively, for that matter. Knowing all security practices backwards has me making mistakes at times. Backdoors, backdoors ...
Re:Didn't work in China (Score:5, Funny)
Even whitelisting doesn't work.
http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/ [habitatchronicles.com]
"We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."
"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:
I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.
Hey now everybody chill (Score:5, Funny)
And the irony is... (Score:5, Funny)
Come on Slashdot, isn't that what we have moderation for?
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Re:Hey now everybody chill (Score:4, Insightful)
It's for the children! Right?
Not in a country where it's legal for a 60 year-old man to marry a 4 year-old girl, mate with her, then throw acid in her face and stone her to death for not wearing a burqa.
Re:Hey now everybody chill (Score:5, Informative)
All of those things happen in Pakistan, but each one is illegal except for one*.
- Age of consent for marriage is 18 for males & 16 for females under Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961. Underage marriages are illegal.
- Throwing acid in a person's face was explicitly criminalized in May of this year and can get you life in prison. Under older Muslim law, the victim had the right to return the favor and have acid dribbled in the eyes of her attacker.
- Burqa wearing is optional and largely AFAIK common mostly in areas that border Afghanistan. Stoning a woman to death for not wearing a burqa is murder.
* The one legal bit you implied was forcing your wife to have sex. Pakistani law requires that the victim not be legally married to the perpetrator in its definition of rape, just like in many US states up until North Carolina was the last to close the loophole in 1993. Many states still don't protect a woman if she's incapacitated and unable to refuse her husband.
Re:Hey now everybody chill (Score:5, Informative)
That's nice. But the AOC isn't enforced outside of major cities. Pakistan is quickly sliding into a imperialist islamist shithole. Meaning that sharia is the law of the day, and a wife or women who isn't subservient is disrespectful of their man, and in turn god. And where the whole sharia law thing has kicked into full gear, there's no such thing as rape. Unless you can find 8 male witnesses. And of course you can't rape your wife, she has to submit.
The Burqa is also becoming a 'norm' throughout the country as the government tries to appease the hardliners. Keep up with the times AC.
Agreed, stop the hate, because this is a good move (Score:5, Interesting)
After all, don't people realize the horrible things that can happen when someone gets offended?
I found this documentary [youtube.com] about the terrible consequences of being offended. It recounts the gruesome details of people who have been offended, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning with leprosy.
It's good that Pakistan is stopping these atrocities before they get out of hand.
The only appropriate response (Score:3)
to Pakistan government on this one is
g o t o h e l l a n d f o r n i c a t e you l o o s e r i d i o t s
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a t h l e t e ' s f o o t
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to Pakistan government on this one is
g o t o h e l l a n d f o r n i c a t e you l o o s e r i d i o t s
You want them to breed?
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G-TFO.
Re:The only appropriate response (Score:5, Funny)
g o t o h e l l
You had to say it, didn't you? You had to say that one little four-letter word. You couldn't just say "call hell" or "eval hell" or "do hell while true" or even "gosub hell". No, you had to put yourself right there beyond the bounds of civilised discourse and say The Word.
Consider yourself harmful indeed, sir!
Re:The only appropriate response (Score:5, Funny)
g o t o h e l l
You had to say it, didn't you? You had to say that one little four-letter word. You couldn't just say "call hell" or "eval hell" or "do hell while true" or even "gosub hell".
The implication is that there is no return. Gosub hell indeed.
Darn (Score:5, Insightful)
But what do they really think this is going to accomplish, other than invention of a new vocabulary?
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Controlling communication helps controlling people (Score:5, Insightful)
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"
OK wow (Score:4, Insightful)
On the list: "harder". I can understand a**f****r, but "harder"? WTF? (also, they have IDIOT and ID1OT and IDOIT... but not 1D10T. Noobs.)
Also on the list: lotion and period. Scientists with dry hands are gonna have some difficulties.
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There is also 'cock fight' and 'cocktail'. I guess they just copied every word from a dictionary starting with 'cock'.
Re:OK wow (Score:5, Funny)
It puts the ***** on its skin
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is one way language evolves (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids and adults alike will just find new ways to say "beat your meat" "go to hell" or whatever in 3..2..1
The censors cannot possibly hope to keep up.
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The censors cannot possibly hope to keep up.
Don't think of it as not being able to keep up. Think of it as job security.
Banned: Juggalo (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the banned words are amusing for various reasons. Some have fairly obvious explicit meanings, others do not. Some examples of messages that will be banned after this goes into effect:
"I am putting a new roof on my house and the stringer length is 18 feet."
"Did you see the new wuutang clan movie on netflix?"
"When using distance measuring equipment in aircraft, it measures the slant length between the VOR and the aircraft."
"When approaching to land, you should retard the throttle abeam the intended landing point."
"I want to go land at Bremerton Airport, IACO identifier PWT."
"When running long distances, you should be careful of joint pain in your knees."
"Calculus is often considered to be a harder class than algebra."
"Juggalo fatso got jesus" * (All words in this one are banned)
Wow. This is good stuff. I often wonder what is going on in these people's heads when they come up with lists like this. They are not sane as we know it.
Re:Banned: Juggalo (Score:4, Informative)
That would block all my messages! (Score:5, Funny)
Just last month I sent a text to my boss that read...
"Hey, monkey crotch! How's your atheletes foot? Any looser? Damn! Quit beating your meat and call idiot!"
And to my wife...
"Tired of flogging the dolphin? Let's fornicate!"
And she replied
"Go to hell!"
oh god mod up (Score:2)
hahahaha awesome
Is this technically feasible? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking about this the other day as a technical challenge.
Assuming their SMS system handles tens of thousands of texts per second, each of which needs to be tested against this user-definable dictionary of 1600 words, is it even possible for the platform to keep up? Are there sophisticated search / pattern matching algorithms for testing a message against 1600 substrings? I can think of a very naive way to do this, but I'm sure it would not scale.
How would one implement this kind of high-speed pattern matching??
ask the people in prison in China (Score:3)
who are there because they tweeted some small phrase or something.
Re:Is this technically feasible? (Score:5, Informative)
What, you think they're going to do this on a Commodore 64?
I looked it up, and folks in the US send 80 billion SMSes per month. That works out to about 30k SMSes/sec on average across the entire United States. Now, I realize that certain times of day are more likely to have SMSes than others, so let's say, to a first order, the peak rate of SMSes is 100k/sec. Now divide that among all the cell towers, understanding that some will be busier than others.
Let's say a given cell tower has to process 100 SMSes a second, each at the full 160 character limit. That's 16kB/s. Let's say each word take 1000 cycles to test for, which should be on the high side since it assumes you can't use, say, a trie to take advantage of common word roots, or use pattern matching accelerators (which are quite common in this space [google.com]). 16kB/s * 1000 * 1600 = 25.6Gcyc/sec. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't.
A single board in one of these cellular base stations has literally dozens of processor chips, most with multiple cores, running in the GHz range. And that's just one board. My employer sells a chip in this space which crunches away 10Gcyc/sec across all of its 8 processors, and our customers put dozens of these on each board.
On GSM networks, SMSes are control channel messages. They go via a low bandwidth side channel that is nowhere near as compute-intensive as the main voice channel. If you're provisioned to handle a certain number of phone calls, you're more than adequately provisioned to handle SMSes and the corresponding filtering, as long as you do the filtering at the base station.
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Re:Is this technically feasible? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cell tower? Why wouldn't you run all this on the considerably more powerful SMSCs?
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It's a well studied problem (Score:5, Interesting)
With a maximum character length of 140 characters, 1600 strings to match, and assuming 8 character long strings, it would take 140*8*1600=1,792,000 character matches per message if you do it naively. That is only a millisecond on modern GHz processors, but when processing large numbers of messages using embedded processors, that is probably a few more cycles than you want to spend on each message. You can do better by using Knuth-Morris-Pratt or Boyer-Moore. Since we can pre-process the strings to be matched, this means it takes only 140*1600*k=224,000*k (for some k determined by the algorithm). This is better, but not by much.
Notice that the dominant factor is the 1600 strings to be matched. If you really care about performance, then you want to get rid of that factor. Simplest way is to build a finite-state automaton. If it is encoded as an NFA, the performance won't be much better than before, but if you encode it as a DFA, then each message can be processed in only 140 table lookups. The downside of this is the size of the lookup tables. In the worse case, expect them to take terabytes of space depending on the particular 1600 strings being matched.
There are algorithms like Rabin-Karp and Aho-Corasick that might take less space while still taking only ~140 character operations. The practical answer, is to try DFA, RK, and AC to see which, if any, don't require too much preprocessing space, and then use one of those. The space requirements will depend on the particular text involved, but there are good odds that the tables for DFA will be small, and even better odds that the tables for RK and AC will be small.
Searching and sorting are two of the most well studied algorithmic problems in computer science. If you ever find yourself wondering how to do them efficiently, there is a good chance that very smart people have already figured out how to do it.
Re:Is this technically feasible? (Score:5, Interesting)
hardware accel.
its how routers do DPI these days.
any real firewall worth anything has hardware support for string finding, substrings, etc.
since routing is now 'boring' and its all worked out; the new hotness is to have 'apps' run on high speed router platforms and 'do things' at realtime speeds with your data.
now, aren't you sorry you asked?
At least they have a public list. (Score:5, Informative)
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If that really is the worst that happens, I applaud the Iranian government for their discovery of successful anti-spam measures. (However, I suspect that their censorship policy has worse effects than blocking advertising campaigns)
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The worst happens for advertisers and advertising companies that send bulk SMS and later find out that nothing has delivered!
Thanks a lot, bastard, now I have to reconsider my opposition to setting up a totalitarian theocratic regime and pervasive censorship apparatus!
all i can picture (Score:5, Funny)
is a bunch of middle aged bureaucratic dudes sitting around a table saying "What do you think about "Monkey dick".. should we ban that?"
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Priceless :)
I'm seeing a Monthy Python sketch in the making :)
WooHoo ... (Score:2)
More list forensics (Score:5, Informative)
- A lot of superstrings seem to be banned; I guess they expect the operators to censor the longest possible match.
- I guess no one's allowed to do research on HSV in Pakistan, since "herpes" is banned.
- How long before someone turns the blocking of "lesbian" and "gay" into a human rights issue? Especially "gay pride"?
- Some of these bans are actually dangerous to public safety: "sniper", "hostage", and "stroke" are all being banned.
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- How long before someone turns the blocking of "lesbian" and "gay" into a human rights issue? Especially "gay pride"
In muslim countries, they have no gays.
Re:More list forensics (Score:5, Insightful)
Human rights? In a muslim theocracy? BWAHAHAHAHA!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why you assume that this theocracy is special only because it's a Muslim theocracy? We all know what was happening in a Christianity theocracy, and it's not better.
Thank goodness! (Score:3)
Bad words are bad because I said so. I don't like them, and so they should be banned.
Think of all the children that are being saved!
US needs a set of BALLS and Liberate Pakistan (Score:4, Funny)
The US needs to get a set of BALLS and Liberate Pakistan.
This has gone to far, we need to bring freedom back to the world. Only way to do this is for the US to get a set of BALLS and Liberate countries like Pakistan and Canada.
Entertaining list (Score:2)
Weird that Jesus Christ is on the list, after Mohammed he is Islam's second most important prophet. :)
Difficult when you are a plumber and need to order 1/2" NPT nipples...
A Pakistani Big Bitch must be huge, she's 2x on the list
Now Pakistan is a country of many languages so I wonder if there are, besides this English one, comparable lists for the others?
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deeper? (Score:2)
Umm i suppose that means something different over there than it does in the states?
Or are they really that idiotic? ( oh wait, i guess this post will be banned too... )
I applaud Pakistan (Score:5, Insightful)
... for doing everything they can to ensure that the range of Pakistani euphemisms and double-entendres expands to ever newer and more creative territory. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Re:I applaud Pakistan (Score:5, Funny)
Let a thousand flowers bloom!
That's just sick, you bastard.
Curiouser and curiouser (Score:3)
I too would like to pretend that the XFL never existed, but ban people from texting "HEHATEME"? Is Rod Smart THAT controversial in Pakistan?
Language evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the most pointless thing with language bans and censorship of this kind is that it's exactly why we -have- so many double entendres and such. Every time a culture, religion, politician, parent, teacher, whomever, tells someone that saying something is offensive, the best they usually manage is the creation of some other way of stating the same thing. Even if that involves making up new words. Beyond that, the very children who everyone is usually trying to protect with language bans like this, are the absolute masters at creating new words to circumvent such things.
Only in English ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if they only will ban this list and words in English, how about the same words (meanings I mean) in their language ? are they banned too ?
Good and bad (Score:5, Funny)
Good: #575 - Juggalo. ICP fans should be banned, everywhere.
Bad: #657 - Master Blaster. Now how will Pakistanis know who rules Bartertown?
Grimly Amusing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:four twenty! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
And Abe Lincoln.
Something tells me, though, it refers to reefer in this context.
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Most of them. But in some regions, as well as in Switzerland, they're sensible enough to use septante/huitante/nonante instead of that vigesimal crap.
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Re:ROFL (Score:4, Informative)
In India, showing your bare feet to someone is extremely offensive. There are similar traditions in Pakistan so it probably is part of an insult of some sort. Just a guess though.
Re:ROFL (Score:4, Interesting)
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Imagine Kansas with nuclear weapons,
truly, a point of know return.
(been waiting *decades* to use that joke. NOW, what do I do?)
Re:ROFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Woefully ineffective (Score:4, Informative)
228. Creamy.
No it won't. On the other hand neither will positive comments about icecream.
Re:Easy to get around and disrupted (Score:5, Informative)
for(p=text,p2=buffer;*p;p++) { if (!isspace(*p)) *p2++ = LEETMAP(*p); }
for(i=0;i<1600;i++) {
result = pcre_exec(badpatterns[i].regex, 0, buffer, strlen(buffer), 0, 0, optvec, sizeof(optvec)/sizeof(optvec[0]));
if ( result >= 0) {
national_database[ subscriber_id ].strikes ++;
(* badpatterns[i].punitive_action) ( national_database[ subscriber_id ].strikes, &gps_position[ subscriber_id], buffer, DISPATCH_POLICE);
return MSG_BLOCKED;
}
}
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:4, Insightful)
What you do is to give people a lot of freedom somewhere while you take it away in other places.
And when people aren't good behaving citizens then you pepper spray them [youtube.com].
Freedom is what you think you have, reality is that you may be free to express what you think in the western world but as soon as you act upon your opinions to get others to listen then you are a danger to the order.