The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kevin Marks:

John #3
As someone who recently left Google, I can confirm that employees net connections aren't filtered (a colleague who used to work on net censorship checked here entire list of blocked-somewhere URLs there on her first day and got to all of them), and that employees are encouraged to blog, twitter etc.

That said, because Google is so open internally with information that all employees are subject to SEC quiet periods, and that anything written in public becomes "Google said" people can be wary of speaking or writing online, and the weekly company meetings where L,S+E speak frankly are explicitly called out as "don't discuss".

The other thing to remember is that WaPo employees are professional writers - telling them they can't write online is like telling Google engineers not to work on Open Source projects (which would be completely antithetical to SV culture).

Obligatory plug - when you get Wave accounts, have a look at the Ribbit Conference gadget that lets you quickly set up a conference call with people on a Wave so you can talk while you edit.

I'm kevinmarks@googlewave.com if you want to Wave to me.

Clifton #30 - defining products as an X killer is always an odd way to look at it from a geek PoV; that said when Lars says he wants to reinvent email, that is the kind of activity he is talking about - emailing documents back and forth. Wave is at core a way for a small group to edit a document together, seeing the changes in real time if they want to, or with changes highlit in yellow when you return. Recently edited documents come up to the top of your inbox.
The inline comments embedded in the documents can be confusing.

#83 Scotland seceded in Halting State, but in this timelineit is still part of Britain.

#39 I don't think Cory has British citizenship yet, but he does live in London and grok the culture, especially with Alice's influence; I'm technically British but have been in California 11 years now and feel like London has diverged from my timeline.

#52 I loved Charlie Stross's recent post where he complains about the bankers out-innovating his predictions of future scams.

Not mentioning Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross as British authors when they are up for the Hugo best novel seems myopic in the extreme...

Baxter's Manifold Time was strikingly hard SF on Moh's scale (warning, entering tvtropes.org is almost as time-consumingly engaging as Making Light comment threads) as it gave two independent ways of surviving the heat death of the universe that are compatible with current Physics knowledge.

PNH's analogy reminds me irresistibly of "A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine" - the parody musical that had a weird copyright suit from the Marx's heirs about using their personas

There's a zeppelin company that flies over the Googleplex regularly; it adds nicely to the Prisoner-like surrealism of the place.

I wonder if this was in any way connected to Neil Gaiman's recent boggling that searching for 'girl scout cookies' on amazon found slutty girl scout halloween costumes and speculums (and no cookies).

Tom #122 that's a similar guilt-by-association smear on homeschoolers right there.

AJ #25

Does anyone hereabouts understand why Hollywood does such an abyssmal job adapting written science fiction and fantasy to the screen? What economic incentives impel movie producers to butcher already vetted stories?

This was explained very well by Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon a while back

• JW: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.
• NG: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.
• JW: There's really no better way to put it.

My colleagues in usenet search tell me that this bug is fixed now. If you're still seeing it, email me at kevinmarks@google.com Sorry for the problems

What about the myth of Savage Nobles?

We have several plug-in hybrids just outside the building I'm sitting in, as well as solar cells in the car park to recharge them.
The other advantage of PEH's is that they can act as energy buffers - they can charge at night, and sell power back at peak times, so can be net profitable for owners if the electric metering is set up right.

Trajan struck me as the poor man's Palatino, but I am a huge Zapf fanboy. Do you know how many glyphs there are in Zapfino?

Allowing user tagging is an excellent way to generate lists of related words (synonym is a misnomer for me - there are very few pure synonyms, as the old thesaurus game of "how quickly can you get to 'homosexual' from an arbitrary word" shows).
Different people use different levels of specificity for labelling things, depending on their expertise and the fineness of distinctions they are used to making. Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory expresses this well. See David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" for a splendid exposition of this.

Jo #97 the interesting thing linguistically about MILF is the intentionality embedded in it. I suspect there's a madonna/whore split in MILF vs Cougar.

Now that Polish and Eastern European immigrants are the latest wave in the UK, is there a new racial epithet for them to watch for?

An excellent social engineering hack that Christy Canida came up with was to have such a list, but to present the error message as "your comment didn't pass our spell-checker - the word 'whore' was not recognised"

You won't be able to repress British profanity, as it is endlessly creative and allusive. See Roger's Profanisaurus, Viz magazine, Urban dictionary, Carry On films &c.
That said, you should add 'wog' to the British list. You should also consider 'retard' as a noun.

Jeremy Keith uses 'shepherding' in describing Heather Champ of Flickr

Heather’s role is community manager. Sometimes she feels like a piñata—people beat you with sticks and you still have to give them candy. She’s helped out by a lot people; regular Flickr users.

Good guidelines really help: Don’t be creepy. You know that guy? Don’t be that guy. As Flickr has grown, the guidelines have stood the test of time really well.

A lot of the articles on historic topics in Wikipedia were seeded from the 1911 Britannica. You can occasionally see traces of that prose style persisting through the edits, like a palimpsest.

Teresa #19 Jo is indeed - she just got me to order 3 classic SF books to read via those Tor reviews of hers.
Could the Elizabethan ruff have been designed to get the wearer to perform the right body language?
A shepherd's crook and a ruff together sound ratehr episcopal.

I'm intrigued by the need for that word - is this related to the quest for tummler recognition ?

John #87 that is s splendid use of twitter. MJ originally twittered entirely in haiku, which is a form that works very well there; limericks can be attempted...
Lance #90 I don't agree - a massively parallel interleaved global water cooler is something different. Ideas propagate across twitter as they do across blogs, only faster and pithier.
Laura Fitton, @pistachio on twitter, managed to arrange to meet with a huge number of SF people on her brief visit form Boston, all of whom she'd only known from twitter.

I assume you all saw the Onion on commenters

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