Just like the people who use ‘gay’ to mean ‘stupid’ or ‘wrong’. It’s only the common verbiage, and trying to change people’s usage is gay.
The differences, of course, being that gay was a self-described noun for thirty years, or so, before it was adopted by outsiders as a negative adjective, (leaving aside its earlier Victorian meaning), while hacker became an epithet within the IT community for programmers doing bad things almost as soon as it was coined. By the time it actually had a definition, only about a hundred geeks were still distinguishing between hacker and cracker while several thousands of programmers, security guys, and network administrators were already using hacker to mean anyone who hacked into a system. The “common” people were simply using the word as it was generally used within the community that coined it.
Not the same at all. As has been pointed out in many ways above, the usage is legitimate. And correct in that atoms are used in the making of those weapons.
Hate speech needs to be corrected in any form.
Anyway, it’s not semantically incorrect to use “gay” to mean “stupid.” It’s just offensive.
What is your criteria for determining if a word is being used correctly or not?
C’mon, man. It’s english. Trying to be all proper about it is so…so…veddy, veddy British.
It’s like getting an incorrigible urchin to sit up straight, comb his hair, and to stop kicking his sister under the table.
As I read it he is saying,
An atomic bomb uses a chemical explosion to set off a fission explosion.
A nuclear weapon uses a fission explosion to set off a fusion explosion.
BTW, the correct progression of terminology is/was:
Atom Bomb
H-Bomb
Nuclear Bomb
Nuclear Weapon
Nucular Weapon
Don’t pretend to have knowledge you don’t. It’s annoying and offensive. Here is The Jargon File on the origin of the word in the relevant sense:
And, since people here seem so impressed by authority, The Jargon File does indeed come from the TMRC and the MIT AI Lab in the 1960s. It is the authority.
Don’t fight the hypothetical: I wasn’t talking about the use of ‘atomic bomb’ in that post. I was talking about the use of ‘hacker’.
Here is something even more responsive to the debate* about the word ‘hacker’, also from The Jargon File:
So ‘hacker’ in the criminal sense only dates to ca. 1985, whereas ‘hacker’ in the original sense dates to the 1960s.
No, what your cite supports is that “cracker” in the criminal sense only dates to ca. 1985; “hacker” in the criminal sense could date to any time before that.
That having been said, the earliest citation from the OED for “hacker” in the criminal sense is from 1983. (At the same time, the earliest citation in the OED for “hacker” in an innocuous computer-related sense is 1976).
But all the same, that criminal sense is in there; which is to say, it is a commonly used definition of the word. And common use among a particular speech community is all there is to telling us what words mean among that community. The case for “hacker” in the mainstream of English speakers has long since been that it generally has connotations of unwarranted intrusion.
So you admit to being annoying and offensive? I have made no claim regarding the geeks who might have coined the term. However, the term hacker shifted meaning within the IT community long before it made it out to the “common” people.
I do know what I am talking about. I entered the IT community many years ago and I am aware that people invading other computers were routinely called hackers, not crackers, regardless what the original geek clique might have said. The Jargon File is not “the authority” except among the geeks who cling to it.
Had the hacker/cracker distinction survived in the IT community for twenty years and then changed at the point where silly movies like War Games came out, you might have a point, but the writers of War Games and similar fluff borrowed the term hacker from the IT community just the way it had been used at that time. Given that the typical hacker througout the 1970s, (whether at MIT or either UoM or Stamford or wherever), fully believed that the capacity to enter someone else’s computer was equivalent to the right to enter someone else’s computer, it is not at all strrange to discover that the people operating the computers considered the self-professed hackers as either nuisances or vandals. It the MIT geeks wanted to keep the cracker/hacker distinction separate, then they should have spent the 1970s helping major universities and corporations prevent vandalism and trespass instead of chortling over their cleverness and the cleverness of their abusive cohorts. Since they did not and since there are far more programmers in legitimate installations who came to view hackers as pests, the geeks surrendered the rights to control the terms.
Next time you want to control a term, control it, don’t wander in twenty years late and complain that it has been badly used by the victims of your confederates.
I love the O.E.D., but it does suffer from the need to establish citations based on published works. The 1976 “enthusiast” entry is quite a bit later than its first appearance in the 1960s, but the 1983 “vandal” citation is also significantly later than its use in the 1970s that I encountered when I got into programming. For that matter, the O.E.D. still does not even recognize cracker as a computer related term.
Oh, I agree that those terms probably appeared much earlier than the OED citations indicate. I just wanted to put the information out there anyway, whatever use it may be.
I disagree. It’s overly broad at worst, but then it’s not a scientific term, despite your odd insistence that it must be. More than that, your supposed correction is wrong-headed, too. Both nuclear and chemical reactions involve atoms; your insistence that “atomic reaction” must refer only to the latter is entirely unjustifiable (they’ve been “chemical reactions” since time immemorial). One could even argue that since in chemical reactions molecules are usually involved, not single atoms, the descriptor is even less apt in that case. At least each individual nuclear reaction occurs within one atom (“intra-atomic”, anyone? No?). So we’ve got two classes of reaction, both of which could be described as “atomic” by some reasoning, and only one of which has ever been referred to thusly. And yet you want us to use it to refer to the other, in defiance of both logic and convention. Strange.
What confusion are you trying to solve here, anyway? Everyone knows how nuclear weapons work. If there is a single person out there in the entire world who:
[list=a][li]has a sufficient scientific knowledge of science to distinguish between nuclear and chemical reactions, and[/li][li]has never heard the phrase “atomic bomb”[/li][/list]
then I will eat my hat. Even if there is such a person, their first thought on encountering the phrase would not be, “gosh, an atomic bomb? That must involve atoms, then, which I suppose can only mean reactions involving the electron shells of atoms or compounds. My word, what a strange way to describe what we’ve just been calling ‘bombs’ for all these years. I shall definitely not look at a book or ask someone less sheltered for clarification on this point.”
I imagine their actual first thought would be, “wow, that’s really tiny.”
Swiftly followed by, “I have got to get some wider reading material in this bunker.”
If enough people use it that way.
Here’s an example:
More and more people are using the word “infer” to mean the same thing as “imply.” If things keep going like this, the new usage will soon be correct.
I popped into this thread before you did. This is the original thread pitting Derleth for saying something reasonable (albeit in an unreasonable way). The other thread was about Death from “Old Age”. If you were posting there about Oppenheimer, then you were participating in a hijack.