funsec mailing list archives
Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished
From: "Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 17:25:53 -0500
On Jan 4, 2008 4:24 PM, <Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu> wrote:
On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 08:46:50 EST, Dude VanWinkle said:Dang, I was hoping to see "virtually" in that list... I hate hearing that "virtually all of $x blah". Either you got 100% or you didn't. Don't try and make your failure to deploy something to everyone sound like a success by invoking that over-and-mis-used word..I dunno. If we try to push something to 30,000 users, and we manage to get 29,999 of them, most people would call that a success even though we didn't get 100% of them. And sometimes, "virtually all" is good enough to declare victory - at some point, you have to admit that the costs of getting *every single one* are above the costs of dealing with the few you missed. For example, note that we've "virtually eradicated" polio in North America by making sure that "virtually all" the people are immunized - but in fact, the immunization rate is only about 97% or so. It simply isn't worth it to track down the other 3%, because that's not enough of a population to sustain an outbreak.
Thats what the word almost, or your even more descriptive numeric representation of 97% is for. Much better than virtually IMO, lots more pertinent data :-) -JP
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Current thread:
- LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished Juha-Matti Laurio (Jan 03)
- Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished Dude VanWinkle (Jan 04)
- Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished Valdis . Kletnieks (Jan 04)
- Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished Dude VanWinkle (Jan 04)
- Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished David Lodge (Jan 05)
- Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished Valdis . Kletnieks (Jan 04)
- Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished Dude VanWinkle (Jan 04)