Re: deinsultifying gnome - dump the translations, people!

[Raphael Bosshard <whistler bluewin ch>]

Sounds good. I further require the removal of all icons and pictures 
from GNOME D&DP; they may be offending and/or insulting too.

(eg. A pen&paper icon may be offending analphabetics)

Raphael


Jaka Moc(nik wrote:

> Hello!
>
> With all the stir caused by recent development release name (that I
> shall not name again not to insult someone, let us just remind you that
> it referenced some genitalia that usually come in pairs), I began to
> think about other potential sources of insults in GNOME and concluded
> that the release names were but a minor insult potential. There is much
> bigger hazard in all the translations that we have!
>
> You see, GNOME is translated in about a zillion different languages,
> with most people using GNOME speaking only one or perhaps two of them.
> So, my GNOME user, all those translations that you don't speak might
> contain nothing but myriads of insults aimed at you, your race, sex,
> your family, your dog, the way you live, your sexual orientation and
> anything else in your life you can imagine.
>
> The obvious, philantropic solution is to start an educational campaign,
> financed by the GNOME foundation, to have all the GNOME users learn all
> the languages that GNOME is translated to, thereby eliminating the
> chance of some perverted translator sneaking an insult into GNOME via an
> obscure language.
>
> Of course, such a campaign seems unlikely due to its financial and
> organisational implications, so I suggest we take a shortcut and simply
> _dump all the translations_, thereby eliminating possible insults in
> them.
>
> After we dump these, the problem of insults in the default C locale
> remains - as the C locale is usually written in English, we could have a
> number of purists scrutinize all those C strings and remove potentially
> insulting ones. But, as the very term "insulting" is inherently
> subjective, these people might skip some strings insulting to some group
> of people, achieving nothing at all.
>
> I thought of replacing the C locale with randomly generated strings
> bearing no meaning at all, but there is still the problem that one of
> these strings might actually be insulting in some language that I don't
> speak (let me remind you, we didn't start that eductaional campaign).
> Ok, so let's generate random strings without vowels. There are no
> insulting words written without wovels, are there? No can do: we might
> end up with a Hebrew insult. So what now? Use pictograms? These are
> ubiquitously understood, even voyager carries pictograms... the idea
> might seem OK, but when you think about it twice, you realize that the
> problem of subjectivity of an insult remains. So pictograms are no good.
>
> All this said, the obvious solution is to dump not onyl translations but
> _all strings_ and replace them with whitespaces, preferably a single
> whitespace or an empty string (otherwise those whitespaces might
> constitute an insulting code in the whitespace programming language, see
> http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/).
>
> I know this is no time for such a massive change since string freeze is
> in effect and the 2.6 release looming, but I urge you to carefully
> consider it for the upcoming GNOME 2.8!
>
> Yours insultingly,
> 	jaKa
>