A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail | Hacker News Reader

A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

gizmodo.com

22 pointsjohns18 comments

Missing dots don't kill people, people kill people!

Indeed, the sickest thing about this story is that it's the missing dot that's emphasized instead of mass killing with knives over words.

But that's the "fun" part. People brutally stabbing each other is booooring!

In reality, I'm sure this guy would have murdered someone else anyway. I don't think one text message is enough to drive a sane person to attempt murder. The phrase "ticking time bomb" comes to mind.

The other big problem with the story: the two words don't just differ by the dots on the "i"s, they also appear to end with a different vowel.

I know nothing of Turkish. But it's extremely feasible that the trailing vowel is decided by tense or inflection. Note that the active subject changed between the two phrases. "You run out of arguments" vs. "They are ____ you."

I studied Turkish in college, but it's been a few years.

Turkish has "vowel harmony", so a suffix's vowels are determined by the preceding vowel. The ending "-IncE" (capital = "correct-by-harmony-rules vowel here") means roughly "when doing", and it can look like ınca or ince (or other variants) depending on the last vowel of the verb it's attached to.

Literally "Zaten sen sıkışınca konuyu değiştiriyorsun" = "Anyway you (when-)get-stuck (to-the-)topic change(-now-you)". They don't quote the other reading of the sentence (or even the alternate word), so I think the "they are __ you" form was just the English translation.

It's not even clear the message used an "e" -- just that "sikişince" is what it "looked like". I propose that people, when reading, tend to place more value in the root of a word than its suffixs. He probably typed "sikişinca", which I admit looks more like "sikişince" than it does "sıkışınca".

Aren't agglutinative languages fun?

RTA! It was his ex-girlfriend and her family that opted for murder, with her heading up the line at the knife buffet. She died of blood loss after he fought back, then he killed himself in prison.

You have to be careful when typing languages where "they are fucking you" and "you run out of arguments" are only one letter apart.

Due to the dirtiness of the human mind, I expect most languages have innocent phrases that are one letter apart from suggestive ones. E.g.: "You're such an uninteresting person... At parties, you're always telling dull stories and boning everyone."

This is hacker news (in more ways than one).

Slasherdot: News for Kurds, Stuff that Splatters

Hmm... The software apparently didn't pass the Turkey Test.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001075.html

Perhaps the deep and abiding problem here is not that all cellphones are not nationalized, its that there are people in this world that kill each other over SMS messages!

But yeah, sure, go ahead and fix the dot. I'm sure that will solve everything.

I guess those people have a slight evolutionary disadvantage in our modern world.

Punctuation and capitalisation can also be problematic: http://www.bash.org/?367896

Unicode is good for your health.

Linkbait title at its best.

All for the want of a cellphone pixel.

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