
A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail - johns
http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two-people-puts-three-more-in-jail
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hugh
Missing dots don't kill people, people kill people!

~~~
Hexstream
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_.

~~~
jrockway
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.

~~~
hugh
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.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
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."

~~~
ken
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?

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

~~~
jcl
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."

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edw519
This _is_ hacker news (in more ways than one).

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Slasherdot: News for Kurds, Stuff that Splatters

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

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

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noonespecial
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.

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

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

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parenthesis
Unicode is good for your health.

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alex_c
Linkbait title at its best.

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daniel-cussen
All for the want of a cellphone pixel.

