According to the AP, a new survey of Americans showed that about half of those polled believed the word “whatever” was the most annoying English conversation word and hated when it was used during a conversation.
The poll was conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion and shows that “whatever” received 47 percent of the votes. Second and third place went respectively to “you know” and “it is what it is.”
The word was made popular in the early 90s by the movie “Clueless” and by the band Nirvana and has not left the everyday English vocabulary since.
“It doesn’t surprise me because ‘whatever’ is in a special class, probably,” added Michael Adams, author of “Slang: The People’s Poetry.” “It’s a word that — and it depends how a speaker uses it — can suggest dismissiveness.”
The poll used 938 U.S. adults from around the States.
Result for: surprise
Apple and Amazon Video On Demand have started rival promotions this week on digital movie and TV downloads, offering movies for under $5 USD and offering rentals for .99.
New digital films will also cost $14.99 at Amazon now, a discount from their previous $16.99 price tag, and occasionally cheaper than their physical media counterparts.
As an example, both sites have slashed the price of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a May release, to $9.99 USD, while the DVD sells for $15 and the Blu-ray for $25.
Most competitors, such as CinemaNow and VUDU, offer new releases for over $17 USD.
FutureSource analyst David Sidebottom adds that Amazon has been trying to steal iTunes market share in the music market, with aggressive pricing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the same on the video side.”
The best deals, however, are on TV shows, with over 9 full seasons of popular shows available for under $5 USD.
Result for: surprise
In 2004, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took down the once large ed2K link site ShareConnector, which had aided in finding files (or parts of files) on the eDonkey2000 network with software such as eMule.
The site came back in 2006 but in 2007, the admin Adi was taken to trial and acquitted of any complicity to criminal copyright infringement. After that, the site went down and now remains as a host for eDonkey and other tutorials.
Interestingly today however, Adi added a blog post saying that BREIN is back to appeal the 2007 case, and a court case is upcoming.
Says the post:
Recently, I got a letter from the Department of Justice, stating that they want a re-trial which they desperately lost back in July 24 2007.
I’m really surprised that they want another shot at trying to make us look as criminals. Nobody expected the DoJ to go for an appeal after an embarrassing defeat 2 years ago.
The defendants are to appear proforma on 22 September 2009 in The Hague. On 18 November 2009 the re-trial should take place. Both ShareConnector and Releases4u (dutch ed2k site we are not affiliated with but was hosted on our ISP) including the former ShareConnector host are to appear in court.
This has nothing to do with the recent civil case against BREIN, where I went for an appeal. That appeal should take place within a few months as well.
So this year is really packed with lawsuits for me with hopefully some conclusive results about the legality of eD2k indexing sites in the Netherlands. After the illegal raids by FIOD-ECD who didn’t do any research and blindly followed BREIN back in December 2004, it took years with the criminal court which made so many blunders and now finally this chapter can be closed with the DoJ and civil appeal approaching us.
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