OT: "PUP"

Do not seal as dangerous goods.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Eh? I though FUD was Fear Uncertainty and Doubt?

Think again. There are only 17,576 different possible TLA's (three letter acronyms). That's not sufficient to simultaneously support a technical civilization and a teenage SMS (short message service) culture, while trying to deal with the rapid depletion of white space. Acronyms are therefore often recycled and require context for proper decoding. For example: I was obviously not referring to the "fair use doctrine" because no legal jargon was mentioned. However, with all the recycled acronyms in circulation, misinterpretation is quite possible. It is therefore customary to expand the acronym only upon initial use. Finding the initial use is often a problem in a large document, so a glossary of buzzwords, abbrevs, and acronyms is often included. While not a perfect solution for acronym infestation, it does help.

Please note that no company or product can be successful without a catchy name or acronym, so this is not a trivial matter.

And I've seen entire system schematics released as pages of "This page left blank intentionally" just to make an engineering release deadline.

Hopefully, someone submitted revised drawings before they flew the plane.

When I was in IBM, they shipped MANY mainframes without the logic modules needed for them to operate, just to make schedules (and execs make their options requirements).

One year Intel shipped us everything that had legs. Every part failed incoming inspection and was sent back for retest. In January, we got good parts.

For ballast? ;-)

On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 21:54:58 -0800, Robert Baer wrote:

I was scribbling a draft of the manual for an RDF (radio direction finder) when I noticed the paradox. A page cannot be considered blank if imprinted with "This page is left intentionally blank". Surely, there must be a better phrase. My proposed solution was to replace it with "Pretend that this page is really blank", which eliminated the paradox. That was uniformly rejected by every manager in a position of authority over my manual. The only manual that contained my revised phrase was the first draft of the manual. Unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to print it on pink paper or employ some other mechanism to prevent management from shipping everything that wasn't literally nailed down. So, my first draft manual was shipped with the prototype to the USCG (US Coast Guard) for evaluation. There were the usual mistakes, omissions, and inadequacies, but it was my replacement "blank" phrase that received the most attention. A senior officer picked up the banner of removing paradoxes and carried it to heights well above my limited civilian imagination. There were negotiations, meetings, conferences, expert opinions, and backroom politics involved. I knew nothing of this until I found out about 9 months later. We were furiously shipping RDF's, when we received a request to change the wording on the blank pages. Management was not amused. Making the change would have required rebinding several hundred manuals. Fortunately, there were only 3 blank pages. Rather than make a mess, I ordered a rubber stamp, and made the changes the easy way. Nobody said anything.

Unfortunately, the USCG senior officer moved on to better problems worth solving and abandoned the crusade to remove paradoxical statements from the manuals. Future manuals reverted to the de facto standard "This page is left intentionally blank" phrase. Therefore, I could not claim on my resume to have inspired a major change in blank page handling.

Since i developed a solid state replacement to the Victoreen Corotron(TM) and since its voltage can be "programmed", i came up with the moniker Codatron(TM). Must be not too bad, as i expected this replacement to an obsolete part to last maybe 2 years - and after 5+ years it is still going as strong. The moniker has produced at least 50 percent of first page hits by BabyBird (GooGull) for a number of years.

I bet if you mentioned that in an interview for a new job, you got BLANK stares....

Welcome to overloaded acronyms, how many do you know of for ATM?

?-)

At this minute?

Any Time, Man.

All That Money earns Awfully Total Misery for Art Thou Man?

When the weight of the documentation equals the weight of the plane, the plane is allowed to fly.