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From: jcb@inf.ed.ac.uk (Julian Bradfield)
Newsgroups: misc.metric-system,comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: decimal separator (international?
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:29:49 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh
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In article <mq2a52-b29.ln1@news.naggum.no>,
Erik Naggum  <erik@naggum.no> wrote:

>Excuse me for being precise, but a statement that pretends to be true 
>always but is actually only true some of the time, is entirely false: It 

Depends on your notion of truth. The statement "birds are flying
creatures with two feathered wings" has a number of well-known
exceptions, but is nonetheless true for useful meanings of "true".

In any question of linguistic usage, taking a two-valued definition of
truth is just pointless. Clearly "in computing, giga = 2^30" is not
maximally true; but it's not plain false, if one takes plain false to
mean the minimal truth value. (You weren't precise about what you
meant by "plain", so I took the meaning that seemed most plausible.)

>is /not/ true that �in computing�, giga = 2^30. The simple fact that a 
>lot of uses of �giga� in computing are 10^9, invalidates the statement 
>and its broad claim.

Only if you think the broad claim was one of absolute maximal truth,
which I don't.
I might note that the specific counter example I gave is
contentious: many people think that giga means (or should mean) gibi
in disk capacities, and that manufacturers only use giga means giga in
order to inflate their capacities.