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CDA
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cdr
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cd tilde
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= C =
CDA/C-D-A/
The "Communications Decency Act" of 1996, passed onBlack Thursdayas section 502 of a major telecommunications reform bill. The CDA made it a federal crime in the USA to send a communication which is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person." It also threatened with imprisonment anyone who "knowingly" makes accessible to minors any message that "describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs".
While the CDA was sold as a measure to protect minors from the putative evils of pornography, the repressive political aims of the bill were laid bare by the Hyde amendment, which intended to outlaw discussion of abortion on the Internet.
To say that this direct attack on First Amendment free-speech rights was not well received on the Internet would be putting it mildly. A firestorm of protest followed, including a February 29th mass demonstration by thousands of netters who turned theirhome pages black for 48 hours. Several civil-rights groups and computing/telecommunications companies mounted a constitutional challenge. The CDA was demolished by a strongly-worded decision handed down on in 8th-circuit Federal court and subsequently affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court on 26 June 1997 (`White Thursday'). See alsoExon.
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cdr
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chad
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CDA
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cdr/ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ vt.
[from LISP] To skip past the first item from a list of things (generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures, which returns a list consisting of all but the first element of its argument). In the form `cdr down', to trace down a list of elements: "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. See alsoloop through.
Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 704 that hosted the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called the `address' and `decrement' parts. The term `cdr' was originally `Contents of Decrement part of Register'. Similarly, `car' stood for `Contents of Address part of Register'.
The cdr and car operations have since become bases for formation of compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts. GLS recalls, for example, a programming project in which strings were represented as linked lists; the get-character and skip-character operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR.
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chad
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chad box
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cdr
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chad/chad/ n.
1. [common] The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also calledselvage,perf, andripoff. 2. obs. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this has also been called `chaff', `computer confetti', and `keypunch droppings'. It's reported that this was very old Army slang, and it may now be mainstream; it has been reported seen (1993) in directions for a card-based voting machine in California.
Historical note: One correspondent believes `chad' (sense 2) derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded back, rather than punching out a circle/rectangle; it was clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be `chad'. There is a legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for "Card Hole Aggregate Debris", but this has all the earmarks of abackronym.
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chad box
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chain
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chad
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chad boxn.
A metal box about the size of a lunchbox (or in some models a large wastebasket), for collecting thechad(sense 2) that accumulated inIron Agecard punches. You had to open the covers of the card punch periodically and empty the chad box. Thebit bucketwas notionally the equivalent device in the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in another great gray-and-blue box.
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chain
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channel
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chad box
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chain
1. vi. [orig. from BASIC'sCHAINstatement] To hand off execution to a child or successor without going through theOScommand interpreter that invoked it. The state of the parent program is lost and there is no returning to it. Though this facility used to be common on memory-limited micros and is still widely supported for backward compatibility, the jargon usage is semi-obsolescent; in particular, most Unix programmers will think of this as anexec. Oppose the more modern `subshell'. 2. n. A series of linked data areas within an operating system or application. `Chain rattling' is the process of repeatedly running through the linked data areas searching for one which is of interest to the executing program. The implication is that there is a very large number of links on the chain.
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channel
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channel hopping
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chain
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channeln.
[IRC] The basic unit of discussion onIRC. Once one joins a channel, everything one types is read by others on that channel. Channels are named with strings that begin with a `#' sign and can have topic descriptions (which are generally irrelevant to the actual subject of discussion). Some notable channels are#initgame,#hottub,callahans, and#report. At times of international crisis,#reporthas hundreds of members, some of whom take turns listening to various news services and typing in summaries of the news, or in some cases, giving first-hand accounts of the action (e.g., Scud missile attacks in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War in 1991).
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channel hopping
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channel op
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channel
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channel hoppingn.
[common; IRC, GEnie] To rapidly switch channels onIRC, or a GEnie chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop from one group to another at a party. This term may derive from the TV watcher's idiom, `channel surfing'.
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channel op
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chanop
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channel hopping
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channel op/chan'l op/ n.
[IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on a particularIRCchannel; commonly abbreviated `chanop' or `CHOP' or just `op' (as of 2000 these short forms have almost crowded out the parent usage). These privileges include the right tokickusers, to change various status bits, and to make others into CHOPs.
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chanop
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char
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channel op
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= C =
chanop/chan'-op/ n.
[IRC] Seechannel op.
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char
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charityware
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chanop
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char/keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ n.
Shorthand for `character'. Esp. used by C programmers, as `char' is C's typename for character data.
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charityware
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chase pointers
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char
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charityware/cha'rit-ee-weir`/ n.
Syn.careware.
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chase pointers
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chawmp
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charityware
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= C =
chase pointers
1. vi. To go through multiple levels of indirection, as in traversing a linked list or graph structure. Used esp. by programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common data type. This is techspeak, but it remains jargon when used of human networks. "I'm chasing pointers. Bob said you could tell me who to talk to about...." Seedangling pointerandsnap. 2. [Cambridge] `pointer chase' or `pointer hunt': The process of going through acore dump(sense 1), interactively or on a large piece of paper printed with hexrunes, following dynamic data-structures. Used only in a debugging context.
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chawmp
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check
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chase pointers
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chawmpn.
[University of Florida] 16 or 18 bits (half of a machine word). This term was used by FORTH hackers during the late 1970s/early 1980s; it is said to have been archaic then, and may now be obsolete. It was coined in revolt against the promiscuous use of `word' for anything between 16 and 32 bits; `word' has an additional special meaning for FORTH hacks that made the overloading intolerable. For similar reasons, /gaw'bl/ (spelled `gawble' or possibly `gawbul') was in use as a term for 32 or 48 bits (presumably a full machine word, but our sources are unclear on this). These terms are more easily understood if one thinks of them as faithful phonetic spellings of `chomp' and `gobble' pronounced in a Florida or other Southern U.S. dialect. For general discussion of similar terms, seenybble.
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check
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cheerfully
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chawmp
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checkn.
A hardware-detected error condition, most commonly used to refer to actual hardware failures rather than software-induced traps. E.g., a `parity check' is the result of a hardware-detected parity error. Recorded here because the word often humorously extended to non-technical problems. For example, the term `child check' has been used to refer to the problems caused by a small child who is curious to know what happens when s/he presses all the cute buttons on a computer's console (of course, this particular problem could have been prevented withmolly-guards).
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cheerfully
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chemist
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check
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cheerfullyadv.
Seehappily.
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chemist
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Chernobyl chicken
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cheerfully
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chemistn.
[Cambridge] Someone who wastes computer time onnumber-crunchingwhen you'd far rather the machine were doing something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or runninglifepatterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry.
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Chernobyl chicken
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Chernobyl packet
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chemist
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Chernobyl chickenn.
Seelaser chicken.
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Chernobyl packet
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chicken head
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Chernobyl chicken
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Chernobyl packet/cher-noh'b*l pak'*t/ n.
A network packet that induces abroadcast stormand/ornetwork meltdown, in memory of the April 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The typical scenario involves an IP Ethernet datagram that passes through a gateway with both source and destination Ether and IP address set as the respective broadcast addresses for the subnetworks being gated between. CompareChristmas tree packet.
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chicken head
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chiclet keyboard
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Chernobyl packet
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chicken headn.
[Commodore] The Commodore Business Machines logo, which strongly resembles a poultry part (within Commodore itself the logo was always called `chicken lips'). Rendered in ASCII as `C='. With the arguable exception of the Amiga (seeamoeba), Commodore's machines were notoriously crocky littlebitty boxes (see alsoPETSCII), albeit people have written multitasking Unix-like operating systems with TCP/IP networking for them. Thus, this usage may owe something to Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (the basis for the movie "Blade Runner"; the novel is now sold under that title), in which a `chickenhead' is a mutant with below-average intelligence.
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chiclet keyboard
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Chinese Army technique
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chicken head
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chiclet keyboardn.
A keyboard with a small, flat rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like pieces of chewing gum. (Chiclets is the brand name of a variety of chewing gum that does in fact resemble the keys of chiclet keyboards.) Used esp. to describe the original IBM PCjr keyboard. Vendors unanimously liked these because they were cheap, and a lot of early portable and laptop products got launched using them. Customers rejected the idea with almost equal unanimity, and chiclets are not often seen on anything larger than a digital watch any more.
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Chinese Army technique
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choad
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chiclet keyboard
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= C =
Chinese Army techniquen.
Syn.Mongolian Hordes technique.
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choad
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choke
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Chinese Army technique
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choad/chohd/ n.
Synonym for `penis' used inalt.tastelessand popularized by the denizens thereof. They say: "We think maybe it's from Middle English but we're all too damned lazy to check the OED." [I'm not. It isn't. --ESR] This term is alleged to have been inherited through 1960s underground comics, and to have been recently sighted in the Beavis and Butthead cartoons. Speakers of the Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati languages have confirmed that `choad' is in fact an Indian vernacular word equivalent to `fuck'; it is therefore likely to have entered English slang via the British Raj.
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choke
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chomp
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choad
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chokev.
1. [common] To reject input, often ungracefully. "NULs make System V'slpr(1)choke." "I tried building anEMACSbinary to useX, butcpp(1)choked on all those#defines." Seebarf,gag,vi. 2. [MIT] More generally, to fail at any endeavor, but with some flair or bravado; the popular definition is "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
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chomp
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chomper
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choke
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chompvi.
1. Tolose; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. 2. To bite the bag; Seebagbiter.
A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means `chomp chomp' (see "Verb Doubling" in the "Jargon Construction" section of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying "You chomper!" If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it.
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chomper
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CHOP
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chomp
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chompern.
Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. Seeloser,bagbiter,chomp.
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CHOP
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Christmas tree
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chomper
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= C =
CHOP/chop/ n.
[IRC] Seechannel op.
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Christmas tree
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Christmas tree packet
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CHOP