On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, RW wrote:
However, if you want to be understood you need to speak the Lingua Franca. If you choose to use a term differently than everyone else you WILL be misunderstood and corrected.
If everyone calls an apple an orange, then yeah, it's an orange.
A false match on a test is a false-positive. It doesn't reverse for a ham test, simply because you're more used to thinking about spam tests.
The distinction is whether the 'false positive' refers to the overall scoring of the message (FP=ham flagged as spam) or an individual test (FP=test triggered incorrectly). I consider *both* usages correct in this group. And as I vaguely recall, the OP did use sufficient context for even a lame-brain like myself to realize he meant the latter.
The FP on the named rule had the potential to cause an FN.
Do you apply the same usage to anything else? For example, do you reverse the meaning of "off" and "on" for air-conditioning to make it consistent with heating, so "on" always mean "make hotter"?
Do you TURN UP or TURN DOWN your air-conditioning? Depends on whether someone has a simple numerical control or is adjusting a thermostat. Plus colloquial usage, of course. :) But yeah, you hit pretty close with your analogy. Just chose the wrong words. :) - Charles
