Interesting articles

Ok. But that doesn't make the article wrong or poorly researched. Like it or not, it is a name associated with the pattern. May as well complain about an article from 1943 calling the US tanks "Shermans". Only foreigners and reporters called it that, to an American soldier it was the M4 or Medium.

And in 20 years driving large American vehicles, I have never heard anyone driving one refer to it as a Yank Tank. Yet there is very little confusion over what they are when you use the term in appropriate conversation. Even the term “Yank” is used by everyone except the Yanks. Does that mean that an article which refers to Americans as Yanks or a Lincoln Continental as a yank tank is poorly researched?

The term exists and is in common use. The lack of use of the term by the users doesn’t invalidate the statement, and the fact that I refer to the pattern as “Irish DPM” and have never personally used the term “Paddyflage” doesn’t preclude me from accepting that.

Waffe means 'weapon', no? Indeed, stick 'gewehr' into Google Translate from German and it comes out as... gun.

It seems to me a rifle is a type of gun. Gun being the overarching name, the subset of weapons which propels by expansive force (Railguns don't really fit into this, in fairness), then you have gun divided into pieces and firearms, then the firearms are crew served or individual, the individual being handguns (Revolvers and pistols, mainly) and long guns, the latter being shotguns, and rifles. Rifles themselves also being a term used for pieces (eg USS Iowa had 16-inch rifles) so in itself a bit of a matter of common usage. In fairness, handgun itself used to refer to long-barreled weapons as well, to distinguish them from the towed guns of the era, though it's no longer a common usage. And then there are the subsets of rifle, battle rifle, assault rifle, etc.

So it's all a bit of a silly argument.

As an aside, the oldest usage of 'paddyflauge' on Boards.ie is 2007. "Paddyflage" is 2008.

Unmanned everything is pretty much the common-sense next step for many sectors. As an aside, a self-driving vehicle managed to complete an off-road course faster than a manned one for the first time about a month ago. The difference was that the AI driver didn't care about any cargo or crew, so it took obstacles at full belt where the human driver would slow down to minimize the impact. So they're still working on that...