Slashdot Mirror

Three seconds in Google. It is an interview with an Olympian from Ethiopia who said that her victories at the Olympics are directly responsible for more gender equality in her village.

I'm quite sure there are more, but I stopped at the first one I found. For reference, all I had to search for was "ethiopia olympics inspired."

Substitute "ethiopia" with another country and you may find more.

It had everything to do with sharing. Please read the debates that were going on in the early 1990s between particle physicists and others who stood to lose funding. Yes, it would have been nice if the $2 billion had not been spent, but go read up on the concept of sunk cost to understand why that $2 billion already spent was not relevant when deciding whether to spend still more.

But critics say big projects drain funds from small-scale research vital to the creation of new products and jobs and often to the advance of science itself.

"Big science has gone berserk," said Dr. Rustum Roy, professor of materials science at Pennsylvania State University, who is an adviser to the House Committee on Science. "Good minds and a lot of money are going into areas that are not relevant to American competitiveness, American technological health, or even the balanced development of American science."

Dr. George F. Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said the trend bodes ill for the nation. "It is very questionable whether these projects will contribute much to stopping America's industrial decline, and may even exacerbate it," he said.

Moreover, the big instruments can take so long to plan and build, sometimes a decade or more, that they are sometimes seen as obsolete when switched on because science now moves so fast. Perhaps most troubling, this same lag is seen as causing bright graduate students to abandon some fields now dominated by giant instruments as they search for timely projects on which to base their Ph.D. research.

Disclaimer: My father got his start in accelerator physics where he helped design this so our family has some experience with unexpected funding cutbacks.

Unions aren't needed where people are treated fairly. The union has been trying to get it's way into foreigned-owned car manufactureres like Toyota and Nissan for years. AFAIK, the UAW has been unable to succeed. Twice the vote to unionized at Nissan has been voted down 2 to 1.

Personally I have no respect for unions anymore since they are actively trying to unionize illegal workers. The union was supposed to be about protecting American jobs, not encouraging those who are breaking the law. Now it's all about the $$$.

But the only real way to get manufacturers back in the US is for it to be more expensive for goods from overseas to come into the US than to be manufactured here. But neither party seems willing to do anything to stop US companies from outsourcing to countries with minimal wages and even more minimal safety practices.

I don't know if they're smarter... But they can't raise taxes any higher 'cause they're already way up, where politicians here see the vast difference and think they've got a ways to go before tax revolt.

Doctors have plenty of good ideas on how to lower costs. They present ideas all the time. Some of them request government involvement, but usually not in the form of paying for treatments. If anything, the gap between the patient and the payment is part of what drives the costs up here. Most things are covered, and the patient doesn't see the costs, so they're more likely to seek treatment for things they would otherwise deem too costly to worry about.

People didn't used to seek out their doctor for a cold... But then again, there used to be a class in high-school that taught girls how to take care of people who were sick with non-threatening conditions. When it was deemed sexist, they did away with it instead of making it for boys too.

the additive binds the nitrogen oxide particles emitted by car exhausts and turns them into harmless nitrates. "With one rain shower everything is washed clean," the institution said

Hmm... the New York Times says nitrates are "a dangerous and increasingly widespread pollutant... reaching dangerous levels in groundwater".

It seems environmentalists hold wildly diverging opinions on this.

If the NYT is correct, it's fortunate that this "air purifying concrete" is not likely to be very effective. You see, only a small percentage of the NOx molecules are going to come in contact with the road surface (which makes them eligible for conversion to nitrates). The titanium dioxide in the concrete is not able to reach out and grab NOx molecules floating one meter or even one millimeter above the road. I predict the air quality measurements will show very little difference, and the media will never report on this idea again.

I think a lot of fans will suspect collusion to obfuscate the scoring again. Like they did with the ice skating--they started combining the scores so it isn't obvious that the French judge is lowballing all the American skaters or trying to fix the results.

If you want to talk about being dicks on the Internet, have a look at this New York Times article -> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html

People who attempt suicide generally fall into 2 classes: people who continually attempt (and often eventually succeed) and other who attempt a single time and fail or are blocked and never attempt suicide again.

The point is that for the latter case, there is a large degree of impulsivity - you get some horrible news, you go into your closet and get your loaded gun and kill yourself. Or go for a walk and jump off a bridge. What is fascinating is that data indicate that a small obstacle in the plan... the gun isn't loaded and the ammo is in the basement, or their is a crowd of tourists on the bridge that you wanted to jump off... turns out to be enough to make people realize that they don't really want to die.

The point is that suicide can be an extremely impulsive act. This child wasn't necessarily mentally ill or whatever other adjectives have been used in this discussion. Usually teenagers use pills or try to slit their wrists and survive, in this tragic case, she died.

'also run'

Hmm, and who was the winner in this race they ran?

Based on IBM's income statement they are fast approaching $100 billion in annual revenue. To put this into perspective Exxon Mobile, that company that has made the news by making record profits for any company ever by gouging consumers, is a $116 billion in revenue corporation.

And how can it be they are an 'also ran' and yet they are continually on the leading edge of many technological breakthroughs.

THE POLLS FOR MCCAIN AND OBAMA ARE ALMOST EQUAL
and if history is a guide, Republicans usually win recent presidential elections, especially if people use Diebold machines.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Where's the Landslide?

By DAVID BROOKS
August 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/opinion/05brooks.html?th&emc=th
Why isn't Barack Obama doing better? Why, after all that has happened,
does he have only a slim two- or three-point lead over John McCain,
according to an average of the recent polls? Why is he basically tied
with his opponent when his party is so far ahead?

His age probably has something to do with it. So does his race. But
the polls and focus groups suggest that people aren't dismissive of
Obama or hostile to him. Instead, they're wary and uncertain. ...

Its hilarious how much effort is put into ranking how healthy people while effort to determine the effectiveness of the treatment is ignored.

Take tracking joint replacements and a database to track the effectiveness.

"Eight years ago, he alerted another implant producer, Sulzer Orthopedics, that patients with one of its hip implants were having such pain they needed replacement surgery almost immediately. Sulzer withdrew the device six months later, but about 3,000 patients got replacements for the implant, which had become contaminated by oil during manufacturing. Sulzer, deluged by lawsuits, threatened to file for bankruptcy protection.

But because of their registry, Swedish doctors were alerted after just 30 patients got the Sulzer hip that it had an alarmingly high replacement rate, Dr. Malchau said."

30,000 - 40,000 for a hip replacement * 3,000 replacements

90,000,000 - 120,000,000 million for defective hips?! Awesome. Good thing we don't have a tracking system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/business/29hip.html?em&ex=1217649600&en=71b09c9571a2af01&ei=5087%0A

Given my own problems getting doctors to connect my severe joint pain with cipro, it'd be nice if there was some national database. They don't like to use google to see the connection.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=joint+pain+cipro&btnG=Google+Search

Since the pay cut is just a way to postpone payments until the budget is passed, the system system needs to issue back pay after the crisis. It's entirely plausible that issuing back pay is more complicated than implementing the pay cut.

It seems that California has a similar budget crisis every single year. Back in 1992 they issued IOUs.

Can you elaborate? I've heard the story vaguely before, but I'm not aware of him damaging other people's property. As far as I've ever heard, all he does is post the responses he receives to his Craigslist ads. What else is he doing?

Here's a good article about him, and trolling in general: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?scp=2&sq=troll&st=cse

When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jasonâ(TM)s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. âoeJason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,â

There is no justification here whatsoever. And in case he is not deranged, I hope he gets what he asked for in his prank post on CL - brutal ass-pounding in the prison.

Recent NYT article on trolls, including Fortuny

I think more serious than men getting into trouble with their wives is the (alleged) fact that a couple of people lost their jobs.

Actually, if you could get children to forgo sex in many of these third world countries, a large number of their biggest issues would be solved.

It is a popular misconception that population size causes poverty. Here are a couple of sources: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE7DA133CF936A25757C0A965958260 http://www.cwpe.org/node/126

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?scp=2&sq=troll&st=cse

He was featured in a NY Times Magazine article about trolling, so I think he flies the troll flag rather proudly.

All they have to do is flag it so search engines don't index it and they can keep the fine print more hidden than ever, yet say it was there all along.

That's what I was thinking too. In order to do this, the SEC should have added requirements for the robots.txt file, and mandated that the there be a link trail from the corporate home page. Just because the documents are on a web server, and therefore technically on the internet (web implies there are links to it), doesn't mean they are available to the public.

The major players on Wall Street are usually very computer savvy these days (aside from Jerome Kerviel). If this plays out like I think it will, I expect analysts to devote massive amounts of computing power to making queries of major corporate websites to find hidden documents.

Sounds like a case of shoulda, woulda, coulda. They weren't signed up for anything.

The trouble is you were demanding accurate web-sourced information from a random Slashdotter in a breaking news situation. It's simply impossible. It's not appropriate to apply standards for well-sourced research topics ("cite?") in that situation. He was simply relaying what was being talked about on, e.g. CNN.

Even the New York Times only reported "dozens". If that kind of ambiguity is unacceptable when it's the very nature of breaking news, you're gonna be disappointed in any Slashdot breaking news story. Or any news outlet's coverage of said events - CNN didn't do any better than he did.

You said, "Seriously, every single legal scholar out there agrees that in terms of legality, Roe vs Wad was an extreme stretching of the constitution."

From two seconds on Google:

"Some 885 law professors argue the soundness of the original (Roe v. Wade) ruling."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DB1E3FF93AA35757C0A96F948260

Seriously, come back from Mars. Please. If you're as open minded as you profess to be, then it's time to drop these various fallacies that the conservatives have imprinted on your mind.

At least try to get your facts straight.

"The point is that it's better to have a few uninsured idiots breaking the law than to have innocent people's privacy infringed upon."

The MANY uninsured idiots are a greater real threat than the theoretical threat of privacy infringement. I don't mind being "on camera" because I can potentially use that to prove my innocence. I do mind not being compensated when some bottom-feeder with no assets runs into my ride...or me.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE3DB163CF930A3575AC0A966958260

http://www.roadandtravel.com/autonewsandviews/2006/uninsureddrivers.htm

If the man wants to track you, he can do it old-school and actually follow you. Plate scanners don't facilitate "following" because they merely confirm presence at the point of scanning.

The New York Time reports that the rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space, including the astronaut Gordon Cooper and the actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the wily engineer on the original "Star Trek" television series.

How much money is wasted in the government on a daily basis to fund lawyers, lawmakers, congresspeople and judges to uphold copyright and patents, which could have gone to supporting arts and sciences directly? Surely, that could do a lot more to encourage true art than the system we have now.

lots.

It'd be a HUGE insult to him (and, yes, perhaps to funding) if he found out because his Chief of Staff watched the news that night.

Why? It's not it's never happened before.

he's still in office and defending things like torture

take a look at this book review

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Brinkley-t.html?ref=review

still don't want to bash Bush?

The oil companies are not using 68 million acres of federal lands they've already leased. They currently have PLENTY of opportunity to increase supply but they aren't. The government doesn't need to give them MORE land, the oil companies could increase supply anytime they want.

Of the 40,000 active oil fields in the world, not one of them is refilling itself.

Geochemist Says Oil Fields May Be Refilled Naturally http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE3D91530F935A1575AC0A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

Wow, you put a lot of effort in to that response. It's really too bad you didn't put that effort in to reading the actual complaint, as I suggested you do in another comment.

Well, as long as you're too lazy to go through the post tree, to the places where I cite the US government sites which write out, clear as day, what copyright protects, then I guess I can't fault you for assuming that non-legally-trained staff writers make small mistakes in reporting.

I read the complaint instead. I figured it had more relevance.

If you bother to look into the lawsuit, there are no copyright claims.

You really need to read that complaint. Here, I'll whet your appetite:

FIRST CLAIM (FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT) ...

44. Defendants have infringed Hasbro's copyrights in the SCRABBLE crossword game and The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary by copying and publicly displaying and/or preparing or authorizing the preparation of a derivative work of copyrightable matter in Hasbro's SCRABBLE crossword game and The official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, without Hasbro's consent or authorization.

They sure throw that word "copyright" around a lot for a lawsuit that has nothing to do with copyright.

You see, they are saying that

1. There are no official rules to the game Scrabulous
2. "A user not already familiar with the rules of the SCRABBLE crossword game would not know how to play "Scrabulous."
3. "Until earlier this year, defendants included on their website hyperlinks to official SCRABBLE webpages, resources such as the official SCRABBLE rules, and also other websites offering unauthorized and infringing versions of SCRABBLE.

You may completely disagree with their claim that their copyrights were infringed, but your assertion that they are not claiming copyright infringement is simply wrong.

Exactly. If speculators were driving up the equilibrium spot price of oil, then there would have to be excess supply on the market. This implies that the excess supply has to be going into storage somewhere. The burden of proof is on those who blame speculators for the high price of oil to show where the excess supply is being stored. To date, noone has been able to show where this excess supply is being stored.

Paul Krugman and James Hamilton have discussed this in some detail recently.

What actually happened, of course, was that the House adjourned for its August recess. As scheduled. Just like it does every year. Presumably it was scheduled months in advance. Everyone knew it.

Except this time the minority party refused to, you know, leave. Though the government is not in session, the Republicans insist on hanging around anyway.

Why? Not to get any work done. They're sticking around in the hopes of getting some press simply for being stupid.

It may work. If the Democrats did this, the media would be happy to portray them as whiny little losers who didn't know when to go home. (Which would basically be accurate.)

But since it's Republicans doing it, the media -- including Slashdot, in this case -- will find amusement in what the Dems "did" to the GOP. Politico, which is generally an organ of the Republican Party, is true to form by calling Democrats "furious" and "complaing" [sic]. Slashdot says the Dems "turned out the lights on" them and giggles that the Democrats left even though "GOP leaders opposed a motion to adjourn." (It doesn't matter what "GOP leaders" wanted. The motion to adjourn passed. So the House adjourned. Learn 2 parliamentary procedure, noobs.)

Calling the House a "politburo" (meaning "the policymaking committee of a Communist party") because it adjourned on schedule is -- and here I have to agree with the Democrat who was quoted -- moronic.

And the issue the GOP is demagoguing is gasoline prices and offshore drilling. This pushes today's stunt from ridiculous to pathetic. The Department of Energy's official projection is that if offshore drilling were legalized immediately, "any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant" -- even in 2030.

And that's an inflated stat, since its numbers include hypothetical drilling off the coast of California. The GOP is pushing to allow states to allow OCS drilling if they choose -- "states' rights," as the slogan goes. And California's politicians, including its Republican governor, have made it clear the state will not allow more drilling off its coast. So the actual benefit of the current GOP proposal would be about 2/3 of the DoE's hypothetical. In 2030 :)

It's hard to believe that the Republicans would hang around a vacated government building after everyone's gone home, and yell into a bullhorn about how Congress needs to debate lower gas prices right now -- not in September! -- when Bush's own Department of Energy admits any changes would have zero effect on oil prices for 9 years and "insignificant" effect after that.

The GOP's twitter feed indicates their dogma du jour is: "drill here drill now to get us through the next 10 to 15 years." Again, the DoE's projections indicate zero effect on oil production or prices for the next 9 years, and "insignificant" effect after that.

It's unbelievable how pathetic our national politics has become. This embarrassment is why we need the grownups back in charge. And every media outlet that fails to make clear why the stunt is pathetic is part of the problem. Sadly, I include Slashdot in this.

The rules can't be copyrighted; they're intangible. The rulebook can.

I'm not disagreeing with your interpretation or opinion, but I'll just remind you I was quoting from the complaint. So, you're objection to the phrase "The Rules of Playing SCRABBLE were first registered for copyright protection ..." really should be directed at Hasbro.

Unless Scrabulous substantially copied the text of the Scrabble rulebook, they didn't violate that copyright.

That is exactly what Hasbro is alleging, that there are no official rules to the game Scrabulous, and - in the past - when players clicked the link for the rules, they are redirected to the official rules of Scrabble, for which Hasbro holds the copyright. Same with the official game dictionary.

It's all in their complaint. If you have not already read it, I encourage you to do so. It isn't very long. (Probably shorter than all of the comments in this thread insisting Hasbro is not claiming copyright infringement, which it is).

Yes, that's copyrighted but I'll skip it because it's not relevant... you were just being thorough in listing the copyrights held by Hasbro. I understand that.

No, I was quoting directly from the complaint. I've quoted further elsewhere in this thread the reason Hasbro considers this relevant, so I will simply encourage you to read my other comments or the complaint itself.

Again, Hasbro is claiming infringement on the copyrights they hold on the text of the rules to the game of Scrabble, the text of the game dictionary and violation of their trademark. All three are part of their complaint.

I'm not really sure how well this holds up. "Scrabble" is a word.

So is apple. So is windows. But Apple and Windows are registered trademarks.

The complaint claims that Scrabble has been registered as a trademark in the United States Patent and Trademark Office since the 1950s for things ranging from "equipment and accessories for playing a board game," scoring devices, accessories such as dice cups, cubes and timers and - notably - "computer game programs" (registered November 26, 2002 under registration number 2,654,348).

I have no idea whether or not any of these trademarks have been challenged, but there they are. Hasbro is saying they are the only ones who can use the word Scrabble to describe a board game, or its electronic counterpart, and that "Scrabulous" is confusingly similar.

I have to say I would tend to agree. My girlfriend was/is addicted to the game and I had assumed, since they were using such a similar name, they must have worked out a licensing agreement with the trademark holder.

If I had gone so far as to click on the link for the rules or dictionary, and been redirected to Hasbros official, copyrighted documents, I would have been convinced this was a Hasbro product. It's this kind of confusion trademark law is designed to prevent.

As for their allegations of copyright infringement, I agree that is not so cut and dried. Especially considering the can of worms you open by claiming that linking to a publicly available document on the web can be construed as copyright infringement.

But Hasbro is saying the defendants directed the players to the official, copyrighted Hasbro rules when looking for the rules to Scrabulous, so I guess they are saying it was no different than copying the rulebook and calling it the Rules of Scrabulous.

I don't know, IANAL and all that, but it should be interesting to see how that part plays out.

'"Lulz" is how trolls keep score. A corruption of "LOL" or "laugh out loud," "lulz" means the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium'

How do you explain this paticular troll in terms of Lulzing. This is someone who has been trolling comp.os.linux.advocacy for over a *decade*, over eight thousand posts since January of this year alone, not to mention its various other aliases.

You do realize that their profit isn't all from gas and Diesel fuels right? They have wells that produce oil sold on the open market, they own stations or station lands and building and lease them out to private operators, produce and sell natural gas and home heating oil plus a number of chemicals.

In fact, Fivecentnickel did a break down of were the money goes in a gallon of gas. As it turns out, refining and profit is of gas is only about 10% of the price per gallon. This isn't off from other estimates either. And it isn't excessive compared to other industries. Microsoft kept 27.3 cents of every $1 in revenue in its most recent quarter; General Electric, 11.4 cents and McDonald's, 12.3 cents. In fact, Exxon is below the 11-cent average of Standard & Poor's 500 companies, says analyst Howard Silverblatt.

So lets look at this, 10% per gallon. That is 40 cents on $4.00 gas. But wait, 40 percent or more of that goes to income taxes. So in reality, of the 40 cents, they keep around 23 ti 24 cents per gallon. Of course federal highway and state taxes average around 13% depending on the price and location but lets not focus on that. So If Exxon (the countries largest oil company) decided to cut their profits in half to save the consumer, that would only effect gas prices by 5% or 20 cents on a $4.00 per gallon gasoline. Does $3.80 compared to $4.00 a gallon seem like gouging?

The problem is that we only have about 5 major oil companies operating in the US with only 4 of them operating in any given state at a time. This problem is compounded by not being able to develop oil fields in the US because of environmental concerns and not being able to open refineries because of the same problems. This means that with all of the smaller oil companies, the major ones just do enormous volume in sales which is why they make so much. In 2007, the US consumed 142 billion gallons of gas (about 390 million gallons per day).

So if we look at this 142 billion gallon figure, we can do a number of things. Lets multiply it by $4.00 per gallon of gas, thats $568,000,000,000 or 568 billion dollars in sales. Now of the 10% holds true, that is 56.8 billion in profit across the US. Lets divide that into quarters to compare it against profits for Exxon. It comes to around 14.2 billion dollar profit per quarter in the US gas market alone. Now assuming that usage hasn't went down in the US in more then a negligible amount, with Exxon's $11.7 billion profit posted this quarter and forgetting that it makes money in places other then Gasoline sales (about 65 billion gallons of diesel and heating oil in 2007 nation wide )plus natural gas supplies and all, 11.7 billion profit in a quarter at $4.00 a gallon is only about 79% of the market.

Now we know that Exxon doesn't control 79% of the US market. So were did all the extra come from? Well, it isn't a calculation error (even though I rounded some numbers) and it isn't a number error, the 8k sec filing shows us that the US market is a very small portion of Exxon's sales compared to world wide participation. It refined 2,584,000 barrels of liquid product (or 2,584 kbd in case I got my abbreviations wrong) in the second quart in the US where it refined 4,191,000 barrels elsewhere in the world for a total of 6,775,000 (6,775 kbd). And forgetting about all the other areas for profit, Roughly 38% of their profit would be derived from within the US. So if we take 38% of the 11.

You are obviously clueless about how taxes work. Cutting taxes RAISES government revenue.

UGH! There exist people who still believe this?!? Let's look at some statistics. The following years since 1968 had lower government revenues than the previous year: 1971, 1983, 2001, 2002, 2003. This is before even adjusting for inflation or population growth. Do you really believe that taxes are so high that we are on the far side of the Laffer curve?

Another poster pointed out that revenues went up 35% from 2003 to 2006. This conveniently measures from the bottom of the economic cycle and coincides with the economic bubble that is currently deflating. A longer term comparison reveals that from 2001 to 2007, revenues went up 29%, whereas from 1993 to 1999 (which included the Clinton tax increase), revenues went up 58%.

read the damn DMCA, it applies to more then Copyright.

Read the damn complaint. It alleges trademark and copyright infringement.

Clearly, Hasbro's lawyers do NOT feel Scrabulous violated trademark, but rather included copyrighted code from Hasbro.

If you read the complaint, it's both.

I'll quote some of section24,

Hasbro is the owner of the following valid and subsisting copyrights registered in the Copyright Office:

A. The Rules of Playing SCRABBLE were first registered for copyright protection under registration No. AA 104547, published on December 1, 1948 ...

B. The Gameboard for SCRABBLE ws first registered for copyright protection under gegistration No. K 18528 and published on December 1, 1948 ...

C. The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary ...

25. The SCRABBLE name is inherently distinctive and has been registered as a trademark in the United States Patent and Trademark Office ...

I'll stop here but you get the idea. To the guy above who says he's a game designer, Hasbro's suit seems to imply that the rules of the game, as well as the layout of the board, can be copyrighted.

This contradicts your comment

Game designs and rules are unprotected. Titles, presentation, artwork and appearances are protected. This is ideal. No brokenness here.

I suppose they can allege whatever they want in their complaint, but they do quote registration numbers.

Just in case you missed it, here is the complaint. I draw your attention to the first paragraph of the Introduction:

'This is an action for trademark and copyright infringement against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla and their company, RJ Softwares, for creating and publicly displaying an online game that copies the essential and original elements of Hasbro's venerable and famous SCRABBLE crossword board game and for promoting and profiting from it in the commerce of the United States under the confusingly similar "Scrabulous" name.'

Perhaps your comment

Scrabble was clonable the first day it was released. You just had to use a different name and color the board differently. This whole thing you're on about is completely mis-aimed.

would be more appropriate if directed at the folks at Hasbro.

I take no issue, by the way, with their trademark claim. I believe society benefits if we have assurance we are doing business with the party we think we are doing business with. If Hasbro thinks the name Scrabulous is too similar to Scrabble - and I agree that it is - they are absolutely right to take action on the trademark claim.

However, I stand by my previously stated opinion with regard to never-ending copyrights.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/27/books/manjoo-600.jpg

Are you surprised? It is google, they sell advertising.

Because this is not a copyright issue, there is no sixty year timeframe involved.

I'm just going by what the various articles have said. Like this one, which says "News wire service Reuters is reporting Hasbro and Mattel are demanding that Facebook remove the popular Facebook application Scrabulous due to copyright infringement." Or this one, which says "Hasbro on Thursday filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against the creators of the ad-supported Scrabulous application, which boasts an astonishing half-million daily users." Or this one, which says "Hasbro, the Rhode Island company that owns the trademark to the 60-year-old board game, Scrabble, on which Scrabulous is closely based, has also asked Facebook to remove the game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ..."

But, hey, some random stranger on Slasdot assures me this has nothing to do with copyright, so I guess I'll just go with that.

As a game designer, I would like to remind you that in the eyes of the law, for a very good reason, game designs are not art.

As an intelligent human being who has actually looked around and noticed what happens in the real world, I would like to remind you that a can of Campbell's soup can be art. Art is not a thing, it is the act of creation and appreciation. I've even taken some pretty artistic dumps in my day.

Spend less time worrying about what should or should not be, and more time understanding the situation correctly.

Spend more time actually reading up on the subject we are commenting on, and less dispensing unsolicited advise to people who didn't ask for it.

Oops! Should have tried the link in Preview. This should work: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06E2DB143DF93AA3575AC0A96F958260

It took me some digging, but this is in fact true, at least in Connecticut.

Guess what? It's also because the cops think so:

The New London, Connecticut police force has successfully defended its policy to favor applicants who scored lower on its entrance test.

1. Profanity on AT&T's network will be fined at $0.99 per incident

While you were joking, there was a time when you could be fined for swearing on the telephone. In one case the fine was actually $5 (and this was back in 1902, so that was pretty hefty).

I believe it's more a general link between prevention/delay of onset of Alzheimer's and regular general cognitive activity. There was a study a few years ago showing a link between regularly playing a musical instrument or other mentally demanding activities had a significantly lower risk of dementia than those who didn't or did so less often.

Got a NY times story on it http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE6D7153BF937A15755C0A9659C8B63. study was in the New England Journal of Medicine in '03.

It's not too much of a stretch to extend that criteria to videogames where you need to think, such as RTS's, TBS's, RPG's, and strategic FPS's.

It's the money many press/media outlets have already invested in getting over there and positioning their people to get the best coverage. NBC Sports would continue Olympic coverage even if Chinese soldiers were making a public show of bludgeoning dissidents to death in the street.

It's one thing to broadcast it... it's another thing entirely if no one watches.

I won't be watching, but then NBC (and the other useless US networks) already know I don't watch their programming from reviewing the channel history right off my cable converter box.

Supporting events in China is a no-brainer to fail miserably, especially given the Nielson ratings from Italy in 2006, and declining numbers since 1984.

This years Olympic trial numbers from NYT
2006 numbers from Italy.
Here's an article which details exactly how much money was spent by NBC in Athens (2004), for less than 20% ROI.
An article from 2000 (Summer) shows the olympics averaged 13.3 and Sunday Night Football (in the SUMMER!) got a 10.3.

what the hell

It's a Shibboleth. Something that you can use to guess at another person's social/regional/political origin.

Back in 1992, there was a plan to log some forest. Republicans liked the idea of logging. Democrats didn't like the idea of logging.

Democrats went with environmentalism -- the notion that a risk to 50 of the 500-odd remaining spotted owls in existence outweighed the commercial interests of the loggers -- as their means of obsctructing the Republicans' goals.

Republicans went with the commercial argument -- "preposterous to forego millions of dollars in revenue over 50 spotted owls!" -- as their means of embarassing the Democrats.

The spotted owl became a shibboleth. Anyone who said "save the endangered owls!" was likely to be a Democrat, and anyone who said "to hell with the owls!" was a Democrat.

Many of the things in that list are shibboleths from the Clinton era. If you followed events such as Iran-Contra (a scandal embarassing to the Republicans), the spotted owl (a shibboleth for environmentalism), the recounts in Florida (which could have only benefited the Democrats), or worked (or ruled) on cases involving other politically-loaded wedge issues -- whether economic ones like NAFTA, outsourcing, and Enron, or sociolopolitical ones like racism, sexism, abortion, homosexuality, and gun ownership -- you had political opinions.

This query wasn't designed to figure out what those opinions were, but it would be a very clear way listing all the times someone identified their political stance by using a political shibboleth within seven words of the name of either Presidential candidate:

"John Doe accused Al Gore of placing the interests of the spotted owl above the legitimate interests of the taxpayers" -> John Doe is almost certainly a Republican.

"Jane Doe suggested Al Gore wasn't doing enough to protect the spotted owl" -> Jane Doe is almost certainly a Democrat.

The spotted owl is a particularly effective shibboleth; most of us have opinions about gun ownership, NAFTA, or Enron that don't necessarily dermine how we vote. But the spotted owl was a manufactured controversy; outside of birdwatchers, very few people knew or cared about the spotted owl until it became the center of a political debate.

Modern-day shibboleths include "homicide bombers" or "the Democrat party" (phrases used only Republicans), or "big business / big health care / big pharma" or "multinational corporations", or "neocons" (which are phrases used almost exclusively by Democrats.)

FOX NEWSWIRE --- Slashdot poster gets ashamed by linking to FOX NEWS.

A slashdotter taking part in a discussion about the police using YouTube to shame pranksters got ashamed today by linking to a FOX NEWS story.

The slashdotter later said "I'm soooo sorry guys, I should've known better than to link to FOX NEWS. That'll teach me."

The slashdotter went on to say "I should've linked to The New York Times instead. I'm sorry."

The slashdotter is also hoping his apology will receive a "score of 5, funny", whatever that means.

Drop the idiotic lie that somehow the government is some alien authority, the government is meant to be an extension of the peoples will.

And in one sentence, you sum up the basic philisophical difference between today's Republicans and "everybody else".

The Republican position disputes that sentence of yours that I have quoted - they hold that government is an extension of specific "special interests" (primarily "business"), and not an "extension of the people" - which I interpret as being "a clear majority".

As evidence, I offer the following quotes from a television interview between Dick Cheney and ABC's Martha Raddatz http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/cheney-unconcerned-by-iraq-wars-unpopularity/:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say it's not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don't care what the American people think?

Cheney: No.

And why is the above pertinent to this slashdot entry?

To remind those of you who are American voters that you should consider carefully who you vote for - because just as with Supreme Court Justices, FCC commissioners are nominated via a political process and do not necessarily garner that nomination because of their skills, or character, or any other "of the people, by the people, for the people"-oriented criteria that you would like to be able to believe.

The toy business is about kids, their parents and grandparents.
Changes come slowly and changes are subtle - never so much as to destroy a toy's essential appeal and recognition across three generations. Beloved Characters as Reimagined for the 21st Century

Hasbro is one of the largest toy makers in the U.S., second only to Mattel.

Hasbro is the largest producer of board games in the world:
Clue, Dungeons & Dragons, {as Wizards of the Coast], Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit.Hasbro
Board games are social and tactile. Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Knife. They bring out the elemental relationships within a family. That is why they endure.

RJ: [Lays down some Monopoly play pieces to signify what they will do] Okay, this is us.
Hammy: Can I be the car?
Bucky: I wanna be the car!
Spike: I'm the car. You be the shoe.
Bucky: The shoe is lame.
Lou: Why don't you be that snazzy-looking iron there?
RJ: Hey! It's not important. Besides, I'm the car. I'm *always* the car. Over The Hedge (2006)