I think it would be really spiffy if Fox got too greedy, and WB looked at their own resulting profitability, and out-and-out cancelled the Watchmen - with appropriate publicity.
Personally I've more than had it with the "Some of that money ought to be MINE!" mentality that so pervades modern business models. As others have said, Fox could have raised the red flag long ago, they just waited until WB was past the point of no return. IMHO that demonstrates bad faith and should be taken into account in any ruling. More commonly the "tap others' revenue stream" is used with copyrights and patents, and that side needs to come to light even more. But I'd like to see the very business model itself shamed.
I happen to have never watched Babylon-5, and never saw the scene in question. But Picabo Street pronounces her first name, "peekaboo", so I was referring to the word play, not the plot.
While into sci-fi, I'm not into the "must watch every single episode or you'll get hopelessly lost" type of series.
Picabo Street is also a nurse, possibly an intensive care nurse. A quick google points to jokes that they wouldn't let her answer the phone there, because she'd say, "Picabo, ICU".
But one of the prime talking points of the anti-global-warming crowd is that mankind's activities aren't sufficiently significant to cause climate changes. Except now we're not even doing a global experiment - it's a large one-city experiment. If it yields significant results - even negative results - it should be scalable. Tonnage of emissions, area, those are all measurable things, and it can all be extrapolated. (Wind is harder, but it should only lesson measured results, still leaving a bounding case.)
Spelling problem. Michael's code was "Picabo", not "peekaboo". See, what Ivanova doesn't know is that Michael is into skiing, and Picabo Street was a 20th Century US Olympic skier.
My response could be snide silliness, but all 3 of these passwords may well display a basic human-engineerable weakness. If Captain Sheridan is into volcanic geology, "obsidian" goes onto an obvious short-list of guessable passwords, along with "basalt" and a few others. Still a large problem-space, but smaller than it was. Maybe Ivanova is into medieval mythology, again putting "griffin" into a large-but-smaller problem space.
So until we know if these security codes were truly chosen at random, or reflected personal interests, we can't assess their real security. Perhaps "Picabo" is still the best code, because most people would think, "peekaboo", without looking a layer deeper.
But for either the token or the written-down password, you're talking "local" attacks that require physical access.
The written-down password may be better than a memorized one, because there's one less impediment to it being stronger. As someone else mentioned, the wallet is a good place to keep it, because most people try to keep pretty good track of their money, credit cards, driver's license, etc.
But at this point, isn't the net effect that your browser-side SSL certificate is really "you"? That means your browser has become you, and when you walk away from your computer, someone else can walk up to it and become you. So you lock your keyboard/account, and then it's back to a password.
I guess at least the remote attack is gone, and only the local attack remains. Unless of course there's some new attack that wrests the certificate from the browser. Then "you" have been duplicated away from your computer.
So here's what really worries me about the 2008 election.
* For average Americans, the economy really sucks. For most of us, pay has either been stagnant or rising slower than inflation for the past 7 years - that is, those of us who still have our jobs, or haven't been forced into a lower-paying job. The "economic expansion" of the past 7 years far from "lifting all boats", has lifted the fewest number of boats ever seen. (It's my pet theory that there has been no significant economic expansion in the past 7 years, only the appearance of expansion caused by paper games made possible by lessened regulation. About a year ago, those paper games started falling apart in the subprime meltdown. I'm guessing that the meltdown won't really be over until the "economic gains" of the past 7 years are largely wiped out and we're back to 2001.)
* We're in an unpopular war, our armed forces are strained past the breaking point, and it's not clear when any of this will start to get better. Furthermore, the *real* war against the people who instigated 9/11 is under-forced, and what we've accomplished in Afghanistan is starting to fall apart.
* There are continuing revelations about Republican corruption - the politization of the DOJ, bribes, etc. Not that there isn't any Democratic corruption, but at the moment there appears to be far more on the Republican side.
* There is a Republican candidate whose own party is lukewarm about him, and a wildly popular Democratic candidate who is practically a rock star.
With all of this, with things about as heavily slanted against the Republican party and Presidential candidate as they can get, the news media shows a 3-to-6 point gap between the 2 candidates - a gap well within statistical errors, and easy to swing either way, based on the mood of the day - or an October surprise.
I see 2 main possibilities:
1: The media benefits from a Presidential horse-race. If the race looks too one-sided, they can't spend as much time reporting on it, raking in advertising dollars. Therefore it's in their best interest to make things look close.
2: Our expectations are being set, to put the race within the "reasonable election fraud" range of going Republican. It's readily arguable that both 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen - primarily by voter disenfranchisement. (In 2000 Florida a few hundred chads was NOTHING compared to tens of thousands of people erroneously mislabeled as felons, and denied the vote.) 2008 takes a little more work, and presetting expectations is part of the job. (Of course this requires a really broad conspiracy, my money is on #1, but I really fear #2. "Both" is also an answer.)
Doesn't matter. The case really isn't the computer, the permaweld is because for most people it is, but not for you. (or me.)
Read the license (and web) some time. Activation permits you to make some hardware upgrades, and I'm not sure if that's a specific number, or a specific number in a given amount of time. But once you exceed that threshold you have to re-activate, perhaps talking to someone on the phone to convince them that you're newly-installed hardware really isn't a new computer. Maybe if you roll over the parts "slowly" enough you can get away with refreshing everything, but I wouldn't count on it.
So let's presume that when Windows 7 comes out, it's pretty decent, but still has some quirks to iron out. I'm trying to give Microsoft the benefit of a doubt here, yet still be realistic. Let's say it comes out looking like something between WinXP-SP1 and WinXP-SP2, in terms of bugginess, compatibility, etc. Let's also presume that Ubuntu hasn't been holding still during that interval.
Your "switched from vista to ubuntu, but I expect windows 7 to exhibit some competentce" indicates that you're planning *now* to switch to windows 7 after some amount of evaluation, if only of market hearsay.
What's wrong with Ubuntu?
IMHO it seems that the burden of proof, the "bar", or what have you is generally immense for switching from Windows to Linux, and at least some portion of that is inertial, and reluctance to change from what's currently working. It would also seem to me that switching from an already-working-for-years Ubuntu to a new Windows ought to have an equally high requirement. Yet from your post, I'd say it doesn't.
This is a marketplace problem - for computer users, not just Linux.
No, I suspect that *someone* in the RIAA knows exactly what the technical facts are, but I'll bet the "technical experts" for the litigation team are kept carefully clueless about this. This is all speculation.
Think for a moment about the care taken in a good "Clean Room" reverse engineering job, and now apply it to the RIAA. Have a truly good "Evil Technical Team" who understands all of this, including MAC spoofing, open access points, etc. Then have a "Litigation Technical Assistance Team" that consists of carefully vetted new-hires out of college. Make sure this second team has only book-learners, no hackers or hobbyists, etc. Then you need a "Technical Interface Team," which is placed in between the "Evil" team and the "Litigation Assistance" team. So when technical questions come up, the Interface team makes sure that the Litigation Assistance team gets the information they need from the Evil Team, but is *very* careful to vet all information to make sure nothing leaks through that could damage the RIAA case.
In other words, the "technical experts" in the RIAA may have college degrees, but they and their schools are carefully selected to make sure they don't know about things that might damage the legal cases. Beyond that, as they need more information it's provided to them, but carefully so that they learn no more about "hacking techniques", walking the fine line between damaging their legal cases and getting cited for contempt.
You echo my point, and to a better extent than other existing mechanisms, carrying Usenet doesn't carry legal liability for the content. That's why I connected it to the First Ammendment. Even though it's decentralized and nearly impossible to kill, it's already falling below "commonly viable". Plus if it falls to too few servers it gets to the point where it's open to legal C&D attacks, going after "the entire Usenet."
But IMHO the bigger attack vectors are spam and trolls. (I'll agree that some are fun, but there are too many.) Anonymity is a politically valuable thing to have, and we're squandering to destroy some of our rare options for free speech. Email is under the same threat.
If we wanted to don our tinfoil hats, we could come up with an alternative reason for killing Usenet, instead of kiddy porn or the mafiAA.
Usenet may be one of the few remaining places on the Internet that might pretend to have First Ammendment protections. Here at Slashdot there are discussion forums, but Slashdot has some form of control/culpability for them despite any disclaimers. If I were to post the Secrets of Scientology here, the Church of Scientology would certainly be after me, but they'd first go after Slashdot to get those secrets removed. (Of course then they're inviting the Streisand Effect, and they'd have to remember the Wayback Machine, but I'm sure they'd try.) But the essence is that Slashdot is a commercial entity hosting contributed content on its servers. The same can be said about pretty much any weblog out there.
The same cannot be said of Usenet. There is no single choke point for Usenet, like there is for a weblog. There is no single point to send a C&D letter to. Furthermore, it's fully possible that the author on Usenet is carefully anonymous, and is therefore untracable. Even finding the original feedpoint may be problematic, and require serious geek assistance.
On the other hand...
I was there on "Green Card Day". I remember seeing it the first time, then seeing it again in the next group that I followed, then again and again.... There may be something inherently unworkable about mixing anonymity with complete freedom speech. I suspect our founding fathers thought that we'd use our free speech more wisely than I do. I still believe that it is at times important to be anonymous, while at the same time retaining first ammendment protection, but I also believe that claiming those dual rights is FAR more important than Viagra or Nigerian bank accounts. I have no idea what a solution might be, other than to make some "cost of anonymity" great enough to prevent spam, but have no idea how to do that.
You forgot all of the ensign/wesley/crusher groups, mostly of the die.die.die pursuasion. I read a bit of one, once. It reminded me of what fanfic must be, considering that that's the only thing I've ever read that might be called fanfic.
My family recently took a trip to Washington DC, and on our itinerary we visited both Air & Space museums, the one on the Mall and the one out at Dulles. Both Enterprises are there.
The NCC-1701 - the original 11 foot model, is on display on the lower level in the gift shop. The surprising thing about it is that the right side is fully painted, and the left side is mostly blank, with only a little detail as if they ran out of time or budget.
Out at Dulles is the "real" Enterprise, the first 747 piggyback and drop-test article.
Microsoft has done a wonderful job of lowering peoples' expectations of how computers really perform, even at the same time as they raise peoples' expectations of how they should perform.
I have a laptop with a TPM that has never been used. It dual-boots WinXP and Linux, thank you very much.
I keep hearing about this TPM thing, and how it isn't necessarily evil, depending on who owns the keys to the kingdom. Accordingly, I have built the Linux TPM kernel support and installed Trousers, though I've never gotten around to using any of it. I keep thinking that some time when I have spare time, I'm going to be the first to own TPM chip, so that I will be the owner, and nobody else can grab it from me. Therefore, if it stays under MY control, I can keep it from being used for evil.
Has anyone else done much with TPM/Trousers under Linux? Has anyone else done this, then tried to install Vista? (Bitlocker, in particular.)
MOST Microsoft customers will be perfectly happy with that level of intrusive control, and won't even realize it's there. It's only that lunatic fringe that thinks that they actually *own* the computer that they paid money for, and want to dual-boot, that will realize that something is amiss at the Circle K.
What we're seeing here is one basis of Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority" that he bragged about in 2004. There are already instances on the books (sorry, I can't produce any specifics) of charges filed against Democrats shortly before elections, even at the time those charges were known to be baseless by less political employees, and after election were found to be baseless by due process of law. The counter to this would be charges against Republicans either not filed, or delayed until after an election. If you have the power to instigate and time prosecutions relative to election cycles, you have a powerful tool for influencing elections without touching the ballot box or counting mechanism.
I talked with my daughter after she got home from work, today. She lost 2 in-progress games, one with her boyfriend and one with a friend from high school. She's more upset about losing her game statistics, though. Her boyfriend was over for dinner tonight, and he's tried the official Scrabble. It didn't get very far before it crashed. She's downstairs playing dead-tree Scrabble with my wife, now.
Don't know what will fill the niche Scrabulous used to occupy.
My daughter is in college and is an avid Facebook user.
She also has been playing Scrabble, or is it Scrabulous, for months now. She typically has 2 or 3 games going at once with different friends. If she has an idle minute or two, she'll get online and check how her games are going, whether it's her turn yet, etc.
Most of her Scrabble/Scrabulous activity is of the instant sort, the got-a-free-minute type. If the game doesn't come up in seconds, if it takes minutes to start, what's the point. She didn't have that much time right then, anyway.
Sometimes speed really is of the essence, even in a non-FPS.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would be really spiffy if Fox got too greedy, and WB looked at their own resulting profitability, and out-and-out cancelled the Watchmen - with appropriate publicity.
Personally I've more than had it with the "Some of that money ought to be MINE!" mentality that so pervades modern business models. As others have said, Fox could have raised the red flag long ago, they just waited until WB was past the point of no return. IMHO that demonstrates bad faith and should be taken into account in any ruling. More commonly the "tap others' revenue stream" is used with copyrights and patents, and that side needs to come to light even more. But I'd like to see the very business model itself shamed.
Hence the case for TPM, assuming YOU own the keys, and not the MafiAA, Microsoft, or Apple.
I happen to have never watched Babylon-5, and never saw the scene in question. But Picabo Street pronounces her first name, "peekaboo", so I was referring to the word play, not the plot.
While into sci-fi, I'm not into the "must watch every single episode or you'll get hopelessly lost" type of series.
Picabo Street is also a nurse, possibly an intensive care nurse. A quick google points to jokes that they wouldn't let her answer the phone there, because she'd say, "Picabo, ICU".
But one of the prime talking points of the anti-global-warming crowd is that mankind's activities aren't sufficiently significant to cause climate changes. Except now we're not even doing a global experiment - it's a large one-city experiment. If it yields significant results - even negative results - it should be scalable. Tonnage of emissions, area, those are all measurable things, and it can all be extrapolated. (Wind is harder, but it should only lesson measured results, still leaving a bounding case.)
Spelling problem. Michael's code was "Picabo", not "peekaboo". See, what Ivanova doesn't know is that Michael is into skiing, and Picabo Street was a 20th Century US Olympic skier.
My response could be snide silliness, but all 3 of these passwords may well display a basic human-engineerable weakness. If Captain Sheridan is into volcanic geology, "obsidian" goes onto an obvious short-list of guessable passwords, along with "basalt" and a few others. Still a large problem-space, but smaller than it was. Maybe Ivanova is into medieval mythology, again putting "griffin" into a large-but-smaller problem space.
So until we know if these security codes were truly chosen at random, or reflected personal interests, we can't assess their real security. Perhaps "Picabo" is still the best code, because most people would think, "peekaboo", without looking a layer deeper.
But for either the token or the written-down password, you're talking "local" attacks that require physical access.
The written-down password may be better than a memorized one, because there's one less impediment to it being stronger. As someone else mentioned, the wallet is a good place to keep it, because most people try to keep pretty good track of their money, credit cards, driver's license, etc.
But at this point, isn't the net effect that your browser-side SSL certificate is really "you"? That means your browser has become you, and when you walk away from your computer, someone else can walk up to it and become you. So you lock your keyboard/account, and then it's back to a password.
I guess at least the remote attack is gone, and only the local attack remains. Unless of course there's some new attack that wrests the certificate from the browser. Then "you" have been duplicated away from your computer.
So here's what really worries me about the 2008 election.
* For average Americans, the economy really sucks. For most of us, pay has either been stagnant or rising slower than inflation for the past 7 years - that is, those of us who still have our jobs, or haven't been forced into a lower-paying job. The "economic expansion" of the past 7 years far from "lifting all boats", has lifted the fewest number of boats ever seen. (It's my pet theory that there has been no significant economic expansion in the past 7 years, only the appearance of expansion caused by paper games made possible by lessened regulation. About a year ago, those paper games started falling apart in the subprime meltdown. I'm guessing that the meltdown won't really be over until the "economic gains" of the past 7 years are largely wiped out and we're back to 2001.)
* We're in an unpopular war, our armed forces are strained past the breaking point, and it's not clear when any of this will start to get better. Furthermore, the *real* war against the people who instigated 9/11 is under-forced, and what we've accomplished in Afghanistan is starting to fall apart.
* There are continuing revelations about Republican corruption - the politization of the DOJ, bribes, etc. Not that there isn't any Democratic corruption, but at the moment there appears to be far more on the Republican side.
* There is a Republican candidate whose own party is lukewarm about him, and a wildly popular Democratic candidate who is practically a rock star.
With all of this, with things about as heavily slanted against the Republican party and Presidential candidate as they can get, the news media shows a 3-to-6 point gap between the 2 candidates - a gap well within statistical errors, and easy to swing either way, based on the mood of the day - or an October surprise.
I see 2 main possibilities:
1: The media benefits from a Presidential horse-race. If the race looks too one-sided, they can't spend as much time reporting on it, raking in advertising dollars. Therefore it's in their best interest to make things look close.
2: Our expectations are being set, to put the race within the "reasonable election fraud" range of going Republican. It's readily arguable that both 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen - primarily by voter disenfranchisement. (In 2000 Florida a few hundred chads was NOTHING compared to tens of thousands of people erroneously mislabeled as felons, and denied the vote.) 2008 takes a little more work, and presetting expectations is part of the job. (Of course this requires a really broad conspiracy, my money is on #1, but I really fear #2. "Both" is also an answer.)
Doesn't matter. The case really isn't the computer, the permaweld is because for most people it is, but not for you. (or me.)
Read the license (and web) some time. Activation permits you to make some hardware upgrades, and I'm not sure if that's a specific number, or a specific number in a given amount of time. But once you exceed that threshold you have to re-activate, perhaps talking to someone on the phone to convince them that you're newly-installed hardware really isn't a new computer. Maybe if you roll over the parts "slowly" enough you can get away with refreshing everything, but I wouldn't count on it.
So let's presume that when Windows 7 comes out, it's pretty decent, but still has some quirks to iron out. I'm trying to give Microsoft the benefit of a doubt here, yet still be realistic. Let's say it comes out looking like something between WinXP-SP1 and WinXP-SP2, in terms of bugginess, compatibility, etc. Let's also presume that Ubuntu hasn't been holding still during that interval.
Your "switched from vista to ubuntu, but I expect windows 7 to exhibit some competentce" indicates that you're planning *now* to switch to windows 7 after some amount of evaluation, if only of market hearsay.
What's wrong with Ubuntu?
IMHO it seems that the burden of proof, the "bar", or what have you is generally immense for switching from Windows to Linux, and at least some portion of that is inertial, and reluctance to change from what's currently working. It would also seem to me that switching from an already-working-for-years Ubuntu to a new Windows ought to have an equally high requirement. Yet from your post, I'd say it doesn't.
This is a marketplace problem - for computer users, not just Linux.
No, I suspect that *someone* in the RIAA knows exactly what the technical facts are, but I'll bet the "technical experts" for the litigation team are kept carefully clueless about this. This is all speculation.
Think for a moment about the care taken in a good "Clean Room" reverse engineering job, and now apply it to the RIAA. Have a truly good "Evil Technical Team" who understands all of this, including MAC spoofing, open access points, etc. Then have a "Litigation Technical Assistance Team" that consists of carefully vetted new-hires out of college. Make sure this second team has only book-learners, no hackers or hobbyists, etc. Then you need a "Technical Interface Team," which is placed in between the "Evil" team and the "Litigation Assistance" team. So when technical questions come up, the Interface team makes sure that the Litigation Assistance team gets the information they need from the Evil Team, but is *very* careful to vet all information to make sure nothing leaks through that could damage the RIAA case.
In other words, the "technical experts" in the RIAA may have college degrees, but they and their schools are carefully selected to make sure they don't know about things that might damage the legal cases. Beyond that, as they need more information it's provided to them, but carefully so that they learn no more about "hacking techniques", walking the fine line between damaging their legal cases and getting cited for contempt.
> come from axillary systems
Are you implying that they have their heads up their armpits?
Or did you mean "auxiliary systems?"
But the laptop seizure is "temporary", just like copyright. Since it's not "permanent" compensation is not required.
You echo my point, and to a better extent than other existing mechanisms, carrying Usenet doesn't carry legal liability for the content. That's why I connected it to the First Ammendment. Even though it's decentralized and nearly impossible to kill, it's already falling below "commonly viable". Plus if it falls to too few servers it gets to the point where it's open to legal C&D attacks, going after "the entire Usenet."
But IMHO the bigger attack vectors are spam and trolls. (I'll agree that some are fun, but there are too many.) Anonymity is a politically valuable thing to have, and we're squandering to destroy some of our rare options for free speech. Email is under the same threat.
If we wanted to don our tinfoil hats, we could come up with an alternative reason for killing Usenet, instead of kiddy porn or the mafiAA.
Usenet may be one of the few remaining places on the Internet that might pretend to have First Ammendment protections. Here at Slashdot there are discussion forums, but Slashdot has some form of control/culpability for them despite any disclaimers. If I were to post the Secrets of Scientology here, the Church of Scientology would certainly be after me, but they'd first go after Slashdot to get those secrets removed. (Of course then they're inviting the Streisand Effect, and they'd have to remember the Wayback Machine, but I'm sure they'd try.) But the essence is that Slashdot is a commercial entity hosting contributed content on its servers. The same can be said about pretty much any weblog out there.
The same cannot be said of Usenet. There is no single choke point for Usenet, like there is for a weblog. There is no single point to send a C&D letter to. Furthermore, it's fully possible that the author on Usenet is carefully anonymous, and is therefore untracable. Even finding the original feedpoint may be problematic, and require serious geek assistance.
On the other hand...
I was there on "Green Card Day". I remember seeing it the first time, then seeing it again in the next group that I followed, then again and again.... There may be something inherently unworkable about mixing anonymity with complete freedom speech. I suspect our founding fathers thought that we'd use our free speech more wisely than I do. I still believe that it is at times important to be anonymous, while at the same time retaining first ammendment protection, but I also believe that claiming those dual rights is FAR more important than Viagra or Nigerian bank accounts. I have no idea what a solution might be, other than to make some "cost of anonymity" great enough to prevent spam, but have no idea how to do that.
You forgot all of the ensign/wesley/crusher groups, mostly of the die.die.die pursuasion. I read a bit of one, once. It reminded me of what fanfic must be, considering that that's the only thing I've ever read that might be called fanfic.
I was surprised to see that the back side was partly detailed. It's as if they started out to do a complete job, then changed their minds.
My family recently took a trip to Washington DC, and on our itinerary we visited both Air & Space museums, the one on the Mall and the one out at Dulles. Both Enterprises are there.
The NCC-1701 - the original 11 foot model, is on display on the lower level in the gift shop. The surprising thing about it is that the right side is fully painted, and the left side is mostly blank, with only a little detail as if they ran out of time or budget.
Out at Dulles is the "real" Enterprise, the first 747 piggyback and drop-test article.
"But that's the way computers ARE!"
Microsoft has done a wonderful job of lowering peoples' expectations of how computers really perform, even at the same time as they raise peoples' expectations of how they should perform.
I have a laptop with a TPM that has never been used. It dual-boots WinXP and Linux, thank you very much.
I keep hearing about this TPM thing, and how it isn't necessarily evil, depending on who owns the keys to the kingdom. Accordingly, I have built the Linux TPM kernel support and installed Trousers, though I've never gotten around to using any of it. I keep thinking that some time when I have spare time, I'm going to be the first to own TPM chip, so that I will be the owner, and nobody else can grab it from me. Therefore, if it stays under MY control, I can keep it from being used for evil.
Has anyone else done much with TPM/Trousers under Linux?
Has anyone else done this, then tried to install Vista? (Bitlocker, in particular.)
MOST Microsoft customers will be perfectly happy with that level of intrusive control, and won't even realize it's there. It's only that lunatic fringe that thinks that they actually *own* the computer that they paid money for, and want to dual-boot, that will realize that something is amiss at the Circle K.
> Now, I worry the major distinction is that we can't really grow bananas here.
I wouldn't worry too much. If half the stories about banana blights are true, pretty soon banana republics won't be growing bananas any more, either.
What we're seeing here is one basis of Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority" that he bragged about in 2004. There are already instances on the books (sorry, I can't produce any specifics) of charges filed against Democrats shortly before elections, even at the time those charges were known to be baseless by less political employees, and after election were found to be baseless by due process of law. The counter to this would be charges against Republicans either not filed, or delayed until after an election. If you have the power to instigate and time prosecutions relative to election cycles, you have a powerful tool for influencing elections without touching the ballot box or counting mechanism.
I talked with my daughter after she got home from work, today. She lost 2 in-progress games, one with her boyfriend and one with a friend from high school. She's more upset about losing her game statistics, though. Her boyfriend was over for dinner tonight, and he's tried the official Scrabble. It didn't get very far before it crashed. She's downstairs playing dead-tree Scrabble with my wife, now.
Don't know what will fill the niche Scrabulous used to occupy.
My daughter is in college and is an avid Facebook user.
She also has been playing Scrabble, or is it Scrabulous, for months now. She typically has 2 or 3 games going at once with different friends. If she has an idle minute or two, she'll get online and check how her games are going, whether it's her turn yet, etc.
Most of her Scrabble/Scrabulous activity is of the instant sort, the got-a-free-minute type. If the game doesn't come up in seconds, if it takes minutes to start, what's the point. She didn't have that much time right then, anyway.
Sometimes speed really is of the essence, even in a non-FPS.