It's a party game. A fun thing to break out when you've got family or friends over for a visit and want to do something sociable. More fun than Monopoly, and depending on how competitive your family is, less argument inducing. But unless you're the kind of person who enjoys games like Simon, you're not going to have fun playing it by yourself. (And, yes, there are people who like games like Simon believe it or not).
This is actually why I think both Rock Band and Guitar Hero have been seeing reduced sales - band games aren't like Halo or WoW where the bulk of the audience is going to be playing solo or on-line and need new content at periodic intervals to replace the content they've beaten. They're more like Mario Party or Super Smash Bros. where the bulk of the audience is playing them casually with a group of friends all in the same room. You don't actually need a lot of new content for band games because as long as the songs are familiar and the players all have a sufficient amount of alcohol in them a couple of discs worth of songs is generally going to be enough.
Just FYI - the "creepy" results you're getting off of Google probably indicate that there are a lot of French-language pages out there for Google to gather data on.
My guess is that it's even better than that - there are a lot of French pages out there that have corresponding English pages that Google can mine for information. Anytime you can find parallel corpora the algorithms are going to do better. I'd guess that the French/English pairing is probably a fruitful one for Google's algorithms because of Quebec - forcing information to be available by law is going to generate a lot of data online for Google to learn translation from.
(There are other reasons that French/English, German/English, and generally "Insert European Language Here"/English are going to be easier for machine translation algorithms to learn than other pairings. But more data is almost ALWAYS helpful for these kinds of algorithms. Parallel corpora are expensive to generate and it's always nice when you can find them for free on the web.)
But even though it looks like "domain parking crap" it does appear that that it is the main page for the Disney-owned "go.com". They just slapped an ugly page on the front and I guess they assume no one will ever visit it.
I believe that the point the the OP is making is that more people die in physical bank robberies than in online robberies. Hence the extra focus of the FBI on stopping physical robberies over online robberies.
Hasbro's not gutting them - Wizards is doing it to themselves. The story is the same as when they had the layoffs after the pokemon market collapsed. There's a little bit more on the story at gamingreport.com, but official annoucements aren't due to come out until tomorrow (Friday).
It looks like exactly the same situation as a year ago when pokemon bit it. Wizards can't support itself at its current size so they're downsizing. The market for disposable income items isn't the best right now, and there's no "must have" item for the card game kids on the docket. Harry Potter isn't doing nearly as well as anyone had hoped (probably because it doesn't capture the feel of the books) and the general economy isn't doing so hot.
I just hope they don't cut the RPG group back too much more. They're only releasing one product a month (or so) and while I think that's a perfect rate to be releasing new RPG material, too much less than that might be bad.
A lot of this stuff has dropped in value since Wizards started putting it up in cheap electronic downloads on their site for $3-$5 a pop. A lot of people who just wanted to read it or play it (instead of collecting it) aren't paying as much for physical copies any more.
I'm willing to pay if *I* can prioritize that list. I think I'll put chicks in thongs somewhere above parks.
Run for office and get yourself elected. Then you get to be among the people who get to prioritize. I'm sure that there are actually many cities in the US where a "More chicks in thongs" platform would get you a massive number of votes.
> Would the rest of the open-source community be > able to take any action against me?
First, IANAL. I am just a copyright/patent/trademark law enthusiast (like 90% of the rest of Slashdot)
As long as the only code in the program was yours, then no. Under US copyright law, you own the copyright and you can change the terms of your license at any time. I'm unclear as to whether you can retroactively change the terms of your license however (I would say no, since this would be breach of contract), so the ORIGINAL code should still be useable under the GPL (again, IANAL).
On the other hand: If you have incorporated ANY changes from other people into your work and they have not specifically signed the copyright over to you, then you could be sued for infringing on their copyright if you changed the license without their permission. This is why most people aren't too worried about the major projects (like the kernel) getting yanked by their developers - there are just too many of them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a party game. A fun thing to break out when you've got family or friends over for a visit and want to do something sociable. More fun than Monopoly, and depending on how competitive your family is, less argument inducing. But unless you're the kind of person who enjoys games like Simon, you're not going to have fun playing it by yourself. (And, yes, there are people who like games like Simon believe it or not).
This is actually why I think both Rock Band and Guitar Hero have been seeing reduced sales - band games aren't like Halo or WoW where the bulk of the audience is going to be playing solo or on-line and need new content at periodic intervals to replace the content they've beaten. They're more like Mario Party or Super Smash Bros. where the bulk of the audience is playing them casually with a group of friends all in the same room. You don't actually need a lot of new content for band games because as long as the songs are familiar and the players all have a sufficient amount of alcohol in them a couple of discs worth of songs is generally going to be enough.
Just FYI - the "creepy" results you're getting off of Google probably indicate that there are a lot of French-language pages out there for Google to gather data on.
My guess is that it's even better than that - there are a lot of French pages out there that have corresponding English pages that Google can mine for information. Anytime you can find parallel corpora the algorithms are going to do better. I'd guess that the French/English pairing is probably a fruitful one for Google's algorithms because of Quebec - forcing information to be available by law is going to generate a lot of data online for Google to learn translation from.
(There are other reasons that French/English, German/English, and generally "Insert European Language Here"/English are going to be easier for machine translation algorithms to learn than other pairings. But more data is almost ALWAYS helpful for these kinds of algorithms. Parallel corpora are expensive to generate and it's always nice when you can find them for free on the web.)
Wow - that is an ugly site.
But even though it looks like "domain parking crap" it does appear that that it is the main page for the Disney-owned "go.com". They just slapped an ugly page on the front and I guess they assume no one will ever visit it.
I believe that the point the the OP is making is that more people die in physical bank robberies than in online robberies. Hence the extra focus of the FBI on stopping physical robberies over online robberies.
Hasbro's not gutting them - Wizards is doing it to themselves. The story is the same as when they had the layoffs after the pokemon market collapsed.
There's a little bit more on the story at
gamingreport.com, but official annoucements aren't due to come out until tomorrow (Friday).
It looks like exactly the same situation as a year ago when pokemon bit it. Wizards can't support itself at its current size so they're downsizing. The market for disposable income items isn't the best right now, and there's no "must have" item for the card game kids on the docket. Harry Potter isn't doing nearly as well as anyone had hoped (probably because it doesn't capture the feel of the books) and the general economy isn't doing so hot.
I just hope they don't cut the RPG group back too much more. They're only releasing one product a month (or so) and while I think that's a perfect rate to be releasing new RPG material, too much less than that might be bad.
A lot of this stuff has dropped in value since Wizards started putting it up in cheap electronic downloads on their site for $3-$5 a pop. A lot of people who just wanted to read it or play it (instead of collecting it) aren't paying as much for physical copies any more.
Run for office and get yourself elected. Then you get to be among the people who get to prioritize. I'm sure that there are actually many cities in the US where a "More chicks in thongs" platform would get you a massive number of votes.
> Would the rest of the open-source community be > able to take any action against me?
First, IANAL. I am just a copyright/patent/trademark law enthusiast (like 90% of the rest of Slashdot)
As long as the only code in the program was yours, then no. Under US copyright law, you own the copyright and you can change the terms of your license at any time. I'm unclear as to whether you can retroactively change the terms of your license however (I would say no, since this would be breach of contract), so the ORIGINAL code should still be useable under the GPL (again, IANAL).
On the other hand: If you have incorporated ANY changes from other people into your work and they have not specifically signed the copyright over to you, then you could be sued for infringing on their copyright if you changed the license without their permission. This is why most people aren't too worried about the major projects (like the kernel) getting yanked by their developers - there are just too many of them.