Uh, it's Hasbro's property that e-Scrabble has copied. Tell me again who's the party that's failing to innovate here?
Hasbro is totally in the right here. It's their game, their trademarks, their ballgame, yet you and others here are painting Hasbro out to be the bad guys? Why? For protecting what's its own property?
Let's play a game of word substitution for a minute. Let's pretend that "Hasbro" = "F/OSS developer", "Scrabble" = "GPLed code" and that "e-Scrabble" = "commercial/CSS developer". Now, imagine a commercial/CSS developer took someone else's GPLed code and ignored all relevant copyrights, trademarks and legal protections. Now whose side are you on?
The guys at e-Scrabble broke the law. They know they did and you know they did. So don't make Hasbro out to be the bad guy because they've asked e-Scrabble to stop.
Heck, Hasbro hasn't even taken legal action, it's politely (as politely as can be done in such cases where the law is concerned) asked e-Scrabble to just quit what it's been doing. If they really were evil then they would be litigating right now, and demanding the shirts of these guys backs to compensate for lost sales (however fictional those lost sales may be).
Hasbro has done everything right here. So far, it's done things by the book and it's done things in as politely and as amicably as it can, given the circumstances. If you want to see an example of "if you can't innovate, litigate" then I suggest you check out RIAA and its friends.
Perhaps you should stick to movies starring Arnie and/or Bruce Willis and switch your music allegiance to Britney Spears.
Don't you realise that "every cool geeky work" that you take for granted today is the prodigy of groundbreaking works that were labelled "radical", "subversive", "destructive", "a bad influence", etc by conservatives of years gone by?
I mean, who bats an eyelid at the lyrics of Come On Baby Light My Fire?, Take A Walk On The Wild Side, Lady Marmalade, etc nowadays? But, in their days, all these songs were castigated by the establishment as negative (if not evil) influences.
Who do you respect more: Spears whose brilliant insight on the invasion of Iraq was "I trust the President" or someone like Chris Martin of Coldplay, a graduate of one of the finest universities in Europe, who's long been an advocate of issues such as Fair Trade? Which do you think knows what their talking about? And which do you think is totally clueless?
You're American, aren't you? "Spelt" is perfectly correct to the rest of the English-speaking world (which happens to be in the majority). It amazes me that every time the I use the word "spelt", there's always someone like you who doesn't understand that not everyone everywhere spells everything the way that they themselves were taught at school.
I'm guessing you were taught that "colour" is spelt without a "u", that "centre" is spelt with an "er" rather than "re" on the end, that "aluminium" is spelt with only one "i", etc. Well, newsflash for you, the majority of the world doesn't do it that way.
Shocking, isn't it? That people elsewhere might - gasp - spell English words the way that the English themselves do?
Actually you are very much mistaken. I am guessing you're from Canada... As it turns out the "ou" spelling was enacted in Canada by Sir John A. McDonald over 100 years ago and it stuck. In England and other English speaking areas a simple 'o' is sufficient. So yes the "ou" spelling is correct only in Canada.
An AC talking complete crap: why am I not surprised? "Favourite" is the correct spelling in Britain, Australasia and elsewhere, and the same is true for "colour", "favour", etc.
In future, if you're going to tell the world and his brother how people in England spell words, please, either get your facts straight or choose a forum where people from England won't be around to cross-examine you. Otherwise, you might end up looking like a fool. Again.
Most educated Indians (ie, virtually all that can read and write) also speak English to some extent. English is used in the classroom to teach subjects like maths and sciences. Also, English literature is widely taught too.
Your list ignores countries like South Africa (population 43 million), Ireland (population 4 million), most of the Caribbean countries and other members of the Commonwealth. Not to mention the other countries of Europe, where English is taught with English rather than American spellings.
Whichever way you want to cut it, the US spelling "favorite" is used by less English-speakers than "favourite".
Both. Last time I checked the population of the US was around 280-300 million. India's way past 1 billion. So, even from a population stand point, the US is blown away by that one country alone.
Uh, I don't have a short attention span. I watched the extended editions of the first two LOTR movies back-to-back at the cinema, then dived into watching the third part, without once being distracted. Titanic was a doddle, not a problem at all. Other long movies don't bother me at all: on the contrary, I often find today's 100-120 minute movies way too short for my liking.
But Troy was just boring. If I was watching it on television I would have switched off or changed channels long before the end.
The siege of Troy lasted for ten years. The film made it seem like it lasted not more than ten days.
Now, how many of the people who paid to see that movie do you think really have any appreciation of that revision? It might seem subtle to you but it changes the whole context of the story: celebrating keeping your enemy at bay and your city free from invasion after ten years of conflict is a world apart from doing it for a week or two. The timescale better explains the "gift" of the Trojan horse, why the Trojans accepted it and partied the night away, why they were so taken in by the deception, etc.
As for Troy's other qualities: well, let's just say that it seemed badly paced and too long. I saw the film with four others, and we all agreed that we just wanted them to get it over and done with well before the conclusion came around. When you're all looking at your watch thinking "I hope this ends soon", then you know something is very wrong.
on an unrelated note: kudo points for a creative spelling of favorite.
Uh, that's how most of the English-speaking worlds spells the word. Unless I am very much mistaken, it's only the US (and US dependencies) where the spelling "favorite" is used instead of "favourite".
As I've pointed out myself, thank you. But even Pride And Prejudice was very controversial when it was published, and somehow the story submitter chose not to label it as such in his story summary, did s/he?
Kids that use calculators most of the time are less likely to be able to do simple mathematics in their heads, or even with pen and paper. Kids that use spelling checkers to verify their work are less likely to know themselves how words should properly be spelt simply because they don't learn from their mistakes.
Apparently, stating the fact that evolution is only controversial to those people who find it inconsistent with their strongly-held religious beliefs is trolling.
I think this moderation proves my point.
Nice to see that the moderator concerned couldn't rise to the challenge that I set down by providing any credible evidence to counter evolution and just went straight for the "-1 Troll" option instead.
Everything in my post is fact. If you have problems with the facts as I've stated them, then say what those are. Else, don't try to stifle a valid point just because you disagree with it.
Evolution is a theory in name only. It's all but fact. (Gravity fits the same description.)
Seriously, has anyone come up with a well-argued, valid rebuttal for all the masses of evidence backing evolution? If they have, I've yet to see it.
The only people who hang onto the belief that evolution isn't true are those who do so because it challenges their religious beliefs. It wasn't that long ago that the Catholic church was proclaiming arabic numerals (0-9), the Earth revolving around the Sun, etc as heretical, and persecuting people for things that they later accepted and for which today only a fool would argue against.
Yes, Darwin's Origin Of The Species was controversial in its time, not least of all to Darwin himself who was a deeply religious man for most of his life - the death of his young daughter shook his faith later in his life - but for anyone ready to judge evolution on is merits it's not at all controversial.
Uh, it might not be in every games store, but I came back from a trip overseas in early March. Last week, I walked down my local high street and while the branch of GAME didn't have a copy (and didn't expect any more until April), both HMV and the Virgin Megastore did, both at the same price as GAME was selling it (£34.99). And they didn't both just have a couple of copies either: one store had 9, the other had "at least 12", when I enquired.
So, you can get a copy if you want one, but it might mean looking around a bit. Getting hold of one in central London might not be too easy but here in the suburbs it took me all of half an hour to get my hands on one. This almost a month after the February 11th European launch date.
As for the content, and the upcoming patch, well I for one find plenty to do apart from PVP. Even if you hate PVE, you need to do some to start levelling and find some decent equipment so it's not as if there's nothing for a dedicated PVPer to do until Battlegrounds is put into place. And, for anyone not familiar with WOW, I'll just point out that it is possible to PVP right now, albeit without any reward apart from stroking your ego.
Be patient. WOW has in the space of a few months become the second largest subscriber-based game ever. I don't even think that Blizzard expected it to be this popular this fast. You didn't think that it was possible to acheive that level of success seamlessly and without any hitches at all, did you? And give credit where credit is due: Blizzard gave everyone in Europe who registered in February and extension of three days to their initial month's trial: they're doing their hardest to get things right, big and small.
Hey, I don't know about you, but I've lost my broadband connection (normally for a few hours at a time) about half a dozen times in the last year, because of a neighbour accidentally cutting my cable, local outages, etc. In that time, I've never had a power cut.
Perhaps if I lived in California or something then power outages would be an issue, but I don't.
Losing my internet connection is an inconvenience right now but if my connection meant my OS, apps and files were gone too then it would be a real pain in the posterior.
If under this plan my hardware is just acting as some glorified dumb terminal then, yes, it is much different.
Right now, if I lose my internet connection then I can use my PC in hundreds of ways. But if I'm reliant on some remote server to deliver any of my OS, applications or files then not having access to that server is severely going to restrict what I can do.
Also, as if this needs to be said, it's not exactly the most practical idea for notebook users, is it? Last time I checked, wi-fi wasn't universal.
You seem to be living in a rather strange world where anything that is F/OSS is automatically better than any commercial/CSS counterpart. How a piece of software is licensed has very little to do with how suitable it is to do its job.
Is GIMP better than Adobe Photoshop? Is any F/OSS tool that's better than Macromedia Dreamweaver? Any that's better than QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign? Any that's better than AutoCAD? Etc, etc.
Stop assuming that the GPL or any other license automatically makes F/OSS superior than the alternatives if you want to be taken seriously, and stop pretending that it's how software is licensed rather than how it performs that constitutes "better" to all but a minority of individuals such as yourself.
Sorry, but you are trolling now and you know you are. For the record, I'm yet another Opera user. Several people I know (all IT professionals, most of them with 15+ years experience) are too.
Opera could have chosen to go down the route of clobbering the competition (including Firefox) by patenting everything it developed and then enforcing those patents vigourously. It could have ensured that its product was superior than the rest by this method, but it chose not to because it favours competing in its market on merit rather than on points of law.
Now, I don't know about you but I think this is commendable, especially as Opera has to make a profit from its browser whereas the majority of its competitors (MSIE, Firefox, Safari, etc) do not and are either subsidised or supported by donations.
I agree with you that software patents are a bad idea but I'm afraid that they're the reality of the world that we live in. Most companies wouldn't (and don't) hesitate to use software patents to their advantage. Opera choses not to go down that route and, in this day and age, I find that highly commendable.
Or Opera from several years ago? Please, don't fall into the trap that all those features (including tabbed browsing) that you love in Firefox are original: most of them are quite unashamedly inferior implementations of features premiered by Opera.
Fortunately, the good people at Opera aren't software patent-crazy. If they were, Firefox wouldn't have half the features that it does.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, it's Hasbro's property that e-Scrabble has copied. Tell me again who's the party that's failing to innovate here?
Hasbro is totally in the right here. It's their game, their trademarks, their ballgame, yet you and others here are painting Hasbro out to be the bad guys? Why? For protecting what's its own property?
Let's play a game of word substitution for a minute. Let's pretend that "Hasbro" = "F/OSS developer", "Scrabble" = "GPLed code" and that "e-Scrabble" = "commercial/CSS developer". Now, imagine a commercial/CSS developer took someone else's GPLed code and ignored all relevant copyrights, trademarks and legal protections. Now whose side are you on?
The guys at e-Scrabble broke the law. They know they did and you know they did. So don't make Hasbro out to be the bad guy because they've asked e-Scrabble to stop.
Heck, Hasbro hasn't even taken legal action, it's politely (as politely as can be done in such cases where the law is concerned) asked e-Scrabble to just quit what it's been doing. If they really were evil then they would be litigating right now, and demanding the shirts of these guys backs to compensate for lost sales (however fictional those lost sales may be).
Hasbro has done everything right here. So far, it's done things by the book and it's done things in as politely and as amicably as it can, given the circumstances. If you want to see an example of "if you can't innovate, litigate" then I suggest you check out RIAA and its friends.
Perhaps you should stick to movies starring Arnie and/or Bruce Willis and switch your music allegiance to Britney Spears.
Don't you realise that "every cool geeky work" that you take for granted today is the prodigy of groundbreaking works that were labelled "radical", "subversive", "destructive", "a bad influence", etc by conservatives of years gone by?
I mean, who bats an eyelid at the lyrics of Come On Baby Light My Fire?, Take A Walk On The Wild Side, Lady Marmalade, etc nowadays? But, in their days, all these songs were castigated by the establishment as negative (if not evil) influences.
Who do you respect more: Spears whose brilliant insight on the invasion of Iraq was "I trust the President" or someone like Chris Martin of Coldplay, a graduate of one of the finest universities in Europe, who's long been an advocate of issues such as Fair Trade? Which do you think knows what their talking about? And which do you think is totally clueless?
You're American, aren't you? "Spelt" is perfectly correct to the rest of the English-speaking world (which happens to be in the majority). It amazes me that every time the I use the word "spelt", there's always someone like you who doesn't understand that not everyone everywhere spells everything the way that they themselves were taught at school.
I'm guessing you were taught that "colour" is spelt without a "u", that "centre" is spelt with an "er" rather than "re" on the end, that "aluminium" is spelt with only one "i", etc. Well, newsflash for you, the majority of the world doesn't do it that way.
Shocking, isn't it? That people elsewhere might - gasp - spell English words the way that the English themselves do?
Actually you are very much mistaken. I am guessing you're from Canada... As it turns out the "ou" spelling was enacted in Canada by Sir John A. McDonald over 100 years ago and it stuck. In England and other English speaking areas a simple 'o' is sufficient. So yes the "ou" spelling is correct only in Canada.
An AC talking complete crap: why am I not surprised? "Favourite" is the correct spelling in Britain, Australasia and elsewhere, and the same is true for "colour", "favour", etc.
In future, if you're going to tell the world and his brother how people in England spell words, please, either get your facts straight or choose a forum where people from England won't be around to cross-examine you. Otherwise, you might end up looking like a fool. Again.
Most educated Indians (ie, virtually all that can read and write) also speak English to some extent. English is used in the classroom to teach subjects like maths and sciences. Also, English literature is widely taught too.
Your list ignores countries like South Africa (population 43 million), Ireland (population 4 million), most of the Caribbean countries and other members of the Commonwealth. Not to mention the other countries of Europe, where English is taught with English rather than American spellings.
Whichever way you want to cut it, the US spelling "favorite" is used by less English-speakers than "favourite".
Both. Last time I checked the population of the US was around 280-300 million. India's way past 1 billion. So, even from a population stand point, the US is blown away by that one country alone.
Uh, I don't have a short attention span. I watched the extended editions of the first two LOTR movies back-to-back at the cinema, then dived into watching the third part, without once being distracted. Titanic was a doddle, not a problem at all. Other long movies don't bother me at all: on the contrary, I often find today's 100-120 minute movies way too short for my liking.
But Troy was just boring. If I was watching it on television I would have switched off or changed channels long before the end.
The siege of Troy lasted for ten years. The film made it seem like it lasted not more than ten days.
Now, how many of the people who paid to see that movie do you think really have any appreciation of that revision? It might seem subtle to you but it changes the whole context of the story: celebrating keeping your enemy at bay and your city free from invasion after ten years of conflict is a world apart from doing it for a week or two. The timescale better explains the "gift" of the Trojan horse, why the Trojans accepted it and partied the night away, why they were so taken in by the deception, etc.
As for Troy's other qualities: well, let's just say that it seemed badly paced and too long. I saw the film with four others, and we all agreed that we just wanted them to get it over and done with well before the conclusion came around. When you're all looking at your watch thinking "I hope this ends soon", then you know something is very wrong.
on an unrelated note: kudo points for a creative spelling of favorite.
Uh, that's how most of the English-speaking worlds spells the word. Unless I am very much mistaken, it's only the US (and US dependencies) where the spelling "favorite" is used instead of "favourite".
As I've pointed out myself, thank you. But even Pride And Prejudice was very controversial when it was published, and somehow the story submitter chose not to label it as such in his story summary, did s/he?
Kids that use calculators most of the time are less likely to be able to do simple mathematics in their heads, or even with pen and paper. Kids that use spelling checkers to verify their work are less likely to know themselves how words should properly be spelt simply because they don't learn from their mistakes.
How the hell is any of this news to anyone?
The story summary (submitted by someone who chose to remain anonymous) labels the book "controversial". Aren't I allowed to take issue with that?
And if it's in the story summary then how the hell is it off-topic?
I've seen both. But what I've seen more of lately is people on Slashdot who can't spot a joke when they see one.
Apparently, stating the fact that evolution is only controversial to those people who find it inconsistent with their strongly-held religious beliefs is trolling.
I think this moderation proves my point.
Nice to see that the moderator concerned couldn't rise to the challenge that I set down by providing any credible evidence to counter evolution and just went straight for the "-1 Troll" option instead.
Everything in my post is fact. If you have problems with the facts as I've stated them, then say what those are. Else, don't try to stifle a valid point just because you disagree with it.
What, like American tourists do in Europe and elsewhere?
Seriously, two words for you: phrase book.
Evolution is a theory in name only. It's all but fact. (Gravity fits the same description.)
Seriously, has anyone come up with a well-argued, valid rebuttal for all the masses of evidence backing evolution? If they have, I've yet to see it.
The only people who hang onto the belief that evolution isn't true are those who do so because it challenges their religious beliefs. It wasn't that long ago that the Catholic church was proclaiming arabic numerals (0-9), the Earth revolving around the Sun, etc as heretical, and persecuting people for things that they later accepted and for which today only a fool would argue against.
Yes, Darwin's Origin Of The Species was controversial in its time, not least of all to Darwin himself who was a deeply religious man for most of his life - the death of his young daughter shook his faith later in his life - but for anyone ready to judge evolution on is merits it's not at all controversial.
Uh, it might not be in every games store, but I came back from a trip overseas in early March. Last week, I walked down my local high street and while the branch of GAME didn't have a copy (and didn't expect any more until April), both HMV and the Virgin Megastore did, both at the same price as GAME was selling it (£34.99). And they didn't both just have a couple of copies either: one store had 9, the other had "at least 12", when I enquired.
So, you can get a copy if you want one, but it might mean looking around a bit. Getting hold of one in central London might not be too easy but here in the suburbs it took me all of half an hour to get my hands on one. This almost a month after the February 11th European launch date.
As for the content, and the upcoming patch, well I for one find plenty to do apart from PVP. Even if you hate PVE, you need to do some to start levelling and find some decent equipment so it's not as if there's nothing for a dedicated PVPer to do until Battlegrounds is put into place. And, for anyone not familiar with WOW, I'll just point out that it is possible to PVP right now, albeit without any reward apart from stroking your ego.
Be patient. WOW has in the space of a few months become the second largest subscriber-based game ever. I don't even think that Blizzard expected it to be this popular this fast. You didn't think that it was possible to acheive that level of success seamlessly and without any hitches at all, did you? And give credit where credit is due: Blizzard gave everyone in Europe who registered in February and extension of three days to their initial month's trial: they're doing their hardest to get things right, big and small.
Hey, I don't know about you, but I've lost my broadband connection (normally for a few hours at a time) about half a dozen times in the last year, because of a neighbour accidentally cutting my cable, local outages, etc. In that time, I've never had a power cut.
Perhaps if I lived in California or something then power outages would be an issue, but I don't.
Losing my internet connection is an inconvenience right now but if my connection meant my OS, apps and files were gone too then it would be a real pain in the posterior.
If under this plan my hardware is just acting as some glorified dumb terminal then, yes, it is much different.
Right now, if I lose my internet connection then I can use my PC in hundreds of ways. But if I'm reliant on some remote server to deliver any of my OS, applications or files then not having access to that server is severely going to restrict what I can do.
Also, as if this needs to be said, it's not exactly the most practical idea for notebook users, is it? Last time I checked, wi-fi wasn't universal.
So lose your internet connection and your PC becomes just a heavy paperweight? Gee, thanks but no thanks.
There's a world of difference between designing a few good applications and designing a viable alternative to the OSes that we have today.
Two words for you: driver support. Do you know how much effort is involved in getting just that relatively minor part of an OS right?
You seem to be living in a rather strange world where anything that is F/OSS is automatically better than any commercial/CSS counterpart. How a piece of software is licensed has very little to do with how suitable it is to do its job.
Is GIMP better than Adobe Photoshop? Is any F/OSS tool that's better than Macromedia Dreamweaver? Any that's better than QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign? Any that's better than AutoCAD? Etc, etc.
Stop assuming that the GPL or any other license automatically makes F/OSS superior than the alternatives if you want to be taken seriously, and stop pretending that it's how software is licensed rather than how it performs that constitutes "better" to all but a minority of individuals such as yourself.
Sorry, but you are trolling now and you know you are. For the record, I'm yet another Opera user. Several people I know (all IT professionals, most of them with 15+ years experience) are too.
Opera could have chosen to go down the route of clobbering the competition (including Firefox) by patenting everything it developed and then enforcing those patents vigourously. It could have ensured that its product was superior than the rest by this method, but it chose not to because it favours competing in its market on merit rather than on points of law.
Now, I don't know about you but I think this is commendable, especially as Opera has to make a profit from its browser whereas the majority of its competitors (MSIE, Firefox, Safari, etc) do not and are either subsidised or supported by donations.
I agree with you that software patents are a bad idea but I'm afraid that they're the reality of the world that we live in. Most companies wouldn't (and don't) hesitate to use software patents to their advantage. Opera choses not to go down that route and, in this day and age, I find that highly commendable.
Or Opera from several years ago? Please, don't fall into the trap that all those features (including tabbed browsing) that you love in Firefox are original: most of them are quite unashamedly inferior implementations of features premiered by Opera.
Fortunately, the good people at Opera aren't software patent-crazy. If they were, Firefox wouldn't have half the features that it does.