Is there any serious doubt that Scrabulous infringes on Hasbro's intellectual property?
Looking at the history of Scrabble on Hasbro's website, all that Hasbro owns is the Trademark. Which leaves them, at best, complaining about a similar name for a similar product. So all the Srabulous people have to do is change the name to "the Game Formerly Known as S*********", and they're in like Flynn.
Or am I way off the mark with respect to how American Football actually operates at this level?
You're way off the mark. Timeouts are when you get more beer and snacks - you're not looking for anything to happen then.
And if it DID happen during a timeout, then as soon as the timeout were over the refs would no doubt rule against the team whose colours most resembled the alien skintones, for too many players on the field.
but I'd give up a hell of a lot if I didn't have to deal with the bullshit that government granted monopolies have bought me (cable, telephone, cell, etc)
Simple solution then - don't do Cable, Telephone, Cell, etc. Not like the law requires it or anything.
Or did you really mean that you wanted the benefits without having to pay for it?
Why not land in the middle of the Superbowl finals, now THAT's revealing!
If aliens were to land in the middle of the Superbowl, either:
a) everyone would assume it was part of the Halftime Show,
b) they'd be escorted off the field and arrested for disrupting the game,
c) they'd be linched by a mob of fans for ruining whatever game-winning play they interrupted.
What they would NOT be is more than a footnote in the news the next day - "Dan, is it true that aliens landed in the middle of the Superbowl?","Just a rumour, Bob, started to explain the inexcusable play called by the Pats just before Halftime. Can you believe that play? If they'd just knelt on the ball, they'd not have gone into the Half down by three..."
How can it do that, if it only flies for 3 minutes?
5 meters per second, 300 seconds. 1500 meters (just under a mile). I can think of a lot of times a group of soldiers might want to know what was going on within a mile of their location, say, over near that machinegun nest....
For this reason I never understood why China and India were left off of Kyoto.
You didn't understand why China and India were left off of Kyoto?
Let me explain - China said that they wouldn't sign Kyoto if it set binding CO2 targets on China. Just like China said recently that they won't sign the Kyoto follow-on if it requires binding targets for China.
Ditto for India.
Note that one of the arguments used to try to convince the USA to sign Kyoto was that China would sign on to binding targets in the next go-round of the Treaty. I notice that when China and India said that they wouldn't sign on to the next round, noone bothered to mention that the USA seemed to have been right about that point after all....
Until the first world nations stop raping third world nations and supporting tinpot dictators just for the sake of guaranteeing access to their resources, human misery will continue wholesale.
Yes! We need to get out of the way and let the local tinpot dictators get on with raping their own countries without outside intereference. Just ask Robert Mugabe! He'll tell you.
And yes, human misery will continue wholesale once we stop helping local tinpot dictators. Or do you really believe that the various non-functional governments in Africa will suddenly become functional if the West ignores them? HINT: We've been ignoring Zimbabwe for years, and look at the progress they've made.
Oh, and if there are any ZANU-PF types reading this, I hate to break it to you, but the West, specifically the UK and USA do NOT want to recolonialize you. We barely care enough to try to keep you from starving.
If only through air travel, middle class America has been impacted. Look at the state of the airliners: that they are still going bankrupt one after another can not be just because the fuel cost is up. It is also because there are so much less passengers: a direct effect of the anti-terror legislations, so much security hassle, and I can't stop thinking "oh, so much security, then really everyone is trying to get us! Must be dangerous in the skies!"
Umm, no. Bankruptcies in airlines pretty much happen when they cut rates to compete with each other. Not because of security concerns. I fly now and then, and the only real effect "security" has on me is that I have to take my shoes off before I step through the metal-detectors. Which is, at most, a minor annoyance. On par with having to buckle my seatbelt, and well below having to remember to take my hypertension medicine.
Note that the last few times I flew, the planes were pretty much full. Hardly a sign that security regulations have impacted ticket sales all that much.
Nonetheless, if the security regulations have affected YOU, don't take anything I say as suggesting you have no right to complain about them. Just understand that the 99.9% of everyone NOT so affected isn't going to be terribly interested in listening to your rants (or so they will perceive them).
Is this a reflection of middle America's concerns?
No. I don't know three people that know FISA from Adam's Housecat. And of the two I DO know, neither thinks it's nearly so important as how many times the Mayor of Mandeville is going to get a free pass on his drunken driving.
Hate to break it to you, but most of America has been impacted by the anti-terror legislation not even the slightest. And thus has little reason to really care about it....
There is no reason to fear nano, only to be a little cautious.
Note that "be a little cautious" implies the possibility of testing the stuff the way we test drugs. Which means a long time between development and use. Which can be expensive for a startup.
The 2006 US energy use was about 4,060,000 thousand mwh. So to generate all of that with plants like the Nevada Solar One, we need 4,060,000,000,000 kwh / 134,000,000 kwh = roughly 30,300 copies of Nevada Solar One.
Better include plans for dealing with night. 30,000 copies of Solar One don't matter a hill of beans after dark.
The population growth in western Europe is still positive.
You must have been looking at the pretty picture. The graph in the article you reference shows a slightly declining population in Europe as of now. Even including immigration, it's declining. Which says a lot about the birthrate among the natives of Western Europe.
Even the pretty picture shows a dramatic slowdown in population growth from when I was a kid. Worldwide average then was better than 2% per year back then. The picture only shows 2% growthrate in Africa, Pakistan, and a few other countries with small populations. It shows declines or barely increasing population in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, China, and North America excluding Mexico.
The growth rate might be slowing, but from a very high rate established in the 20th Century. We're already at at least 6.7B people, and on target for 7B by 2013. And 8b BY 2028.
Let's see. When I was born, they were expecting 8 billion by the early 1990's. And 16 billion by 2025 or so.
Looks like a pretty significant slowdown from where I sit.
Here's the rub as far as population growth - that slowdown is strongly correlated with increased standard of living. Which suggests, at least, that we need to continue to pull the rest of the world up to current Western standards of living. Might be tricky.
Well that does indeed remove any bias toward people who want power. Unfortunately it also removes any bias toward competence, skill, intelligence, etc. There must be a better way!
Nope. There's not. Anyone who wants the job shouldn't have it. And any system other than a general lottery can AND WILL be gamed by those who want the job.
Just how do you choose a good leader without having a huge bias toward those people who want the position?
I always like Clarke's idea - pick the leader by lot from among all eligible citizens. One term, and your name is removed from the pool of eligibles after that term.
No, the Shuttle suffered from budget cuts, changing mission requirements, and worst of all, technological advances.
When the Shuttle was conceived, it made sense. Alas, by the time it was BUILT, it no longer made sense. Especially given that what was eventually built had only limited resemblance to the original concept.
If the Shuttle had first flown in 1975, and if the Shuttle Fleet had been built up to the levels originally envisioned (one or two launches per week, you figure out how many Shuttles we'd have needed), and if NASA had had a plan to DO anything after Apollo, then (and only then) the Shuttle would have been worth building.
By the time we finally got around to building a crippled by design Shuttle, with no purpose remaining (because NASA had no purpose remaining), they might as well have built a gigantic Mardi Gras Float....
I look back on the Shuttle Era as a period of wasted opportunites. We could have gone to Mars with less than a dozen Shuttle launches (three months worth, by the original concept), or to an asteroid with a similar number of launches. Or built our moonbase. Or all of the above....
Have you or anybody in your field considered that humans living that long would grossly exacerbate the current crisis concerning population and resources?
Do people really still believe in the Population Bomb? Birth rate has been declining steadily for at least the last 40 years. If the trend continues, within 100 years, worldwide population growth will be negative.
Note that in Western Europe and the United States (and Canada, which really should just give up and become six more States), population growth rate is already negative. If not for immmigration, the USA would have had a smaller population last Census than the one before, for the first time ever.
Little Boy had far more Uranium than was actually needed. It was a very poorly designed weapon, that had only one redeeming feature - it was guaranteed to go off.
Most later weapons used a fraction of the U-235/Pu-239 (or the mixture of the two) of Little Boy.
Really, I've often wondered when "landfill mining" was going to take off as a viable enterprise, as the higher cost of materials justifies the complicated means.
In Italy, before WW2, they mined iron from the slag heaps of Roman-era smelters - it had a higher iron concentration than any ore that could then be found in Italy.
Name Brand, Designer items are expensive because their is a name and a service associated with them that can only be consistently offered if the company has a limited distribution channel it can accurately monitor. For example: I purchased a Louis Vuitton purse and matching wallet for my wife for a ridiculous amount of money. When I purchased it at the LV store they took my name, her name and a lot of other info. Now we've relocated three times since then (4 years later) and we can still go into any LV store to have the purse cleaned and treated for free just by giving them our names and info. Luxury items are not just expensive for the sake of being expensive, their is a service and expectation that comes with having them, otherwise there would be no difference between JC Penny and Coach.
So, you are asserting that it SHOULD be illegal for you to sell your LV purse and wallet? Or are you just asserting that the value of your investment would go down if someone ELSE were to choose to sell their purse and/or wallet?
Either way, I hate to break it to you, but there is NOT an inalienable Right for LV to control something once they have sold it. First Sale Doctrine ftw.
but given the laws of physics I can't see this one being true within any reasonable time frame (several lifetimes)
Didn't they say that about flight to the moon in the early 1900's? My grandfather was born in the year of the Wright Brothers' first flight. He died ten years or so after Apollo. Less than one lifetime from "no powered flight" to "flight to the moon".
Note: Actually, what "they" said about flight to the moon in the early 1900's was that it was completely impossible.
Note that in 1947, Arthur Clarke wrote Prelude to Space. He set his first moon landing in 1978, as I recall. In later interviews, he said that he didn't really believe that flight to the moon would be possible in his lifetime. He picked a date in his own lifetime just to be optimistic. And we got there nine years earlier than his "optimistic" date, only 22 years after he thought "not in my lifetime".
Call me an elitist jerk all you want, but I think you should have to be a property owner to vote.
You're an elitist jerk.
Ben Franklin, when discussing a property requirement to vote back in the day phrased it this way:
I own an ass. I have the Right to vote. The ass dies. I no longer have the Right to vote. Therefore, the franchise rests not with me, but with the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the history of Scrabble on Hasbro's website, all that Hasbro owns is the Trademark. Which leaves them, at best, complaining about a similar name for a similar product. So all the Srabulous people have to do is change the name to "the Game Formerly Known as S*********", and they're in like Flynn.
You're way off the mark. Timeouts are when you get more beer and snacks - you're not looking for anything to happen then.
And if it DID happen during a timeout, then as soon as the timeout were over the refs would no doubt rule against the team whose colours most resembled the alien skintones, for too many players on the field.
Simple solution then - don't do Cable, Telephone, Cell, etc. Not like the law requires it or anything.
Or did you really mean that you wanted the benefits without having to pay for it?
If aliens were to land in the middle of the Superbowl, either:
a) everyone would assume it was part of the Halftime Show,
b) they'd be escorted off the field and arrested for disrupting the game,
c) they'd be linched by a mob of fans for ruining whatever game-winning play they interrupted.
What they would NOT be is more than a footnote in the news the next day - "Dan, is it true that aliens landed in the middle of the Superbowl?","Just a rumour, Bob, started to explain the inexcusable play called by the Pats just before Halftime. Can you believe that play? If they'd just knelt on the ball, they'd not have gone into the Half down by three..."
5 meters per second, 300 seconds. 1500 meters (just under a mile). I can think of a lot of times a group of soldiers might want to know what was going on within a mile of their location, say, over near that machinegun nest....
You didn't understand why China and India were left off of Kyoto?
Let me explain - China said that they wouldn't sign Kyoto if it set binding CO2 targets on China. Just like China said recently that they won't sign the Kyoto follow-on if it requires binding targets for China.
Ditto for India.
Note that one of the arguments used to try to convince the USA to sign Kyoto was that China would sign on to binding targets in the next go-round of the Treaty. I notice that when China and India said that they wouldn't sign on to the next round, noone bothered to mention that the USA seemed to have been right about that point after all....
Yes! We need to get out of the way and let the local tinpot dictators get on with raping their own countries without outside intereference. Just ask Robert Mugabe! He'll tell you.
And yes, human misery will continue wholesale once we stop helping local tinpot dictators. Or do you really believe that the various non-functional governments in Africa will suddenly become functional if the West ignores them? HINT: We've been ignoring Zimbabwe for years, and look at the progress they've made.
Oh, and if there are any ZANU-PF types reading this, I hate to break it to you, but the West, specifically the UK and USA do NOT want to recolonialize you. We barely care enough to try to keep you from starving.
Umm, no. Bankruptcies in airlines pretty much happen when they cut rates to compete with each other. Not because of security concerns. I fly now and then, and the only real effect "security" has on me is that I have to take my shoes off before I step through the metal-detectors. Which is, at most, a minor annoyance. On par with having to buckle my seatbelt, and well below having to remember to take my hypertension medicine.
Note that the last few times I flew, the planes were pretty much full. Hardly a sign that security regulations have impacted ticket sales all that much.
Nonetheless, if the security regulations have affected YOU, don't take anything I say as suggesting you have no right to complain about them. Just understand that the 99.9% of everyone NOT so affected isn't going to be terribly interested in listening to your rants (or so they will perceive them).
No. I don't know three people that know FISA from Adam's Housecat. And of the two I DO know, neither thinks it's nearly so important as how many times the Mayor of Mandeville is going to get a free pass on his drunken driving.
Hate to break it to you, but most of America has been impacted by the anti-terror legislation not even the slightest. And thus has little reason to really care about it....
Note that "be a little cautious" implies the possibility of testing the stuff the way we test drugs. Which means a long time between development and use. Which can be expensive for a startup.
If so, won't be cheaper than oil until the last barrel is pumped out of the ground.
Better include plans for dealing with night. 30,000 copies of Solar One don't matter a hill of beans after dark.
You must have been looking at the pretty picture. The graph in the article you reference shows a slightly declining population in Europe as of now. Even including immigration, it's declining. Which says a lot about the birthrate among the natives of Western Europe.
Even the pretty picture shows a dramatic slowdown in population growth from when I was a kid. Worldwide average then was better than 2% per year back then. The picture only shows 2% growthrate in Africa, Pakistan, and a few other countries with small populations. It shows declines or barely increasing population in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, China, and North America excluding Mexico.
Let's see. When I was born, they were expecting 8 billion by the early 1990's. And 16 billion by 2025 or so.
Looks like a pretty significant slowdown from where I sit.
Here's the rub as far as population growth - that slowdown is strongly correlated with increased standard of living. Which suggests, at least, that we need to continue to pull the rest of the world up to current Western standards of living. Might be tricky.
Nope. There's not. Anyone who wants the job shouldn't have it. And any system other than a general lottery can AND WILL be gamed by those who want the job.
I always like Clarke's idea - pick the leader by lot from among all eligible citizens. One term, and your name is removed from the pool of eligibles after that term.
No, the Shuttle suffered from budget cuts, changing mission requirements, and worst of all, technological advances.
When the Shuttle was conceived, it made sense. Alas, by the time it was BUILT, it no longer made sense. Especially given that what was eventually built had only limited resemblance to the original concept.
If the Shuttle had first flown in 1975, and if the Shuttle Fleet had been built up to the levels originally envisioned (one or two launches per week, you figure out how many Shuttles we'd have needed), and if NASA had had a plan to DO anything after Apollo, then (and only then) the Shuttle would have been worth building.
By the time we finally got around to building a crippled by design Shuttle, with no purpose remaining (because NASA had no purpose remaining), they might as well have built a gigantic Mardi Gras Float....
I look back on the Shuttle Era as a period of wasted opportunites. We could have gone to Mars with less than a dozen Shuttle launches (three months worth, by the original concept), or to an asteroid with a similar number of launches. Or built our moonbase. Or all of the above....
Nah. But if you want to invade North Dakota and Montana, feel free.
Do people really still believe in the Population Bomb? Birth rate has been declining steadily for at least the last 40 years. If the trend continues, within 100 years, worldwide population growth will be negative.
Note that in Western Europe and the United States (and Canada, which really should just give up and become six more States), population growth rate is already negative. If not for immmigration, the USA would have had a smaller population last Census than the one before, for the first time ever.
Little Boy had far more Uranium than was actually needed. It was a very poorly designed weapon, that had only one redeeming feature - it was guaranteed to go off.
Most later weapons used a fraction of the U-235/Pu-239 (or the mixture of the two) of Little Boy.
In Italy, before WW2, they mined iron from the slag heaps of Roman-era smelters - it had a higher iron concentration than any ore that could then be found in Italy.
So, you are asserting that it SHOULD be illegal for you to sell your LV purse and wallet? Or are you just asserting that the value of your investment would go down if someone ELSE were to choose to sell their purse and/or wallet?
Either way, I hate to break it to you, but there is NOT an inalienable Right for LV to control something once they have sold it. First Sale Doctrine ftw.
Didn't they say that about flight to the moon in the early 1900's? My grandfather was born in the year of the Wright Brothers' first flight. He died ten years or so after Apollo. Less than one lifetime from "no powered flight" to "flight to the moon".
Note: Actually, what "they" said about flight to the moon in the early 1900's was that it was completely impossible.
Note that in 1947, Arthur Clarke wrote Prelude to Space. He set his first moon landing in 1978, as I recall. In later interviews, he said that he didn't really believe that flight to the moon would be possible in his lifetime. He picked a date in his own lifetime just to be optimistic. And we got there nine years earlier than his "optimistic" date, only 22 years after he thought "not in my lifetime".
You're an elitist jerk.
Ben Franklin, when discussing a property requirement to vote back in the day phrased it this way:
I own an ass. I have the Right to vote. The ass dies. I no longer have the Right to vote. Therefore, the franchise rests not with me, but with the ass.
Well, no.
Actually, what happened was that he lost the Democratic Primary in his home district, and left the Democratic Party so he could run anyway.
He won, he votes with the Democrats, so nothing has really changed, other than the little tag (I) after his name, instead of the (D) after his name.