There is no level above TOP SECRET because Wikipedia said so. Wow! Who's the frickin nut case? Don't believe everything you read, especially if anybody in the world can edit the gd page you're reading.
The basic reason why there isn't a level above top secret is very boring and pragmatic: it is imperative that the classification hierarchy is well-known so that personnel that are cleared for lower levels know to avoid material they happen across that is stamped with a higher level.
For instance, someone cleared for secret might be visiting a facility that holds top secret documents. It is important then for them to be aware that any top secret documents they glance held by the staff or whatever is off-limits to them. If there was a secret classification "ubersecret", someone cleared for secret would not be aware of this and might accidentally start reading such information. When this happens the classification system has failed and so this sort of thing is not practiced.
Further, as has been pointed out by others in this thread, the ubersecret classification is largely unnecessary anyway since the same effect can be achieved by compartmentalizing top secret.
Kind of makes you wonder what happens once we design a computer fast enough to accurately simulate physics exactly as in our universe.
Some would say that the only computer capable of accurately simulating physics exactly as in our universe/is/ our universe. And, further, that our universe is already doing these calculations at the maximum possible speed. If this conjecture is correct then in order to make accurate predictions of future events you would need a computer even bigger than our universe to do so. Implementing this is left as an exercise for the reader:-)
But how many muggings with guns would not have happened without the guns?
You seem to be basing your position on the notion that if guns were outlawed, criminals would not be able to obtain guns. This is not the case.
Access to guns enables crimes, which creates situations where the criminals would rather injure or kill victims or police officers rather than face a substantial jail sentence.
This tendency is caused by draconian punishments, not the possession of guns. If a criminal knows that what he's done is going to put him in jail for life (or worse) he might as well try to kill his way out of the situation since there's nothing to be lost by trying anyway.
Get insurance, get secure plastic means of payment, give them your damned wallet, call the police.
Carrying only plastic is, however, going to give them an incentive to kill you since being dead will preclude you from canceling the cards before they can be tapped.
However that could all change and certain countries could cut off the US or Europe from their oil.
This is not feasible. Oil is a completely fungible commodity and so what oil Russia doesn't want to sell to Europe, Europe will buy from the Middle East. What oil Russia sells to the US the US can sell to Europe. Both of these will happen because the movement of oil on the international market is controlled first and foremost by who has the cash to buy it.
If these countries also just stockpile the oil for themselves then this would cause a huge problem for the world economies.
Oil producing nations are, almost without exception, so dependant upon income from oil exports that all they would achieve by withholding it for any length of time is an internal coup and the speedy resumption of exports.
Bin Laden had a pretty cushy safe-haven there. He figured as long as he didn't piss off the Taliban leaders, they'd give him safe haven. And he figured the U.S. would not attack a sovereign nation.
Afghanistan may have been a sovereign nation, but its internationally recognized leadership was with the Northern Alliance, not with the Taliban. When US et al stepped in to assist the Northern Alliance they were therefore not invading the country but helping its "rightful" rulers liberate it from unlawful occupation. Rhetoric, perhaps, but rhetoric is important in international diplomacy.
The EULA for Firefox deals with the use of the trademark "Firefox," only. In order to keep the trademark, they have to enforce it.
The EULA in question isn't any form of trademark enforcement. If anything it might be trying to make people aware that the marks/are/ in fact trademarks. The traditional way of doing this would be to accompany them with a TM or (R) depending on trademark status, not provide a bunch of legalese nobody in their right mind is going to read anyway.
Iceweasel etc do not claim trademark, and thus don't have an EULA.
"Iceweasel" might very well be a trademark. It might not be a/registered/ one but that doesn't not make it a trademark.
But I can just make a piece of shit browser and call it "Iceweasel" and nobody can stop me.
Not until after the fact anyway. The creators of Iceweasel most certainly could sue you for misappropriating their mark and they would stand a decent chance of winning.
You are agreeing to a license not to abuse the name and logo of Firefox, not anything to do with the actual code.
It is not necessary for people to agree not to abuse trademarks - they are forbidden from doing so whether they agree or not. If this were not the case I can assure you you'd see a lot of Mickey Mouse branded restaurants across the world.
It is altogether unclear what Firefox is trying to do with this EULA. Apart from trying to divest themselves of liability, the rest appears to be pointless blather.
[so do they] relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?
No, they said that this change would be applied retroactively.
...right, and since "retroactively" means "Influencing or applying to a period prior to enactment", that would make the answer yes, not no. How did this get moderated informative?
Well, it/was/ informative. It was also -1 Self-contradictory but I don't think that mod option exists:-)
(...) I see that now I live in a country that spies on my email contacts and who I'm in touch with over the phone and what websites I visit (and so technically what newspapers I may read and where my political sympathies may lie).
You don't seriously think that Western governments did any/less/ spying on their own citizens during the cold war? The biggest difference from then till now is probably that there is an increasing public awareness of what is actually going on (and always has).
Of course, the nature of the spying has presumably changed with the times. It used to be phone calls nowadays it's the Internet. While this provides the spies with a lot more to work with than before, it also provides the public with tremendous resources to hide their communications (encryption etc).
Whatever the case, the availability of this new information about how we're being spied upon is not a reason to despair but rather an opportunity to have things changed. The recent excuse of terrorism is sufficiently flimsy that people are unlikely to accept it for very long. At least the Soviet Union actually/did/ have hundreds (thousands?) of fully functional ICBMs to throw around. The terrorists have . . . box cutters?
That they do not. Last time I checked, they did have copy protection though. Intentionally or not, their copy protection system seems to be (or have been):
1) Release for retail a game that is buggy or otherwise wanting. Include no copy protection but do provide a serial# for each sold copy. 2) Release patches that are only available online after thorough serial# checking.
Since the retail version of the game is rather unfinished (in effect, it's the demo even if a rather big one) you will generally/want/ to get the patch, which is under copy protection.
The insight this brings is basically that Stardock doesn't believe in absence of copy protection so much as they believe in absence of completely obnoxious copy protection.
Disclaimer: things may have changed since my experience with GalCiv 1.
For the average user, changing the wallpaper is one of the most important functions a computer can perform!
Countdown until someone writes a resident app that will automatically reset the wallpaper to what the user actually wants it to be: ... zero.
This isn't going to prompt people to un-pirate their Windows installation, it's going to prompt them to download software that will fix their OS. Before long this will be an ubiquitous feature in third-party screen savers etc.
Most likely, the law department in the company examined the law, and then the risk management division (or whoever it is: I have no idea how Newegg is managed) decided that the risk was worth taking. PR, seeing an opportunity for, well, PR, made up a fluff statement about how the dear customers were the reason.
That is certainly one possibility. However, I find the following scenario about as likely: newegg is confronted with the new tax demands from the state, run it by legal and conclude the risk cost of refusing is greater than the cost of complying so they comply. After some time, however, customer complaints start piling up and PR pipes in saying that "the PR benefit of refusing to collect taxes is x". The bean counters plug the new x into their equations and find that now, suddenly, the risk cost of refusal is smaller than the cost of complying plus the lost PR benefit. So they stop collecting, and it was customer feedback which prompted this development.
More likely still, of course, is that the real situation is more complicated than either of our two scenarios:-)
Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins
Plugins like, oh, I don't know, maybe, FLASH?!
Flash is, of course, a/necessary/ plugin in the author's opinion.
Since an opportunity to use the phrase correctly very rarely comes up, I feel I must add that the author of the topmost line is begging the question in this case: he is assuming that Flash is a necessary or desirable or even automatically available plugin and so that it doesn't count as an "unnecessary" one. Opinions vary a lot on this issue however (many would say that whether or not Flash is good/necessary/etc/is/ the debate) and so his assumption doesn't necessarily hold. His conclusion remains suspect so long as we lack a thorough debate and reasonable consensus regarding his underlying assumption.
It's not just dumb people. It's your mom or dad, if they wind up with some kind of aging-related disease that affects their judgement. Or you, in a few years. Losing everything because of that is a pretty harsh outcome.
Courts will tend to take medical and mental conditions into account and if it is clear that the victim can not be held responsible for his actions he will be let off. This is no different from your grandma getting busted for shoplifting because she forgot to pay on her way out - if it can be shown that she has memory problems she'll walk.
(Wedding photography) If you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than the old way.
The reason the old way was preferable to photographers is presumably that it provides built-in market segmentation, a holy grail for any industry. This way they got to effectively charge different rates from different customers depending upon each customer's willingness to pay: Wealthy customers would order several of the overpriced copies because they don't care about the cost anyway while more struggling ones would just get one set.
The customer's gain in this is (in theory) that the lowest price with market segmentation tends to be lower than the regular price would be without it so the service would be available to larger segments of the population at the price of being costlier to the ones able to pay more.
Yes the two main things you dont have access to are the GPU (which i cannot fully understand) . .
Presumably because they don't want to see a thriving market for unlicensed games with high-quality graphics, which could easily happen if, say, Linux had full access to the GPU.
Your point is that in the absence of TV advertising the lobbyists would continue in much the same way they do today, simply by buying 'favours'.
That, and there's always other advertising. It may be less effective but it is also less expensive so you can do more of it.
So, while we're on the reform train, what would you propose be changed besides financing in order to clean up the mess we're in ?
Well, the ones I've mentioned are probably the big ones: disband the winner takes all system and outlaw the direct corporate bribery of politicians that is institutionalized today. Beyond that I do not know - those just happen to be the glaring errors seen from the perspective of a non-US observer.
They're so sick and tired of politics that it borders on apathy and I really don't see what you could do to re-engage them.
Well, considering the US, having your inept administration declare war upon, invade and completely wreck your energy source and then having your economy collapse from the resulting war cost and skyrocketing energy prices (liberally helped by the credit crunch) might be a good start:-)
Those are definitely factors, but the reason I see TV advertising as one of the major problems is that it gives money a huge say in determining the outcome of elections.
If that were not the case then other interests (such as, 'the people') would be higher on the agenda. Now the most important thing is to raise funds.
In quite a few other countries corporate donations to political parties are strictly forbidden, in fact they are considered a crime.
I still think that TV is a red herring though, even if it may certainly exacerbate the issue. I didn't touch upon this earlier, but the disproportionate effect of wealthy lobbying groups on politicians can be a serious problem and especially so in a two-party system. The solution for this problem is more likely, as you suggest, to be the curtailing of corporate sponsorship of politicians rather than to disallow political advertising on TV.
(Not that I'm in favor of political advertising on TV but the reason for that is unrelated to this debate - I just dislike advertising in general.)
There's already considerable evidence that humans don't have free will, but that free will is (essentially) an illusion created by your brain.
I find that it is entirely certain that humans have free will. I base this conclusion upon the following observations: 1) Humans want to have free will as evidenced by centuries of debate on the topic. 2) "Free will" is very poorly defined and it is ultimately humans that define it. Therefore, "free will" will always be defined in such a way as to tell us that we have free will even if there will certainly be skeptics around to debate the issue.
My observations on the questions "are humans intelligent" and "are humans sentient/self-aware" are pretty similar. So long as these questions are to be answered by humans, the answer will always be "yes" and we will tweak the definitions as necessary to make them fit.
The only thing that can upset this state of affairs is if scientific or other progress somehow hands us natural definitions for the terms that are difficult to tear down. The most immediately obvious (if unlikely) way this might happen would be if we encountered other intelligences and for whatever reason adopt their ideas on the subject.
That's because there really is only one side in US politics, the one with the money.
As long as TV advertising is the way to get voters this will not change.
TV advertising is unlikely to be the culprit. After all, all you need to get on the TV is money and if you have some pressing political agenda that is shared by a significant proportion of the electorate then you will be able to raise the money.
More likely, it's the election system itself that is to blame. The wide-spread use of winner takes all type elections for the highest federal positions inevitably results in a polarized two-party system wherein new parties stand absolutely no chance of making a dent and anyone who wants to rise to power within one of the two existing parties generally need to cozy up with those parties' sponsors first. Stagnation follows, to the extent that the two parties end up looking pretty much exactly the same to an outside observer.
(snip excellent summary) So merely showing that people think that the game on Scrabulous' web site is called SCRABBLE isn't enough to sink them. If those people think that the game is called SCRABBLE, whoever sells or provides it, then that's what will sink Hasbro instead.
Which is why this is on the express train towards settlement. Hasbro most likely cannot afford to take the risk that a well-prepared defense will be able to show that "Scrabble" has become a generic term.
Assuming that the Scrabulous team has any intent of building such a case, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no level above TOP SECRET because Wikipedia said so. Wow! Who's the frickin nut case? Don't believe everything you read, especially if anybody in the world can edit the gd page you're reading.
The basic reason why there isn't a level above top secret is very boring and pragmatic: it is imperative that the classification hierarchy is well-known so that personnel that are cleared for lower levels know to avoid material they happen across that is stamped with a higher level.
For instance, someone cleared for secret might be visiting a facility that holds top secret documents. It is important then for them to be aware that any top secret documents they glance held by the staff or whatever is off-limits to them. If there was a secret classification "ubersecret", someone cleared for secret would not be aware of this and might accidentally start reading such information. When this happens the classification system has failed and so this sort of thing is not practiced.
Further, as has been pointed out by others in this thread, the ubersecret classification is largely unnecessary anyway since the same effect can be achieved by compartmentalizing top secret.
Kind of makes you wonder what happens once we design a computer fast enough to accurately simulate physics exactly as in our universe.
Some would say that the only computer capable of accurately simulating physics exactly as in our universe /is/ our universe. And, further, that our universe is already doing these calculations at the maximum possible speed. If this conjecture is correct then in order to make accurate predictions of future events you would need a computer even bigger than our universe to do so. Implementing this is left as an exercise for the reader :-)
Are you the kind of person who says "I feel badly?" Go ahead. Admit it. You are.
I have a badly feeling about the way this is goingly.
But how many muggings with guns would not have happened without the guns?
You seem to be basing your position on the notion that if guns were outlawed, criminals would not be able to obtain guns. This is not the case.
Access to guns enables crimes, which creates situations where the criminals would rather injure or kill victims or police officers rather than face a substantial jail sentence.
This tendency is caused by draconian punishments, not the possession of guns. If a criminal knows that what he's done is going to put him in jail for life (or worse) he might as well try to kill his way out of the situation since there's nothing to be lost by trying anyway.
Get insurance, get secure plastic means of payment, give them your damned wallet, call the police.
Carrying only plastic is, however, going to give them an incentive to kill you since being dead will preclude you from canceling the cards before they can be tapped.
Actually Iraq's oil exporting capacity is just now exceeding pre-war levels. It was way below that for a long time.
Yes, external coups are different. And it's not as if Saddam didn't want to export his oil in the first place :-)
However that could all change and certain countries could cut off the US or Europe from their oil.
This is not feasible. Oil is a completely fungible commodity and so what oil Russia doesn't want to sell to Europe, Europe will buy from the Middle East. What oil Russia sells to the US the US can sell to Europe. Both of these will happen because the movement of oil on the international market is controlled first and foremost by who has the cash to buy it.
If these countries also just stockpile the oil for themselves then this would cause a huge problem for the world economies.
Oil producing nations are, almost without exception, so dependant upon income from oil exports that all they would achieve by withholding it for any length of time is an internal coup and the speedy resumption of exports.
... so instead of debating about it, why doesn't someone just post the question on the site:
"Is this site good, or crap?"
"What is the best way of gaming the stackoverflow.com reputation system?"
Bin Laden had a pretty cushy safe-haven there. He figured as long as he didn't piss off the Taliban leaders, they'd give him safe haven. And he figured the U.S. would not attack a sovereign nation.
Afghanistan may have been a sovereign nation, but its internationally recognized leadership was with the Northern Alliance, not with the Taliban. When US et al stepped in to assist the Northern Alliance they were therefore not invading the country but helping its "rightful" rulers liberate it from unlawful occupation.
Rhetoric, perhaps, but rhetoric is important in international diplomacy.
The EULA for Firefox deals with the use of the trademark "Firefox," only. In order to keep the trademark, they have to enforce it.
The EULA in question isn't any form of trademark enforcement. If anything it might be trying to make people aware that the marks /are/ in fact trademarks. The traditional way of doing this would be to accompany them with a TM or (R) depending on trademark status, not provide a bunch of legalese nobody in their right mind is going to read anyway.
Iceweasel etc do not claim trademark, and thus don't have an EULA.
"Iceweasel" might very well be a trademark. It might not be a /registered/ one but that doesn't not make it a trademark.
But I can just make a piece of shit browser and call it "Iceweasel" and nobody can stop me.
Not until after the fact anyway. The creators of Iceweasel most certainly could sue you for misappropriating their mark and they would stand a decent chance of winning.
You are agreeing to a license not to abuse the name and logo of Firefox, not anything to do with the actual code.
It is not necessary for people to agree not to abuse trademarks - they are forbidden from doing so whether they agree or not. If this were not the case I can assure you you'd see a lot of Mickey Mouse branded restaurants across the world.
It is altogether unclear what Firefox is trying to do with this EULA. Apart from trying to divest themselves of liability, the rest appears to be pointless blather.
[so do they] relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?
No, they said that this change would be applied retroactively.
...right, and since "retroactively" means "Influencing or applying to a period prior to enactment", that would make the answer yes, not no. How did this get moderated informative?
Well, it /was/ informative. It was also -1 Self-contradictory but I don't think that mod option exists :-)
(...) I see that now I live in a country that spies on my email contacts and who I'm in touch with over the phone and what websites I visit (and so technically what newspapers I may read and where my political sympathies may lie).
You don't seriously think that Western governments did any /less/ spying on their own citizens during the cold war? The biggest difference from then till now is probably that there is an increasing public awareness of what is actually going on (and always has).
Of course, the nature of the spying has presumably changed with the times. It used to be phone calls nowadays it's the Internet. While this provides the spies with a lot more to work with than before, it also provides the public with tremendous resources to hide their communications (encryption etc).
Whatever the case, the availability of this new information about how we're being spied upon is not a reason to despair but rather an opportunity to have things changed. The recent excuse of terrorism is sufficiently flimsy that people are unlikely to accept it for very long. At least the Soviet Union actually /did/ have hundreds (thousands?) of fully functional ICBMs to throw around. The terrorists have . . . box cutters?
Stardock has never had DRM or used CD checking.
That they do not. Last time I checked, they did have copy protection though. Intentionally or not, their copy protection system seems to be (or have been):
1) Release for retail a game that is buggy or otherwise wanting. Include no copy protection but do provide a serial# for each sold copy.
2) Release patches that are only available online after thorough serial# checking.
Since the retail version of the game is rather unfinished (in effect, it's the demo even if a rather big one) you will generally /want/ to get the patch, which is under copy protection.
The insight this brings is basically that Stardock doesn't believe in absence of copy protection so much as they believe in absence of completely obnoxious copy protection.
Disclaimer: things may have changed since my experience with GalCiv 1.
For the average user, changing the wallpaper is one of the most important functions a computer can perform!
Countdown until someone writes a resident app that will automatically reset the wallpaper to what the user actually wants it to be:
... zero.
This isn't going to prompt people to un-pirate their Windows installation, it's going to prompt them to download software that will fix their OS. Before long this will be an ubiquitous feature in third-party screen savers etc.
Most likely, the law department in the company examined the law, and then the risk management division (or whoever it is: I have no idea how Newegg is managed) decided that the risk was worth taking. PR, seeing an opportunity for, well, PR, made up a fluff statement about how the dear customers were the reason.
That is certainly one possibility. However, I find the following scenario about as likely: newegg is confronted with the new tax demands from the state, run it by legal and conclude the risk cost of refusing is greater than the cost of complying so they comply. After some time, however, customer complaints start piling up and PR pipes in saying that "the PR benefit of refusing to collect taxes is x". The bean counters plug the new x into their equations and find that now, suddenly, the risk cost of refusal is smaller than the cost of complying plus the lost PR benefit. So they stop collecting, and it was customer feedback which prompted this development.
More likely still, of course, is that the real situation is more complicated than either of our two scenarios :-)
(emphasis mine)
Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins
Plugins like, oh, I don't know, maybe, FLASH?!
Flash is, of course, a /necessary/ plugin in the author's opinion.
Since an opportunity to use the phrase correctly very rarely comes up, I feel I must add that the author of the topmost line is begging the question in this case: he is assuming that Flash is a necessary or desirable or even automatically available plugin and so that it doesn't count as an "unnecessary" one. Opinions vary a lot on this issue however (many would say that whether or not Flash is good/necessary/etc /is/ the debate) and so his assumption doesn't necessarily hold. His conclusion remains suspect so long as we lack a thorough debate and reasonable consensus regarding his underlying assumption.
It's not just dumb people. It's your mom or dad, if they wind up with some kind of aging-related disease that affects their judgement. Or you, in a few years. Losing everything because of that is a pretty harsh outcome.
Courts will tend to take medical and mental conditions into account and if it is clear that the victim can not be held responsible for his actions he will be let off. This is no different from your grandma getting busted for shoplifting because she forgot to pay on her way out - if it can be shown that she has memory problems she'll walk.
1) The victim was actively pursued and persuaded to take part in the illegal activity. That sounds a helluva lot like entrapment.
It's only entrapment if it's the police doing it. If a criminal pursues you and persuades you do commit a crime, you're going to jail.
(Emphasis mine)
' No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.'
Really. (...) I'm reasonably sure nobody paid the guys who made cave paintings.
What!? Barbarians! :-)
(Wedding photography)
If you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than the old way.
The reason the old way was preferable to photographers is presumably that it provides built-in market segmentation, a holy grail for any industry. This way they got to effectively charge different rates from different customers depending upon each customer's willingness to pay: Wealthy customers would order several of the overpriced copies because they don't care about the cost anyway while more struggling ones would just get one set.
The customer's gain in this is (in theory) that the lowest price with market segmentation tends to be lower than the regular price would be without it so the service would be available to larger segments of the population at the price of being costlier to the ones able to pay more.
Yes the two main things you dont have access to are the GPU (which i cannot fully understand) . .
Presumably because they don't want to see a thriving market for unlicensed games with high-quality graphics, which could easily happen if, say, Linux had full access to the GPU.
Your point is that in the absence of TV advertising the lobbyists would continue in much the same way they do today, simply by buying 'favours'.
That, and there's always other advertising. It may be less effective but it is also less expensive so you can do more of it.
So, while we're on the reform train, what would you propose be changed besides financing in order to clean up the mess we're in ?
Well, the ones I've mentioned are probably the big ones: disband the winner takes all system and outlaw the direct corporate bribery of politicians that is institutionalized today. Beyond that I do not know - those just happen to be the glaring errors seen from the perspective of a non-US observer.
They're so sick and tired of politics that it borders on apathy and I really don't see what you could do to re-engage them.
Well, considering the US, having your inept administration declare war upon, invade and completely wreck your energy source and then having your economy collapse from the resulting war cost and skyrocketing energy prices (liberally helped by the credit crunch) might be a good start :-)
Those are definitely factors, but the reason I see TV advertising as one of the major problems is that it gives money a huge say in determining the outcome of elections.
If that were not the case then other interests (such as, 'the people') would be higher on the agenda. Now the most important thing is to raise funds.
In quite a few other countries corporate donations to political parties are strictly forbidden, in fact they are considered a crime.
I still think that TV is a red herring though, even if it may certainly exacerbate the issue. I didn't touch upon this earlier, but the disproportionate effect of wealthy lobbying groups on politicians can be a serious problem and especially so in a two-party system. The solution for this problem is more likely, as you suggest, to be the curtailing of corporate sponsorship of politicians rather than to disallow political advertising on TV.
(Not that I'm in favor of political advertising on TV but the reason for that is unrelated to this debate - I just dislike advertising in general.)
There's already considerable evidence that humans don't have free will, but that free will is (essentially) an illusion created by your brain.
I find that it is entirely certain that humans have free will. I base this conclusion upon the following observations:
1) Humans want to have free will as evidenced by centuries of debate on the topic.
2) "Free will" is very poorly defined and it is ultimately humans that define it.
Therefore, "free will" will always be defined in such a way as to tell us that we have free will even if there will certainly be skeptics around to debate the issue.
My observations on the questions "are humans intelligent" and "are humans sentient/self-aware" are pretty similar. So long as these questions are to be answered by humans, the answer will always be "yes" and we will tweak the definitions as necessary to make them fit.
The only thing that can upset this state of affairs is if scientific or other progress somehow hands us natural definitions for the terms that are difficult to tear down. The most immediately obvious (if unlikely) way this might happen would be if we encountered other intelligences and for whatever reason adopt their ideas on the subject.
That's because there really is only one side in US politics, the one with the money.
As long as TV advertising is the way to get voters this will not change.
TV advertising is unlikely to be the culprit. After all, all you need to get on the TV is money and if you have some pressing political agenda that is shared by a significant proportion of the electorate then you will be able to raise the money.
More likely, it's the election system itself that is to blame. The wide-spread use of winner takes all type elections for the highest federal positions inevitably results in a polarized two-party system wherein new parties stand absolutely no chance of making a dent and anyone who wants to rise to power within one of the two existing parties generally need to cozy up with those parties' sponsors first. Stagnation follows, to the extent that the two parties end up looking pretty much exactly the same to an outside observer.
(snip excellent summary)
So merely showing that people think that the game on Scrabulous' web site is called SCRABBLE isn't enough to sink them. If those people think that the game is called SCRABBLE, whoever sells or provides it, then that's what will sink Hasbro instead.
Which is why this is on the express train towards settlement. Hasbro most likely cannot afford to take the risk that a well-prepared defense will be able to show that "Scrabble" has become a generic term.
Assuming that the Scrabulous team has any intent of building such a case, of course.