You may be right that this is the reasoning, but I think it's flawed reasoning.
The people who are still playing 2nd and 1st edition are not going to stop and switch to a new edition. It's as simple as that, all you're doing by cutting off access to the old content is losing those peoples dollars.
I'd also like to add that RPG fans are pack rats, and many of us are always interested in checking out or trying new and old systems. My group is still playing 3.5, but most of us have bought the 4E books, and are even running extra 4E games. The new and old editions are not in any way mutually exclusive, people can and will play multiple editions, and multiple games. Cutting off sales to older product isn't likely to actually do anything to increase the sales of your newer edition, it just means you won't get any money from the sales of older editions.
Finally I'd point out that I was planning on buying some old classic adventures specifically so I could convert/adapt them to 4E.
I'm not saying there is no logic behind the reasoning of removing some competition with your flagship product, I just don't think it'll actually have that effect. (Let's also keep in mind that they pulled their current flagship product from the pdf stores too). More likely it'll just anger potential customers (as it already has) and drive those people who do want the old products to simply pirate them, rather than give you any money for them.
That being said, I get what you're saying, engaging in rampant piracy is likely to simply be seen as vindication for the policy, even if the increase only happens after they pull the PDF's from stores.
But still... What if I want to play the original Castle Ravenloft Adventure? I can't get that anywhere else, except playing huge amounts for a printed copy on ebay. And now I CAN'T pay WoTC for it either way.
They did have the old books available, at places like Paizo's store, for like $5 a pop.
I was actually planning on buying a bunch of them, until they did this. Now I can't go and buy the original Keep on the Borderlands, Temple of Elemental Evil, Tomb of Horrors, or Castle Ravenloft, like I was planning to do.
These are books that are OUT OF PRINT. I now literally CAN'T give Wizards money for them. If I want them I HAVE to look for pirated copies. It's insane!
The REALLY insane thing here is that they've pulled even old edition stuff. I think pulling 4E stuff was also an insane move, but it at least has the illusion of making some small kind of sense.
But to pull older out of print stuff is just removing a revenue stream. I was actually going to buy several classic adventures sometime soon (and at $5 a pop I could afford to get a bunch), and use them as inspiration for my first run at DMing a game. Now? Well I can't get them legally anywhere, so I guess I might as well hunt down torrent copies. It'll be a bit more work, but if that's the only way to get them it's what I'll probably do.
I'd also point out that I have pirated copies of some of the first few core books. I got them initially to see if I thought I'd like the new system. I determine I would and immediately went out and bought the PHB, DMG, and MM. I've kept the PDF's because the search-able PDF's are a quick way to look up rules etc, but I still want the physical book for other things, like longer reading sessions to make sure I fully understand the rules etc. I have since bought, in hardcover a couple more books, and have considered buying PDF's of some of the other books (mostly splat-books) I'd likely use less but still might want.
Maybe they do want people to move on to 4th edition, but this isn't going to make people do it. This is just cutting off a revenue stream for them.
All of this cat and mouse is ultimately futile, and has just given Boxee more attention than it would likely have gotten for at least several more years (if ever). And since Boxee keeps fixing their Hulu integration... It's just pushing more people to check it out and start using it.
I had heard of Boxee, and actually started using it a few weeks before this whole mess, but I have a number of friends who had never heard of it until all of this nonsense started, and now they (and I) are considering dropping cable in favor of setting up some sort of HTPC running Boxee or XBMC or something similar (and if Hulu doesn't want to join that party... well too bad, I'll probably watch it less, and just watch it in a browser on the same damn TV when I do want to).
That would be the case if the lossy part was all that was transferred to the mp3 player. But since the whole thing is transferred, you get a giant file that you can't even play a full fidelity.
So, using your analogy, it's as if when you switched to the car, you still had the truck stapled to the back. You would still take up just as much space and weight just as much when you were trying to get around, but you could only use the power of the car's engine.
The new mini's do in fact support dual monitors. They have a mini DVI port and a mini display-port. They come with a mini DVI to DVI adapter, so you'll need to get a separate display-port to DVI or VGA adapter to run a second monitor (or I guess if you have one of those fancy new Apple monitors maybe you won't need any adapter.)
Did you read the review? While the title may make it seem like this is some book on how to pick up geeks, this is clearly not what the book is about at all.
Now that we've established that we live in a republic, and not a direct democracy, I guess it's clear that we should round up everyone of a different political persuasion and make 'em move out of the country. Certainly we couldn't have any interest in democratic principles or the idea of pluralism in our Rebublic!
You seem to be assuming that the legal system always works perfectly, and instantly.
What if the abuse has just happened? What if the woman had to flee to a shelter without any notice and now needs to contact her children to tell them where she is? What if the case hasn't gone through yet?
There are many many situations you probably can't think of where this sort of thing could be necessary.
Sure an abuser shouldn't have custody of the children, but the reality is that they frequently do, and we need to deal with the reality of the world not just with ideals of how it should work.
And what if the victim is trying to get in touch with their children? Say they call the house hoping the child will pick up, with the plan to hang up if the abuser picks up? Or if they want to be sure there isn't a caller ID record of the number they were calling from?
There are plenty of reasons why hiding your caller ID could be important, especially for victims of abuse.
Whenever you see an issue like this and you think that the only people needing a privacy service or something like that are stupid or criminals you probably just haven't thought of all the different ways it could be important.
I agree that the Iowa system is strange, as it could mean that the states electors would go to someone the people of Iowa didn't vote for, but a system like that in Maine and Nebraska makes a bit more sense, (at least as long as you want to keep the Electoral College). In their system the electoral votes are distributed based on how the state votes (so if 2/3rds vote for Candidate X, and 1/3rd for Candidate Y, then two votes will go to Candidate X, and one to Candidate Y, they may or may not have it broken down by congressional district, I'm not totally sure, but the idea is still better than the winner takes all system that most states have).
In fact both of those states actually got more attention last election than they probably would have otherwise (small populations, few electoral votes, both likely to tip one way), specifically because both campaigns thought the electoral count might be pretty tight, and getting one extra electoral vote in a state that would might otherwise go to your opponent could have tipped the election one way or the other in a tight race.
Now as to whether or not we should keep the electoral college at all... I'm not totally sure about, I'm torn about how much I care whether most of the attention goes to the major population centers, and whether sparsely populated areas of the country get (somewhat more) ignored (than they already are).
Depends on the artist I guess. Just look at Nine Inch Nails, they're doing great now that they aren't on a label. Trent Reznor is trying all sorts of interesting things that are good for his music and good for the fans, and by all accounts is making boatloads of money off of it.
That's not to say that your "multiplatinum albums dating to the 70s until the early 90s" friend wasn't right about the problems of operating without a lable when he was trying to do it, he may have simply tried it too early.
Digital distribution and the internet may be what have made it possible for stuff like this to work for well known bands like NIN, (I have no illusions that for most unknown bands labels are still somewhat of a necessity, though not necessarily the major labels) so perhaps technology has changed the equation some.
Slumdog Millionaire was based on a book.
That's not a knock against the movie (it was great), or against the idea of basing movies on books, some of the best movies ever made have been based on books, but it does kind of undermine your "ORIGINAL" thing.
Also, others have pointed out that Reservoir Dogs was a remake (though I had no idea that was the case until I read the comments so I can't really fault you for that, as I'd have likely made the same mistake).
But quibbling aside, I do agree with your general point, it would be nice to see more new ideas, and fewer sequels and remakes coming out of hollywood.
I honestly don't know the answer to this, but would it be even close to economically feasible to have an EV or a plugin-hybrid type vehicle, with a photovoltaic panel as the roof? It wouldn't charge the car at night, and probably wouldn't provide enough power to keep a car running indefinitely, but it seems like it could extend the range of a car a bit, and allow you to charge it "for free" during the day if you weren't near a charging station.
But this is all pretty moot if the panels are far to expensive to make that sort of thing worth it. But maybe some day?
I would point out that I in fact know a lot of people who find Madamn Thussads to be quite creepy. I don't personally but often see the same problem as I do with things in the "uncanny valley" it's not so much about them being creepy as that they just look... off.
The reason that stuffed animals (and by this I assume you mean taxidermy, not things like teddy bears) don't fall into the uncanny valley is that they're so close to the real thing that they're on the other side of the valley. They also aren't humans, which people generally find more creepy than other things. That's why it's called a valley, things on one side, are stylized and/or cartoonish, things inside the valley are pretty realistic, but not quite right, so they look wrong to most people, and things on the other side of the valley are realistic enough to not bother people.
As I said most of the time it's humans that just aren't quite right that bother people, so... things like cars in games, don't generally bother people as much.
the parts that are new, are the attack they mentioned, and the fact that recently Gmail rolled out the option to set SSL as the default, so even if you don't type "HTTPS" you will get it anyway. Previously you had to explicitly type "https" to get SSL, now it will just switch to it no matter what you type (if you turn the feature on, it's somewhere in settings.)
I don't think it was a stupid idea, but it looks like it may have been bad execution.
They really should have gotten Tartakovsky (he also did Samurai Jack) back to do it. The Clone Wars serials on Cartoon Network were a lot of fun, and more of that would have been GREAT as a full movie.
I actually wouldn't worry too much about the hard drives. As long as you take some precautions like securely wiping them, with something like DBAN (which is free and incredibly, maybe dangerously, easy to use). You can wipe the drive using a large number of methods and to a number of different standards (including, oddly enough, the Canadian Mounties standard. Who knew!?). I wiped a bunch of computers that my Dad's company was going to donate using it, and it took a little while (depended on the computer and drive, but was anywhere between an hour and 4-5 hours), but it was easy and didn't require any babysitting once it got started. We wiped them to the DoD standard, which seemed good enough, though we could have gone further than that.
I was thinking the same thing.
I'd point out that YDL also runs on older Apple PowerPC (and other PPC based processors) hardware.
I recently installed Yellow Dog on my on my 8 year old G4. It's a little slower than I expected, though once I changed a few settings it seemed to run a lot smoother. I'm still learning my way around, but it was my first linux installation at home, and it went a lot more smoothly than my attempts to install Fedora 9 (which I later learned doesn't play well with my particular G4).
It's an interesting distro, the E17 desktop is certainly interesting, and it does seem to do ok for the most part.
So far I'm not impressed. I've been playing a lot of online Diplomacy lately, so the first thing I thought to test out the new search engine was to put in "diplomacy game." On the first page I got a fair number of results related to the game. Things like ebay listings and such, but none of the bigger diplomacy sites, and a fair number that didn't have anything to do with the game (most had to do with real diplomacy, but a surprising number had to do with "diplomas"). Seemed ok. Not great, but at least most of the results were somewhat relevant.
Then I tried "online diplomacy game." First page mostly did in fact have to do with diplomacy, mostly sites that mentioned play by e-mail games, a couple of sites connected with EA/Mythic (apparently one of the founders worked on an online diplomacy game ages ago. I wonder if my friend who works there knows that?) a few forum games, and a couple of links to other strategy games that happened to use the word "diplomacy" on their webpage. Ok, seemed ok but not great, and not exactly what I was looking for. Then as I went a few pages in hoping to find more of what I was looking for: next couple pages are basically more of the same in fact several of them appear to be more or less the same results as I saw on the first page. This continued for several pages, there were more and more unrelated results some had to do with real diplomacy and international relations, and a lot of them had to do with "online digital photo printing." Going about 7 or 8 pages in, I kept getting basically the same results every page, none of which were what I was looking for.
Same search in Google turned up sites on which you can play diplomacy online, a Wikipedia page about the game of Diplomacy, a place to buy the physical board game, a newsgroup about the game, and several of the biggest diplomacy strategy and general information sites online. Second page was still pretty relevant, and including more sites you can play on, including the site I play on (http://phpdiplomacy.net/), third page had more useful Diplomacy related resources, and so far none of them appear to be dupes, or only tangentially related to the game of diplomacy or playing online. Basically Google still gets me much more useful and relevant results than Cuil. Now maybe that'll change, but for now, I'm not likely to use Cuil, except to mess around with every so often to see if they've improved. They may have indexed more of the web than Google, but that's pretty worthless when the results aren't helpful.
Googles big claim to fame back in the day was that they gave you more relevant and helpful results, not that they had indexed more of the web than any of their competitors.
How do you know what Apples margins are for OSX retail copies? I think it's entirely possible that Apple does make money on those retail copies of OSX, and isn't simply being subsidized by the purchase of a Mac.
Actually putting it in multiple languages, would, likely, aid them in translating it. The main reason we can read hieroglyphics today is because someone discovered the Rosetta Stone which had the same text in hieroglyphics and ancient Greek. We didn't know much about hieroglyphics, but we did know a fair amount about ancient Greek, so it was useful in figuring out the ancient Egyptian scripts.
Sure if they have no knowledge whatsoever about any of the languages, then they're screwed. But you'd increase the chances that they'd have at least some scraps of knowledge about at least one of the languages used, maybe even a few, and thus might increase the chances of translating it. If they have no context whatsoever for any of them they'd have a lot of trouble translating it anyway, (there are still a few mostly untranslated ancient languages, such as Linear A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A), so adding other languages (especially if they're clearly separated) wouldn't likely really screw them any more than just having one.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right that this is the reasoning, but I think it's flawed reasoning.
The people who are still playing 2nd and 1st edition are not going to stop and switch to a new edition. It's as simple as that, all you're doing by cutting off access to the old content is losing those peoples dollars.
I'd also like to add that RPG fans are pack rats, and many of us are always interested in checking out or trying new and old systems. My group is still playing 3.5, but most of us have bought the 4E books, and are even running extra 4E games. The new and old editions are not in any way mutually exclusive, people can and will play multiple editions, and multiple games. Cutting off sales to older product isn't likely to actually do anything to increase the sales of your newer edition, it just means you won't get any money from the sales of older editions.
Finally I'd point out that I was planning on buying some old classic adventures specifically so I could convert/adapt them to 4E.
I'm not saying there is no logic behind the reasoning of removing some competition with your flagship product, I just don't think it'll actually have that effect. (Let's also keep in mind that they pulled their current flagship product from the pdf stores too). More likely it'll just anger potential customers (as it already has) and drive those people who do want the old products to simply pirate them, rather than give you any money for them.
But doesn't it seem like a poor business decision on the part of those that could make them available to not do so, when there is clearly a demand?
What about doing both?
That being said, I get what you're saying, engaging in rampant piracy is likely to simply be seen as vindication for the policy, even if the increase only happens after they pull the PDF's from stores.
But still... What if I want to play the original Castle Ravenloft Adventure? I can't get that anywhere else, except playing huge amounts for a printed copy on ebay. And now I CAN'T pay WoTC for it either way.
They did have the old books available, at places like Paizo's store, for like $5 a pop.
I was actually planning on buying a bunch of them, until they did this. Now I can't go and buy the original Keep on the Borderlands, Temple of Elemental Evil, Tomb of Horrors, or Castle Ravenloft, like I was planning to do.
These are books that are OUT OF PRINT. I now literally CAN'T give Wizards money for them. If I want them I HAVE to look for pirated copies. It's insane!
The REALLY insane thing here is that they've pulled even old edition stuff. I think pulling 4E stuff was also an insane move, but it at least has the illusion of making some small kind of sense.
But to pull older out of print stuff is just removing a revenue stream. I was actually going to buy several classic adventures sometime soon (and at $5 a pop I could afford to get a bunch), and use them as inspiration for my first run at DMing a game. Now? Well I can't get them legally anywhere, so I guess I might as well hunt down torrent copies. It'll be a bit more work, but if that's the only way to get them it's what I'll probably do.
I'd also point out that I have pirated copies of some of the first few core books. I got them initially to see if I thought I'd like the new system. I determine I would and immediately went out and bought the PHB, DMG, and MM. I've kept the PDF's because the search-able PDF's are a quick way to look up rules etc, but I still want the physical book for other things, like longer reading sessions to make sure I fully understand the rules etc. I have since bought, in hardcover a couple more books, and have considered buying PDF's of some of the other books (mostly splat-books) I'd likely use less but still might want.
Maybe they do want people to move on to 4th edition, but this isn't going to make people do it. This is just cutting off a revenue stream for them.
All of this cat and mouse is ultimately futile, and has just given Boxee more attention than it would likely have gotten for at least several more years (if ever). And since Boxee keeps fixing their Hulu integration... It's just pushing more people to check it out and start using it.
I had heard of Boxee, and actually started using it a few weeks before this whole mess, but I have a number of friends who had never heard of it until all of this nonsense started, and now they (and I) are considering dropping cable in favor of setting up some sort of HTPC running Boxee or XBMC or something similar (and if Hulu doesn't want to join that party... well too bad, I'll probably watch it less, and just watch it in a browser on the same damn TV when I do want to).
That would be the case if the lossy part was all that was transferred to the mp3 player. But since the whole thing is transferred, you get a giant file that you can't even play a full fidelity.
So, using your analogy, it's as if when you switched to the car, you still had the truck stapled to the back. You would still take up just as much space and weight just as much when you were trying to get around, but you could only use the power of the car's engine.
The new mini's do in fact support dual monitors. They have a mini DVI port and a mini display-port. They come with a mini DVI to DVI adapter, so you'll need to get a separate display-port to DVI or VGA adapter to run a second monitor (or I guess if you have one of those fancy new Apple monitors maybe you won't need any adapter.)
Did you read the review? While the title may make it seem like this is some book on how to pick up geeks, this is clearly not what the book is about at all.
Wow, you really showed him with your semantics.
Now that we've established that we live in a republic, and not a direct democracy, I guess it's clear that we should round up everyone of a different political persuasion and make 'em move out of the country. Certainly we couldn't have any interest in democratic principles or the idea of pluralism in our Rebublic!
You seem to be assuming that the legal system always works perfectly, and instantly.
What if the abuse has just happened? What if the woman had to flee to a shelter without any notice and now needs to contact her children to tell them where she is? What if the case hasn't gone through yet?
There are many many situations you probably can't think of where this sort of thing could be necessary.
Sure an abuser shouldn't have custody of the children, but the reality is that they frequently do, and we need to deal with the reality of the world not just with ideals of how it should work.
And what if the victim is trying to get in touch with their children? Say they call the house hoping the child will pick up, with the plan to hang up if the abuser picks up? Or if they want to be sure there isn't a caller ID record of the number they were calling from?
There are plenty of reasons why hiding your caller ID could be important, especially for victims of abuse.
Whenever you see an issue like this and you think that the only people needing a privacy service or something like that are stupid or criminals you probably just haven't thought of all the different ways it could be important.
I agree that the Iowa system is strange, as it could mean that the states electors would go to someone the people of Iowa didn't vote for, but a system like that in Maine and Nebraska makes a bit more sense, (at least as long as you want to keep the Electoral College). In their system the electoral votes are distributed based on how the state votes (so if 2/3rds vote for Candidate X, and 1/3rd for Candidate Y, then two votes will go to Candidate X, and one to Candidate Y, they may or may not have it broken down by congressional district, I'm not totally sure, but the idea is still better than the winner takes all system that most states have). In fact both of those states actually got more attention last election than they probably would have otherwise (small populations, few electoral votes, both likely to tip one way), specifically because both campaigns thought the electoral count might be pretty tight, and getting one extra electoral vote in a state that would might otherwise go to your opponent could have tipped the election one way or the other in a tight race. Now as to whether or not we should keep the electoral college at all... I'm not totally sure about, I'm torn about how much I care whether most of the attention goes to the major population centers, and whether sparsely populated areas of the country get (somewhat more) ignored (than they already are).
Depends on the artist I guess. Just look at Nine Inch Nails, they're doing great now that they aren't on a label. Trent Reznor is trying all sorts of interesting things that are good for his music and good for the fans, and by all accounts is making boatloads of money off of it. That's not to say that your "multiplatinum albums dating to the 70s until the early 90s" friend wasn't right about the problems of operating without a lable when he was trying to do it, he may have simply tried it too early. Digital distribution and the internet may be what have made it possible for stuff like this to work for well known bands like NIN, (I have no illusions that for most unknown bands labels are still somewhat of a necessity, though not necessarily the major labels) so perhaps technology has changed the equation some.
Slumdog Millionaire was based on a book. That's not a knock against the movie (it was great), or against the idea of basing movies on books, some of the best movies ever made have been based on books, but it does kind of undermine your "ORIGINAL" thing. Also, others have pointed out that Reservoir Dogs was a remake (though I had no idea that was the case until I read the comments so I can't really fault you for that, as I'd have likely made the same mistake). But quibbling aside, I do agree with your general point, it would be nice to see more new ideas, and fewer sequels and remakes coming out of hollywood.
I honestly don't know the answer to this, but would it be even close to economically feasible to have an EV or a plugin-hybrid type vehicle, with a photovoltaic panel as the roof? It wouldn't charge the car at night, and probably wouldn't provide enough power to keep a car running indefinitely, but it seems like it could extend the range of a car a bit, and allow you to charge it "for free" during the day if you weren't near a charging station. But this is all pretty moot if the panels are far to expensive to make that sort of thing worth it. But maybe some day?
I would point out that I in fact know a lot of people who find Madamn Thussads to be quite creepy. I don't personally but often see the same problem as I do with things in the "uncanny valley" it's not so much about them being creepy as that they just look... off. The reason that stuffed animals (and by this I assume you mean taxidermy, not things like teddy bears) don't fall into the uncanny valley is that they're so close to the real thing that they're on the other side of the valley. They also aren't humans, which people generally find more creepy than other things. That's why it's called a valley, things on one side, are stylized and/or cartoonish, things inside the valley are pretty realistic, but not quite right, so they look wrong to most people, and things on the other side of the valley are realistic enough to not bother people. As I said most of the time it's humans that just aren't quite right that bother people, so... things like cars in games, don't generally bother people as much.
the parts that are new, are the attack they mentioned, and the fact that recently Gmail rolled out the option to set SSL as the default, so even if you don't type "HTTPS" you will get it anyway. Previously you had to explicitly type "https" to get SSL, now it will just switch to it no matter what you type (if you turn the feature on, it's somewhere in settings.)
I don't think it was a stupid idea, but it looks like it may have been bad execution. They really should have gotten Tartakovsky (he also did Samurai Jack) back to do it. The Clone Wars serials on Cartoon Network were a lot of fun, and more of that would have been GREAT as a full movie.
Damn I didn't see that you'd already posted this when I posted my comment. DBAN is a great little program!
I actually wouldn't worry too much about the hard drives. As long as you take some precautions like securely wiping them, with something like DBAN (which is free and incredibly, maybe dangerously, easy to use). You can wipe the drive using a large number of methods and to a number of different standards (including, oddly enough, the Canadian Mounties standard. Who knew!?). I wiped a bunch of computers that my Dad's company was going to donate using it, and it took a little while (depended on the computer and drive, but was anywhere between an hour and 4-5 hours), but it was easy and didn't require any babysitting once it got started. We wiped them to the DoD standard, which seemed good enough, though we could have gone further than that.
I was thinking the same thing. I'd point out that YDL also runs on older Apple PowerPC (and other PPC based processors) hardware. I recently installed Yellow Dog on my on my 8 year old G4. It's a little slower than I expected, though once I changed a few settings it seemed to run a lot smoother. I'm still learning my way around, but it was my first linux installation at home, and it went a lot more smoothly than my attempts to install Fedora 9 (which I later learned doesn't play well with my particular G4). It's an interesting distro, the E17 desktop is certainly interesting, and it does seem to do ok for the most part.
So far I'm not impressed. I've been playing a lot of online Diplomacy lately, so the first thing I thought to test out the new search engine was to put in "diplomacy game." On the first page I got a fair number of results related to the game. Things like ebay listings and such, but none of the bigger diplomacy sites, and a fair number that didn't have anything to do with the game (most had to do with real diplomacy, but a surprising number had to do with "diplomas"). Seemed ok. Not great, but at least most of the results were somewhat relevant. Then I tried "online diplomacy game." First page mostly did in fact have to do with diplomacy, mostly sites that mentioned play by e-mail games, a couple of sites connected with EA/Mythic (apparently one of the founders worked on an online diplomacy game ages ago. I wonder if my friend who works there knows that?) a few forum games, and a couple of links to other strategy games that happened to use the word "diplomacy" on their webpage. Ok, seemed ok but not great, and not exactly what I was looking for. Then as I went a few pages in hoping to find more of what I was looking for: next couple pages are basically more of the same in fact several of them appear to be more or less the same results as I saw on the first page. This continued for several pages, there were more and more unrelated results some had to do with real diplomacy and international relations, and a lot of them had to do with "online digital photo printing." Going about 7 or 8 pages in, I kept getting basically the same results every page, none of which were what I was looking for. Same search in Google turned up sites on which you can play diplomacy online, a Wikipedia page about the game of Diplomacy, a place to buy the physical board game, a newsgroup about the game, and several of the biggest diplomacy strategy and general information sites online. Second page was still pretty relevant, and including more sites you can play on, including the site I play on (http://phpdiplomacy.net/), third page had more useful Diplomacy related resources, and so far none of them appear to be dupes, or only tangentially related to the game of diplomacy or playing online. Basically Google still gets me much more useful and relevant results than Cuil. Now maybe that'll change, but for now, I'm not likely to use Cuil, except to mess around with every so often to see if they've improved. They may have indexed more of the web than Google, but that's pretty worthless when the results aren't helpful. Googles big claim to fame back in the day was that they gave you more relevant and helpful results, not that they had indexed more of the web than any of their competitors.
How do you know what Apples margins are for OSX retail copies? I think it's entirely possible that Apple does make money on those retail copies of OSX, and isn't simply being subsidized by the purchase of a Mac.
Actually putting it in multiple languages, would, likely, aid them in translating it. The main reason we can read hieroglyphics today is because someone discovered the Rosetta Stone which had the same text in hieroglyphics and ancient Greek. We didn't know much about hieroglyphics, but we did know a fair amount about ancient Greek, so it was useful in figuring out the ancient Egyptian scripts. Sure if they have no knowledge whatsoever about any of the languages, then they're screwed. But you'd increase the chances that they'd have at least some scraps of knowledge about at least one of the languages used, maybe even a few, and thus might increase the chances of translating it. If they have no context whatsoever for any of them they'd have a lot of trouble translating it anyway, (there are still a few mostly untranslated ancient languages, such as Linear A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A), so adding other languages (especially if they're clearly separated) wouldn't likely really screw them any more than just having one.