Really? Outside of the suffix "-ize" where do Americans use more Z's than the Brits? I'm genuinely curious.

Z is useful in Scrabble less because of long "ize" words, and more because of it's combination with so many small common letters, i.e. ZOA, ZOEA, ZIG, ZIG, ZED, ZIT and on and on and on.

For what it's worth, even the less permissive American Scrabble dictionary includes most word with "-ise" and "-ize".

But the Scrabble dictionary is sourced directly from "real" English dictionaries. It's arguably better in that it requires a word to appear in at least 2 of it's 5 source dictionaries to make the cut.

No, I think your real issue is that the English language is indeed a "huge mixture of "real" English words and a random collection of exceptions, foreign words, nonsense words, misspelled words, etc, and that the source dictionaries are merely reflective of that reality.

I'll grant you the Scrabble dictionary is imperfect, but so is every other dictionary you pull off of the shelf. You can either pick a word list and agree that them's the rules, or you can play lawyer games with your friends and argue over the validity of any word you don't like.

Don't you see why this path is pretty much failure if you're trying to design a game with rules?

Is BURRITO a word to your judge friend? I mean it's Spanish but we eat a lot of burritos in America. How about NAAN? That's pretty delicious at an Indian restaurant. It's pretty much just bread though. We don't have the word FUTBOL in the scrabble dictionary because it's Spanish, and between the words SOCCER and FOOTBALL, it's pretty well covered. Should we exclude NAAN because BREAD is already in the dictionary?

QAT is just transliterated Arabic characters that make that sound, right? That's why KHAT and KAT are there too. I can see the argument that you might just want to pick one transliteration and stick with it, but even that is tricky. I think most people would agree that GRAY and GREY should be in the dictionary, why not KHAT and QAT?

Not really true.. it would just force competitive scrabble players to focus on different lists of obscure words.

If you make the U worth more and the Q worth less for example, people will focus less on QAID, QI and UMIAQ, and more on ULU, URUS, MUUMUU and JUGULUM.

That seems like a flawed way to judge the amount of skill in something. You sometimes see the best team in the NFL lose to the worst team 38-13 in a single match, but sure enough even over a short (in terms of data points) football season, the best teams usually rise to the top.

You should come play some live Tournament Scrabble! We need more people. I assure you there are people at these tournaments that will demonstrate to you that it's a skill game. Maybe it's not chess -- once you become a mediocre tournament Scrabble player, you'll be able to beat the top players in the world maybe once every 20-30 matches due to luck, but they'll do a pretty good job of crushing you the other 95% of the time.

'fraid not sir: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.asp

Windows has a hosts file too.

Really? His 'stock' was hovering around $6-$7 on Intrade right up to the election, well past the point where Nate Silver and everyone else knew Obama was a lock barring something catastrophic. That means you could have made 30%+ returns on money in just a few weeks. If anything, Obama was undervalued at Intrade.

Not that I think this wouldn't be a brilliant strategy -- you are right, to buy up all of the Intrade shares for a candidate would probably be peanuts to an American political campaign, but I just don't think Obama's camp actually, you know, did it.

Which article?

Could you link to the edit history? Usually that only happens when people add stuff to lists that doesn't have it's own wikipedia page (usually complete with external links to a website).

Seriously though, link it. I'd be happy to help correct the error.

Depends on what your kid is correcting? I've never seen ClueBot or XLinkBot eat a spelling/grammar correction, even from an IP with a single edit.

If your kid is adding "Bobby was here!!" or Facebook links to random articles, they tend to do a pretty good job of reverting his edits.

What was the foundation and background that your consider necessary? I'm actually that guy right now (as long as we're all being brutally honest). I've been thrust into this role and I don't know what the fuck. Have any good books I should read, college degrees I might be missing? Should I get a PMP cert?

Seriously it's only a matter of time before they get me but I figure I should try to learn something in case I ever want to do this again (i don't).

Best search engine? Have you forgotten AltaVista?

That monitor is not in a laptop, that's why.

I love my iPhone, but it would be extremely cool if I could pop out the battery, mostly because that means I could keep a 2nd charged one in my bag in the event that I used it heavily and drained it in the middle of the day.

When (if?) the day comes where portable batteries can power a system (phone/laptop/whatever) for a solid 12-16 hour day, then I'll be totally behind sealed-in batteries -- I can always plug the thing in at night, and I don't mind deconstructing it or sending it in once every 3 years.