Weren't they also all named George?

There's 8 color groups in the game, so unless you're playing a 2-player game (in which case there is no reason to ever trade unless your opponent is making a stupidly bad play), have 3 color groups at all makes your victory a foregone conclusion.

Not to mention, how do you get the first 3 color groups? luck, luck, luck.

The "good" board games tend to take under an hour to play, and where Monopoly lags for about 2 hours after the winner is a foregone conclusion, the "good" games come to a sudden end just as it becomes clear who will win.

By "good" game, take a look at classics like Catan, Carcassonne and Puerto Rico (which are all about the same complexity as Monopoly yet have a lot more strategy involved than luck) or less well known ones like Power Grid, and Ticket to Ride.

If you want a light little party game with lots of social interaction and bartering, take a look at Bohnaza. And if you like rolling dice, Formula De is hard to beat.

Bright out Monopoly if you want to spoil an evening.

If you conservatively play, you just slowly loose your money to the guy with all the buildings!

Actaully...wow that is insightful. Ford "played" conservatively and so had a much smaller but more stable position. GM "played" agressively, was much larger and more powerful -- and unstable. And then when the economy hit a little bump, Ford won -- well actually the "bank" slapped Ford in the face and emptied the coffers in front of GM.

It may mirror real life, but as a game, it's just a horrible design.

You say it right in your strategy...you take a chance...you hope you can survive a few rounds.

Why not have everyone roll the dice, whoever rolls highest wins the came. There's an equal amount of strategy and luck in that "variant". (And fwiw, I usually win because I'm more stubborn and people get bored and make stupid trades just to move things along -- what a great game mechanic).

Yet people in America think Monopoly is the ultimate board game. But deep down they know you're right, so they hate board games -- if monopoly is so boring, all board games must be boring. It's a shame because sitting down around a good game is a great social activity which is almost unheard of in the US. The US board game companies would rather sell another copy of Monopoly than something good...I guess that's typical of American business so somehow appropriate.

Why is a game where the main strategy is "pray I get the roll I need" considering such a great game by American? People buy a new edition, play it once, remember how much it sucks and put it on the shelf for the cycle to repeat in 5-10 years.

There's so many amazing board games out there that are about the same complexity as Monopoly but actually fun (Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne for example).

In my 4th year "Computer Networks" course that was a final exam question except it was the school's T1 line (hey that was fast back then) vs an airplane full of CD-R's.

The airplane won easily on total bandwidth, but the Doom2 ping times sucked.

Try taking a break from coding every week or so for a shower.

Shouldn't IE itself and microsoft.com be on any decent malware list?

Before they can work on a linux driver, they need to wait for someone to develop suitable linux nanolaser fonts. It should be available any year now.

"They" say being slightly overweight leads to a longer life than "normal" weight. Perhaps the reality is "they've" defined normal a little too low.

But when you want to upgrade your iMac, you have to pay for a new screen to replace the perfectly good one with the old computer. And if you want multiple machines on a KVM, you're screwed. For me, the Mini is underpowered, the PowerMac is over priced, and I will not buy a computer with an integrated screen. The day they release something comparable to an iMac but without an integrated screen and a price that reflects the missing screen is the day I switch to mac.

Most of the people who will pay $29 for snow leopard paid apple for their hardware. How many vista users bought their hardware from microsoft?

I bought MS-DOS 6.0. It wiped out my hard drive. Then MS charged an extra $20 for the "upgrade" to 6.2 which doesn't wipe out hard drives (as often). Compared to that, Vista Ultimate was a bargain.