I don't buy it, with driverless shuttles/cabs all over the place there would be tons of people fucking/doing drugs/pissing/vandalizing in these (expensive) things.
You'll damn well need a user account and probably have 24/7 cameras on you if these things ever get off the ground.
Of course.
Vegas will do something like this.
Florida -4 -110
Louisville +4 -110
What this means is if you want to bet on either Louisville +4 OR Florida -4, you have to risk $1.10 for each dollar you'd win.
So their goal is to get something like (for example) $11000 bet on each side, guaranteeing them a $1000 profit no matter what happens.
It's just like the internet, you stop a fight with trolls by ignoring them.
I figured you were trolling but holy crap, that really might be the worst written Wikipedia article ever. It reads like a 5th grade book report thrown together at the last minute.
It's not evil or immoral software, it's just kind of shoddy, crashy stuff put out by an overworked and understaffed team. I'll happily take a paycheck while I bust ass trying to improve it, but I'm not going to give it 5 stars on Amazon because it doesn't deserve them. I'm pretty sure even if it was amazing, that it would be a conflict of interest to review it.
I was asked to do it by one of my employers, but refused on ethical grounds. So the idea exists in marketing departments, I'll tell you that much.
Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.
Oh sure it will, there is almost certainly some percentage of fatties that are partially kept in check by the shame of ordering multiple day's worth of food from a skinny teenager. Once you're ordering from an nonjudging robot it will be much socially easier to ask for 3 burgers and 2 orders of fries.
It will be like the guys that would never set foot in a physical porn shop, but have no problem purchasing it online.
My issue is that the exceptions to the excluded words are arbitrary. If you choose a particular spelling (especially different romanizations of Chinese words) of a particular foreign word, there's no saying whether or not it will be in the Scrabble dictionary. Some abbreviations are in the Scrabble dictionary, but not all of them. And so on...
My point is that this is a problem with dictionaries in general, not simply the Scrabble dictionary. The Scrabble dictionary doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's compiled from real world source dictionaries. Those dictionaries (which are largely descriptive) have lexicographers and other academics who decide which romanizations to include based on what exists in actual usage. I mean SOOSHEE is a romanization of the Japanese "sushi", but its not in English dictionaries because no one uses it. But people do use both QAT and KHAT when referring to North African drug usage.
It's the arbitrary nature of the special "allowed" exceptions that I dislike about the Scrabble dictionary. The Scrabble dictionary introduces the "lawyer games" by making the rules arcane instead of simple and straightforward.
I don't see how it invites lawyering at all. It's a concrete list of allowed words. Either a word is in there or it's not. I'd venture that played to the rules in the box, and with an official Scrabble dictionary, it's one of the least amibigious/rules lawyery board games on the market.
I guess I don't see how you think anything is made simple and straightforward by using a "real" dictionary as you originally posted. Either that dictionary will be so comprehensive that it will frustrate you with lots of romanizations, or it will be so abridged that you'll be frustrated when you play some word that is very common in your field of study but perhaps rare in general discourse, and you find it's not valid because it was left out to keep the page count down.
Duplicate kind of stinks if you enjoy the competitive and tactical aspects of Scrabble. It's a neat word learning/anagramming game though.
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.
I generally play with a non-scrabble-fanatic judge instead of a dictionary to determine word correctness. Sorry, "Qat" is not a word.
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?
By updating the scoring to match with the current dictionary the game would reward people who have a good general vocabulary instead of those with a specialised scrabble vocabulary.
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
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell