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.

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 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.

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.

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?