Posts matching tags 'scrabble'
2008/1/13
Hasbro take legal action to shut down Scrabulous. I'm surprised it took them this long. I wonder whether they'll be smart enough to come to a deal, either acquiring Scrabulous or licensing it in return for a share of the (considerable) ad revenue, or whether they'll just sue it into oblivion to teach them a lesson, undoubtedly cheered on by the Ayn Rand fanboys loudly defending anything they may choose to do in the comments.
The Scrabulous servers are in India, which may be hard to shut down, though Facebook could block the application immediately. And the authors should probably avoid any country with an extradition treaty with the US unless this is settled.
2007/12/12
Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word of the Year is w00t:
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay": "w00t! I won the contest!"The article gives the etymology of "w00t" as an acronym for "we owned the other team"; I agree with Cory Doctorow that this seems like a back-formation of the word. I suspect that the word comes from the UNIX superuser account name "root", via hacker/cracker culture (as in "I've acquired root privilege (on some machine)" -> "root" -> "w00t").
Incidentally, w00t is probably the only word in the dictionary with digits as letters (though please correct me if I'm wrong); which means that Scrabble players may soon need the L33T Tiles.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]