Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by floren on Friday September 21, 2018 @06:10PM
(#18043034)
> And they know something much more important: every one of these people was affluent enough (or knew someone affluent enough) to spend a three-digit sum on a puzzle in the middle of the worst economic downturn in living memory.
Let's not hyperventilate too much; on any given weekend you can find people who hover around the poverty line spending hundreds of dollars on "toys", although those toys will probably continue to provide value and enjoyment significantly longer than this dumb puzzle.
Also, I would hardly consider the Great Depression to be out of "living memory", and are we still going to say we're "in the middle of" a huge economic downturn in 2028 just to support whatever histrionic point we need to make that day?
Edit: Either the (2009) wasn't in the title when I first clicked, or I just missed the damn thing. Thanks for pointing that out, Shaanie
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by autokad on Friday September 21, 2018 @04:18PM
(#18042366)
the domain is registered by [email protected], which registered over 500 domains, 2 of them marked malicious. the cisco umbrella risk of the domain is 77, medium
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by vortico on Friday September 21, 2018 @05:00PM
(#18042618)
Puzzle companies need a lot of trust from their customers for hobbyists to buy them and spend hours working on them. To solve this problem, is there a community review site for puzzles without spoilers? Solvers would want to avoid Googling around, since the solution could accidentally be revealed, making the $200 purchase worthless.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by parliament32 on Friday September 21, 2018 @06:33PM
(#18043171)
It was an example of seemingly innocuous compliance with "please provide us with your personal info, we promise we won't do anything bad with it!" leading to horrific consequences.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by invalidusernam3 on Friday September 21, 2018 @05:26PM
(#18042781)
My brother adopted a dog a few years back named Isis (after the Egyptian god). Even though Isis now had a very different connotation, they felt bad to change the dog's name. They recently adopted another dog which I jokingly recommended they name Al Qaeda.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by seszett on Saturday September 22, 2018 @03:59AM
(#18045020)
I didn't know the name "Isis" had actually seen its popularity affected that much in the US? It still feels like a beautiful classical name to me, but then we never used the English name "ISIS" for the organisation, here in France.
It's a shame that the multimillenial name of an ancient god could be ruined for some people by an organization that lasted less than a decade, I hope this effect doesn't last.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by cuboidGoat on Saturday September 22, 2018 @06:48AM
(#18045449)
"Al Qaeda" can be translated as "The Foundation", and there is apparently some discussion about Bin Laden being an Asimov fan and basing the name of his organisation on the Foundation Series. Also, I am reliably informed that wiping your Al Qaeda has apparently become slang in some places.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by MithrilTuxedo on Friday September 21, 2018 @05:31PM
(#18042805)
The Pentagon didn't start calling it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) until 2017. Prior to then, it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Worth noting that the Islamic State has preferred being called ISIS. I think calling them ISIL was being done in part to annoy them.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by jpatokal on Friday September 21, 2018 @05:57PM
(#18042960)
No, it's more to do with the ambiguity of the Arabic original ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām. The "Sham" bit here can be refer either to the present day state of Syria, hence ISIS; or the historical greater Syria aka Levant, hence ISIL. However, the group internally dropped the qualified some time ago, now it's just Islamic State, with the obvious implication that it's the global state for true believers.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by probably_wrong on Saturday September 22, 2018 @06:20AM
(#18045380)
There was a tweet about the poor NSA intern who would be tasked with the code to identify whether "is" referred to the organization or the verb. The paranoid side of me always assumed that the rebranding to Isis could have been suggested by the Pentagon to news organizations for that reason.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by psergeant on Saturday September 22, 2018 @04:59AM
(#18045169)
Parts of the Thames that flow through Oxford are called “The Isis” (presumably after the Goddess), and there are (or at least were) a good number of Oxford things called that
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by gweinberg on Friday September 21, 2018 @05:10PM
(#18042670)
Yes, there are a lot of people named Isis. It used to be possible to get a Coke that said 'Share a Coke with Isis' on it, but i think they stopped making them.
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by justaguyhere on Friday September 21, 2018 @05:18PM
(#18042734)
Maybe he is paranoid, but it is his information, so he has every right to be! If only more people are like him, we wouldn't have all these multi billion dollar companies doing whatever they feel like with their users' info
Re:Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
by ZoomStop on Friday September 21, 2018 @05:39PM
(#18042851)
His rationale that the accumulated mailing list would be highly valuable is not wrong. The idea such a list would be sold by a luxury toy company looking for cash in hard economic times isn't hard to fathom. And this is before robo calls ruined our cell phones, back then you could keep your spam calls to almost zero if you were smart about giving your number out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0sCGotCw2Y
The Mr Puzzle channel as a whole is highly recommended if you're into puzzles of this sort.
Or even if you're not, I found that video highly entertaining. :)
Let's not hyperventilate too much; on any given weekend you can find people who hover around the poverty line spending hundreds of dollars on "toys", although those toys will probably continue to provide value and enjoyment significantly longer than this dumb puzzle.
Also, I would hardly consider the Great Depression to be out of "living memory", and are we still going to say we're "in the middle of" a huge economic downturn in 2028 just to support whatever histrionic point we need to make that day?
Edit: Either the (2009) wasn't in the title when I first clicked, or I just missed the damn thing. Thanks for pointing that out, Shaanie
If you were 5 in 1938, you'd be 85 today. And your memories of the Depression probably wouldn't be that good.
The older you were in the Depression, the more dead you are now.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/12/isis-update.html
WTF.
It's a shame that the multimillenial name of an ancient god could be ruined for some people by an organization that lasted less than a decade, I hope this effect doesn't last.
It was a pretty big deal (huge backing by carriers, phone manufacturers, and credit card companies). They changed the name to Softcard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...
Worth noting that the Islamic State has preferred being called ISIS. I think calling them ISIL was being done in part to annoy them.
Wikipedia goes into all this in detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Islamic_State_of_...
If you read the article, you will see that the author did exactly that.