The part that is broken about it is the sixty years.
Because this is not a copyright issue, there is no sixty year timeframe involved.
Once a work of art has been around long enough to become part of our collective culture, it should belong to no one.
As a game designer, I would like to remind you that in the eyes of the law, for a very good reason, game designs are not art.
Incidentally, Scrabble was clonable the first day it was released. You just had to use a different name and color the board differently. This whole thing you're on about is completely mis-aimed. The real problem here is just that Scrabulous was visually similar and had a similar name.
Spend less time worrying about what should or should not be, and more time understanding the situation correctly.
You think wrong. It's not a copyright issue at all, and there is no time frame attached at all. The issue is that Scrabulous was a brand ripoff. Game clones are okay. Brand clones aren't.
Copyright and trademark are about as related as boats and cars. Please put more effort into debate. It's really annoying for a debate about cars to have people keep saying "but the problem is the water level in the lake." Trademarks do not, and should not, expire. It doesn't matter if Microsoft has been around for 80 years; nobody else should ever be able to claim to be Microsoft. This is a trademark issue because the company needs to be able to protect the brand. Scrabble clones can be released. Scrabble, the brand, is still S+R / Hasbro's property.
If you don't understand the difference between copyright/trademark, or between a product and a brand, you really need to stay out of discussions like this.
No brokenness? You can't copy a game that you played before you turned ten when you're an old man, and you say that's not broken?
Uh, sure you can. You just can't steal their title or artwork.
Copyrights were not meant to be extended across generations.
I'd be a lot more inclined to take you seriously if you were at least getting the right branch of the law. This is not and never was a copyright issue.
They were meant to protect innovators for part of their lives to generate income
No, that's patents. Copyright has nothing to do with innovation, and this is neither a copyright nor a patent issue. Please settle down until you have at least a basic familiarity with the laws or case in question. This is a waste of time.
Nobody, just like Shakespeare and The Odessey. A basic familiarity with the law might help you here. Nobody ever filed for or was granted protection on those items, and if they had been, they'd be several thousands of years expired by now.
and if all you have to do is change the design, why isn't there a boardgame out there at wal-mart for $5 made in china that has alphabetical discs, instead of tiles, with the same basic rules as scrabble?
Brand recognition. People periodically try to replace Scrabble. It happens every several years.
the only game i can recall having 'dupes' are kismet 'the modern game of yacht' and yahtzee.
This is primarily an indication that you don't know much about the games market. Games that perenially get copied include Uno, Sorry, Yahtzee, Connect 4, Mille Bornes, Scrabble, Rubik's Cube, Battleship, and on and on the list goes.
Perhaps you don't understand market forces. Clones aren't absent because they're illegal. They're absent because nobody buys them.
You can't copyright the idea of how you play the game, but you can copyright the board artwork.
There is nothing broken about this. At all. This is, in fact, exactly as it should be. Otherwise, all someone would have to do to duplicate my game would be to change the title.
Game designs and rules are unprotected. Titles, presentation, artwork and appearances are protected. This is ideal. No brokenness here.
Scrabulous was taken down because the name and visual presentation were too similar. Game mechanics are explicitly not protected by any branch of law. (In fact, I warned them in email six months ago that this was coming, and that they should rename/reskin their app.)
Hasbro may try to sue again, but from here, if they do, it's barratry. Wordscraper is now safe.
how exactly can you show work that you've done in a professional capacity to a prospective employer without violating the privacy of the company for which the code was written?
Write new samples
Request permission to publish snippets from employers
Write more than just the code your job pays you for
1) Actually, there are quite a few good reasons for this, largely around the complete elimination of mutexing and locks. Just because you don't understand the purpose doesn't mean there wasn't one.
2) Oooooh, a language is faulty because it has a syntax with which you are not familiar. Immediately kill all non-Java clones!
3) They're just lists of numbers; they're neither ASCII nor Latin1. There is unicode parsing in the XMERL module.
Please wait until you know a language before criticizing it.
Take a look at the rate of growth in spam between the two nations, extrapolate two years, and you have your answer.
The US may have the lead in the spam race, but China's spam is growing exponentially, and ours is shrinking. They've never prosecuted a spammer.
Gee, why could it be important to shut down a corrupt registrar under circumstances like those? Hm. Figure it out. Shouldn't take you much more than 30 seconds.
Varies according to the application, the environment, the tools used to build it. Something which can distribute both database and web load across all nodes (such as you'd get in an Erlang, Twisted Python or Mozart-Oz setup) is a good first step.
If you have twelve servers, they're probably in three datacenters. Lots of naive setups are webserver, webserver, webserver, database, repeat across location, or things like that.
Until SSD drives cost only around 10-25% more than a regular drive of the same capacity, they're not replacing them at all.
Mechanical random seek time is murder on certain business segments, particularly hosting, a vertical large enough that it made other seemingly cost-ineffective performance focussed storage technologies like SAN work. Between that and the seriously dropped cost of electricity, I think you'll find there's already a large viable market around the 3x cost line.
Considering that hosting has been buying solid state drives for years already, this one seems pretty clear cut.
But claiming there is some conspiracy to mod down their opinions is a bit lame.
I never made any such claim.
All I said was that individuals with axes to grind would willfully ignore what those moderations meant in the desire to downplay things which went against their beliefs. It happens all the time, whether you want to face it or not, and it's much less common when you mention it. I wanted people to see what I had to say, so I mentioned it.
Mostly people are modded down when they deserve it for bringing up the same factually incorrect or emotive view that has been discussed over and over again.
This is a straw man, as I am not one of those people.
For the most part people that bring up the moderation system are people either trying to manipulate it by so doing
Yep. I brought up bad moderation in the effort to stave it off. Unfortunately I seem to have picked up a critic who's reading things that aren't there.
Sometimes, you just can't get away from the loons on slashdot.:(
Starting post by making claims about what the GPL "did" to the BSD license in some sort of anthropomorphism
If you're preparing for troll and flamebait mods, then you probably at least have an inkling that your view is both inflammatory and reflects a poor understanding of those licenses as they are commonly used by the OSS community.
Or expect that from others in combination with perjorative moderation. Believe it or not, someone can understand the issues involved and still disagree with you.
How is this any different than what GPL did to BSD? Show up, act like you invented the term "free software", impose a bunch of draconian restrictions that didn't used to exist and loudly tell everyone that your choice of strictures does good for the community?
Preparing for inappropriate troll and flamebait mods. It's still a legitimate question.
Slashdot Mirror
Because this is not a copyright issue, there is no sixty year timeframe involved.
As a game designer, I would like to remind you that in the eyes of the law, for a very good reason, game designs are not art.
Incidentally, Scrabble was clonable the first day it was released. You just had to use a different name and color the board differently. This whole thing you're on about is completely mis-aimed. The real problem here is just that Scrabulous was visually similar and had a similar name.
Spend less time worrying about what should or should not be, and more time understanding the situation correctly.
You think wrong. It's not a copyright issue at all, and there is no time frame attached at all. The issue is that Scrabulous was a brand ripoff. Game clones are okay. Brand clones aren't.
Copyright and trademark are about as related as boats and cars. Please put more effort into debate. It's really annoying for a debate about cars to have people keep saying "but the problem is the water level in the lake." Trademarks do not, and should not, expire. It doesn't matter if Microsoft has been around for 80 years; nobody else should ever be able to claim to be Microsoft. This is a trademark issue because the company needs to be able to protect the brand. Scrabble clones can be released. Scrabble, the brand, is still S+R / Hasbro's property.
If you don't understand the difference between copyright/trademark, or between a product and a brand, you really need to stay out of discussions like this.
Uh, sure you can. You just can't steal their title or artwork.
I'd be a lot more inclined to take you seriously if you were at least getting the right branch of the law. This is not and never was a copyright issue.
No, that's patents. Copyright has nothing to do with innovation, and this is neither a copyright nor a patent issue. Please settle down until you have at least a basic familiarity with the laws or case in question. This is a waste of time.
Nobody, just like Shakespeare and The Odessey. A basic familiarity with the law might help you here. Nobody ever filed for or was granted protection on those items, and if they had been, they'd be several thousands of years expired by now.
Brand recognition. People periodically try to replace Scrabble. It happens every several years.
This is primarily an indication that you don't know much about the games market. Games that perenially get copied include Uno, Sorry, Yahtzee, Connect 4, Mille Bornes, Scrabble, Rubik's Cube, Battleship, and on and on the list goes.
Perhaps you don't understand market forces. Clones aren't absent because they're illegal. They're absent because nobody buys them.
You watch too much law and order. The fruit of the poisonous tree applies only to evidence gathering by law enforcement officials. Read a book.
There is nothing broken about this. At all. This is, in fact, exactly as it should be. Otherwise, all someone would have to do to duplicate my game would be to change the title.
Game designs and rules are unprotected. Titles, presentation, artwork and appearances are protected. This is ideal. No brokenness here.
Scrabulous was taken down because the name and visual presentation were too similar. Game mechanics are explicitly not protected by any branch of law. (In fact, I warned them in email six months ago that this was coming, and that they should rename/reskin their app.)
Hasbro may try to sue again, but from here, if they do, it's barratry. Wordscraper is now safe.
I'd rather code in beach sand with sticks than Java.
Real engineers can work in any language. ... except Java.
Spammers use fake headlines to trick people into downloads all the time. I get notices of fake chinese earthquakes like twice a day.
Why is this news?
1) Actually, there are quite a few good reasons for this, largely around the complete elimination of mutexing and locks. Just because you don't understand the purpose doesn't mean there wasn't one.
2) Oooooh, a language is faulty because it has a syntax with which you are not familiar. Immediately kill all non-Java clones!
3) They're just lists of numbers; they're neither ASCII nor Latin1. There is unicode parsing in the XMERL module.
Please wait until you know a language before criticizing it.
Way to explain the joke to death, sherlock.
Translation: with the only reason to buy pre-removed for your convenience.
You obviously got the model without the porn key, then.
Take a look at the rate of growth in spam between the two nations, extrapolate two years, and you have your answer.
The US may have the lead in the spam race, but China's spam is growing exponentially, and ours is shrinking. They've never prosecuted a spammer.
Gee, why could it be important to shut down a corrupt registrar under circumstances like those? Hm. Figure it out. Shouldn't take you much more than 30 seconds.
Two years, if it keeps progressing as it has lately. Maybe less - surely the money will start ramping up soon.
Varies according to the application, the environment, the tools used to build it. Something which can distribute both database and web load across all nodes (such as you'd get in an Erlang, Twisted Python or Mozart-Oz setup) is a good first step.
If you have twelve servers, they're probably in three datacenters. Lots of naive setups are webserver, webserver, webserver, database, repeat across location, or things like that.
Considering that hosting has been buying solid state drives for years already, this one seems pretty clear cut.
When I was your age, this joke was still funny.
All I said was that individuals with axes to grind would willfully ignore what those moderations meant in the desire to downplay things which went against their beliefs. It happens all the time, whether you want to face it or not, and it's much less common when you mention it. I wanted people to see what I had to say, so I mentioned it.This is a straw man, as I am not one of those people.Yep. I brought up bad moderation in the effort to stave it off. Unfortunately I seem to have picked up a critic who's reading things that aren't there.
Sometimes, you just can't get away from the loons on slashdot.
How is this any different than what GPL did to BSD? Show up, act like you invented the term "free software", impose a bunch of draconian restrictions that didn't used to exist and loudly tell everyone that your choice of strictures does good for the community?
Preparing for inappropriate troll and flamebait mods. It's still a legitimate question.
Because we don't want to read anyone complaining about this guy. Surprise: you're a Roland too.