2.5.1. You agree not to seek to obtain a Trademark or any similar restrictive right to any portion of the Covered Materials contributed by others.
2.5.2. If you are contributing material that you hold a patent, trademark, or similar restrictive right to, You agree that this License also provides a world-wide, perpetual, royalty free License to use that patent, trademark or other restrictive right in conjunction with the Covered Materials to any person who comes in to possession of any copy of the Covered Materials.
2.5.3. Excluded from the provision of Section 2.5.2. is the following exception: If you are the Contributor of a trademark used in the title of the work, you may restrict the use of that trademark in the title of the work to versions of the work that are exact duplicates of the version You published. You may require that the publisher of any modified version of the Covered Materials You contributed change the title of the resulting derivative work to remove your trademark. A notice indicating that you are exercising this right must appear in the version of the Covered Materials You publish.
This section seems to contradict their D20 licence. The OGL gives us a Royalty-free licence to re-use any trademark freely, except in the title.
I assume the intent of 2.5.3 was to allow "worldbooks" for trademarked terms (such as Forgotten Realms, AD&D, Traveller, Magic: The Gathering, etc). They may be under the illusion that this will cover their D20 Trademark games. I don't believe it does, however, since as long as the trademark is not part of the title, it is not excluded from 2.5.2, and can be freely used in any other part of the work.
So we can easily get around 2.5.3 by removing the trademarked item from the title, and making it part of the cover design, as long as that trademark is used anywhere else in the original work!
How can anyone prefer D&D based games to the beauty of GURPS and similar systems (Heroes, White Wolf, etc.) The concept of generating character statistics randomly (used by D&D and others), leads to huge gulfs in character abilities, and favours cheating over roleplaying.
I own and have played a lot of systems over the years, from Toon to Rolemaster, and I think that GURPS is the best sytem I've come across. The best thing about it is that a cut-down set of the basic rules is available from Steve Jackson Games as a free download in PDF.
Well, we can but hope that some students in this course put some effort into developing a top-quality open source 3d game engine.
I'm surprised that no one in the industry has done this yet. Rather than cross-licensing and paying huge royalties back and forth, all the companies could combine their efforts and just play "feature race", along with spending more of their time on storyboard. Games would get better and cheaper (to make, at least).
The biggest effect I can see this "innovation" having is to prevent the ntfsdos.sys driver and linux ntfs support from being able to work, at least for a while. Someone will presumably have to reverse engineer the hash function? Perhaps not for simple read access.
As far as space saving goes, what if your drive doesn't have a lot of duplication? Won't this database of signatures take up a significant amount of space? How big are these signatures going to be? If they are a fixed size, what happens with very small files, like some ini files that are less than 1K in size? I can see circumstances where this feature will actually increase disk usage.
No, the linking is only happening within a specific filesystem. Different disk means a different filesystem. My reading of this is that this linking would be invisible to all user-level programs, it is simply built into the filesystem.
Indeed, there's no reason you can't have an "Anonymous" smart card. Something that identifies an entity, but has no way of linking that net entity with the real person using it, much the same way as a PGP key can show that the "Politas" writing this message is the same "Politas" that wrote that message last week.
Age verification should be a simple case of going to an agency, showing some ID and recieving a digital certificate on your smart card from them. This should be able to be done without them reading any info from your card.
As for the form factor, I think that the credit-card size is a necessary part of smart cards, otherwise they will never get widespread adoption.
The smart card will only accept requests from a reader that you certify (via PIN/whatever). There should be some system of multiple PINs to allow progressively higher levels of trust.
Alternatively, maybe the card could run a secure web server, and force all devices to communicate via SHTML, asking for input from user.
I'm not a security/privacy expert, but I'm sure there must be some way to keep everyone happy.
Shrink-wrapped software would seem to be goods, since there is a physical object being handed over, but EULA software does seem more like a service. Mind you, I do recall seeing on some installation media something along the lines of "this disk and the accompanying software remains the property of...", so it seems in some cases they're renting us the physical object too, which strengthens the case for services.
With purely electronic transactions, where nothing physical changes hands, the case is pretty good for services rather than goods.
In which case, what is GPLed software? In this case, the licence is free, so any tariff based on a percentage of the cost of the service (or good) would be nothing! Yet another reason to use open source software.
Aside: Damn! Your post wasn't there when I started mine on the same topic
...an EU proposal that would reclassify electronically delivered software as a service. Software has traditionally been classified as goods.
It sounds like an interesting proposal, given that (non-free) software is licensed rather than sold, in a purely electronic software transaction, it would seem reasonable to treat it as a service.
What I'm curious about is what governing authority gets the tax money from tariffs like this. If it is the national government of the seller, then what difference does it make to less developed nations anyway? (Assuming they aren't doing relatively more selling, which could be totally wrong, considering that writing software requires a lot less capital than many "high-tech" economic activities.)
The difference it makes to the less developed nations is that Tariffs make for higher prices.
Writing software may not require huge capital, but it does require an expensive infrastructure, needed to train or attract those coders.
There are times when I fear that there is no point trying to re-educate the world. "Hacking" is now so firmly established in the minds of the general populace as meaning cracking, that maybe we need to just give up and decide on a new name for monkeying around with computers. It's sad, but linguistic inertia can be very difficult to overcome.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a product that lets you run MS' Active Server Pages on a Linux web server.
Basically, it means that you can let your users use Frontpage without worrying about what's supported and what isn't.
When I try to follow that link, it just comes up blank.
This section seems to contradict their D20 licence. The OGL gives us a Royalty-free licence to re-use any trademark freely, except in the title.
I assume the intent of 2.5.3 was to allow "worldbooks" for trademarked terms (such as Forgotten Realms, AD&D, Traveller, Magic: The Gathering, etc). They may be under the illusion that this will cover their D20 Trademark games. I don't believe it does, however, since as long as the trademark is not part of the title, it is not excluded from 2.5.2, and can be freely used in any other part of the work.
So we can easily get around 2.5.3 by removing the trademarked item from the title, and making it part of the cover design, as long as that trademark is used anywhere else in the original work!
How can anyone prefer D&D based games to the beauty of GURPS and similar systems (Heroes, White Wolf, etc.) The concept of generating character statistics randomly (used by D&D and others), leads to huge gulfs in character abilities, and favours cheating over roleplaying.
I own and have played a lot of systems over the years, from Toon to Rolemaster, and I think that GURPS is the best sytem I've come across. The best thing about it is that a cut-down set of the basic rules is available from Steve Jackson Games as a free download in PDF.
Well, we can but hope that some students in this course put some effort into developing a top-quality open source 3d game engine.
I'm surprised that no one in the industry has done this yet. Rather than cross-licensing and paying huge royalties back and forth, all the companies could combine their efforts and just play "feature race", along with spending more of their time on storyboard. Games would get better and cheaper (to make, at least).
The biggest effect I can see this "innovation" having is to prevent the ntfsdos.sys driver and linux ntfs support from being able to work, at least for a while. Someone will presumably have to reverse engineer the hash function? Perhaps not for simple read access.
As far as space saving goes, what if your drive doesn't have a lot of duplication? Won't this database of signatures take up a significant amount of space? How big are these signatures going to be? If they are a fixed size, what happens with very small files, like some ini files that are less than 1K in size? I can see circumstances where this feature will actually increase disk usage.
No, the linking is only happening within a specific filesystem. Different disk means a different filesystem. My reading of this is that this linking would be invisible to all user-level programs, it is simply built into the filesystem.
Indeed, there's no reason you can't have an "Anonymous" smart card. Something that identifies an entity, but has no way of linking that net entity with the real person using it, much the same way as a PGP key can show that the "Politas" writing this message is the same "Politas" that wrote that message last week.
Age verification should be a simple case of going to an agency, showing some ID and recieving a digital certificate on your smart card from them. This should be able to be done without them reading any info from your card.
As for the form factor, I think that the credit-card size is a necessary part of smart cards, otherwise they will never get widespread adoption.
The smart card will only accept requests from a reader that you certify (via PIN/whatever). There should be some system of multiple PINs to allow progressively higher levels of trust.
Alternatively, maybe the card could run a secure web server, and force all devices to communicate via SHTML, asking for input from user.
I'm not a security/privacy expert, but I'm sure there must be some way to keep everyone happy.
Speaking of Asimov, I saw a preview for The Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams at the last movie I saw. It looked pretty good.
Shrink-wrapped software would seem to be goods, since there is a physical object being handed over, but EULA software does seem more like a service. Mind you, I do recall seeing on some installation media something along the lines of "this disk and the accompanying software remains the property of...", so it seems in some cases they're renting us the physical object too, which strengthens the case for services.
With purely electronic transactions, where nothing physical changes hands, the case is pretty good for services rather than goods.
In which case, what is GPLed software? In this case, the licence is free, so any tariff based on a percentage of the cost of the service (or good) would be nothing! Yet another reason to use open source software.
Aside: Damn! Your post wasn't there when I started mine on the same topic
It sounds like an interesting proposal, given that (non-free) software is licensed rather than sold, in a purely electronic software transaction, it would seem reasonable to treat it as a service.
The difference it makes to the less developed nations is that Tariffs make for higher prices.
Writing software may not require huge capital, but it does require an expensive infrastructure, needed to train or attract those coders.
There are times when I fear that there is no point trying to re-educate the world. "Hacking" is now so firmly established in the minds of the general populace as meaning cracking, that maybe we need to just give up and decide on a new name for monkeying around with computers. It's sad, but linguistic inertia can be very difficult to overcome.
Have you considered that your cable modem may be the cause of your problems?