Chat Room: A multi-user environment were messenges between users are posted immediately to an interface that is shared by all users, typically using a dedicated document window that does not require refreshing and that is not specifically saved to a web-accessable permanent file.
An IRC Channel is a "chat room." And little kids who break computers for fun are "hackers." Welcome to the English language, we're adaptive, not proscribed.
And when a judge gives specific prohibitions, he'll likely be as wordy as possibe so that the poor pedophile's lawyer will interpet the rule as "don't go into any online thing where you can communicate with little boys."
I'm just going to have to stare at you blankly, since the last Apple I used was a IIe and I have no idea WTF "Mach" is.
And you're on slashdot?
Mach is the BSD layer that OS X runs on, licensed using the BSD license.
Contact me off-list or go to www.theFGA.com for a better way to use the OGL. WotC's FAQs are for people who create supplements and don't want to bother with a lawyer; they're far more restrictive than the actual OGL istself, in large part due to the d20STL.
Look up the arguments for "copyrightability of software" if you have Lexis. You won't find the same ones I listed, but you'll find what would probably be referenced by the plantiff's attorney to stop a "duplicate and sell" RPG.
It's really an academic exercise, though. Anyone with the artistic ability to re-create a whole RPG system without infringing on the clear copyrights RPGs do have (layout, expression, et al) has the artistic ability to just make an RPG distinct enough to stand on its own. And is probably smart enough to exploit whatever advantages they can find.
You could also subscribe to OGF-L at the opengamingfoundation.org website, and ask if anyone has the arguments.
Without so much as a phone call between the publisher and WotC, all of the following have become D&D-compatible RPGs:
Babylon 5
WarCraft
Everquest
Conan
Lone Wolf
Slayers
Traveller
Trinity (A failed product line from White Wolf!)
Judge Dredd
Stargate SG-1
Not to mention all of the new-RPGs that have a market they never would have reached without the OGL and the SRD:
Engel
Mutants & Masterminds
Dawnforge
Grim Tales
Arcana Unearthed
Darwin's World
Testament
Spycraft
. The OGL does exactly what Ryan Dancy said it would do: make more RPGs on the market, which means that those who want to write have a better chance of making a profit and those who just want to play have a MUCH wider range of choices.
And all this happened without a single red cent being passed from the producers of any game I mentioned to Wizards of the Coast, aside from the authors buying one copy of their books. (Which was unnecessary at the very start, and isn't necessary now if you open the book to check for chargen in the RPG shop.)
Comparing the OGL to MS's "Shared Source" program is as petty and wrongheaded as complaining that Apple's shoveling bullshit by not forcing Mach to become GPL.
Got a cite? I'd like to see something dicussing this.
I wish I did. Most of the conversation happened on the OGF-L listsev, which as long since degerated into an impotent group with no meaningful discussion and no archives.:(
Try making an RPG that's rules-identical to Storyteller 2.0. Watch how fast you wind up in court for "violation of copyright upon trade dress" or even the very untested "game as a character" theory. You can't copyright Monopoly or Football or Roleplaying Game, but there's enough credible legal theory to aruge that an RPG is complex enough to deserve copyright protection that, at the least, you'd have to go to court to fight it.
This is why I always found the d20 license to be bizarre. They can't actually stop people from making compatable works, or from indicating compatability so long as there's no confusion as to source, etc. You really don't get anything out of it. And yet people just keep on going for it. Weird.
Not all that weird, when you realize three very important things:
Most folk who try making indie RPGs are not wealthy enough to hire a lawyer to fight off a lawsuit. They have to be browbeaten to even hire one for a one-day review before publicaion.
The Open Gaming License is a trade where you agree not to bugger on about compatability, and in exchange you get to use *prewritten text* of the world's most popular RPG
The d20 license is only necessary if you use the OGL (which is a "get out of court free" pass), in that it gives you the right to use a registered trademark
Factor in the shrinking viability of the public domain due to MPAA/RIAA and the "software as art" crowd, and you've got a cottage industry that would much rather spend its dollars making RPGs than fighting lawsuits.
To say nothing of the commericial value of being able to use a specifically designed trademark that WotC markets as meaning "uses the same basic rules as D&D", and uses on every RPG book they print.
If you read the OGL carefully, you'll quickly realize that's a load of balls. Take special care to read the section on "product identity" which includes such things as creating fscking characters.
Product Identity means that you or WotC or White Wolf can seperate character from stat-block. You can make all the stat-blocks you want for all of the characers you want, and use WotC's system (pure or highly tweaked) to add all the stat-blocks you want.
You just can't write "Elminster on Slashdot" or "Geminidomino does Dragonlance" and point to the OGL to say "but you said it was open!"
(Oh, and WotC/Hasbro is pretty good about online bits. They assume that if you're sharing new rules you're using the OGL, and will tell you what you need to fix if you cross the line. And if you're not using rules, but just running a "fan-site" -- well, even back to WotC's inital purchase of TSR they were sane about it.)
No. They are too general to be trademarks, and you can't copyright single words.
In fact, you can't even copyright single rules. Whole games neatly put together--maybe. RPG books --yes. Single rules or names for rules? Not unless they're Exalted style "power of obscure poetry."
I have a feeling that archiving of broadcast television is against a whole bunch of laws, though my knowledge of American Law is nothing to speak up about.
It's not.
I'm an american, not a lawyer, but if I was told that my archive of VHS tapes that were broadcasted that I only watch in my home was somehow illegal, I'd fight the fine all the way to the Supreme Court.
Were I to sell or rebroadcast any of it without the permission of four or five corporate persons I'd be screwed, but keeping it for my own use is 100% AOK.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
Reading an ebook in the path:
Read it on a PDA. The thing is no more succeptable to being dropped in the tub than a book is.
Oh, and a properly done zero-DRM ebook should sell for about as much as a paper copy. DRM or poor quality would, of course, be acceptable if the price is comparably reduced.
Surprisingly, he does not realize that one of the advantages that a tank has is a low profile.
The same profile is had by dogs and horses. And yet humans still survive.
"Giant" walking robots could exist, but they would fit the same niche as WMDs, not tanks -- strategic displays of strength as psychological warfare, not open-field gun platforms.
OTOH, railgun equipped slow-moving mechs might replace the super-artillery role once played by battleships. Having a big gun you can fire from the sea is good and all, but one that you can move inland is even better. (Why the legs? To make it easier to set and brace the weapon. The thing would probably still have tracks for long-term movement.)
But how can anyone play a first person shooter on a gamepad? Absolute motion axis suck for aiming. Anyone who says otherwise is a console system apologist, and in denial.
EVERYONE sucks the same, though.
With PC FPS, you have the weenies who do nothing but play FPS games, and who can pick a pixel in the blink of an eye. They're simply not fun to play against -- nor fun to play as when your friends aren't.
Halo is great for multiplayer, because you sit there and game and no ammonut of practice with the game makes you wholly incapable of being beaten by you friend on the counch next to you.
The term you're looking for is "treasured almost equally", not "respected." Animistic tribes respected animal life more than you or I, and yet they still ate them.
But I can only hope that in the future, we can artifically generate food in a way without harming any life
Any "artificial" food source would qualify as life -- in fact, by the measure of "kill no living thing", you're not allowed to drink cold medicine.
fact whether it fits in with our narrow-minded version of intelligence and sentience
Communication is a rather good way to measure intelligence. Sure, that old tree MIGHT be able to do fractal equations in its head and compose epic ballads, but if there's not way for us to know that, then it's unreasonable for us not to treat it like a free-growing wood pile.
I differ with your position, but it's a free country, so we can have different positions on just about anything. However, the terms you're using to defend your position are simply wrong.
In your headlong rush to be clever you failed to notice, or deliberately avoided noticing, that bar codes cannot be read without being on the outside of something
RFID tags can be read by a bunch of folks for a bunch of reasons, but the "why" is relatively low. Wal-Mart could track your time in their store via the RFID tag in the shirt you bought there, but that'd only affect the portion of their customer base that buys shirts at Wal-Mart. They could do the exact same thing with random surveys and in-store video tracking, with the added benefit that no one gets wonkey.
The federal government could require RFID tags on all state IDs and data-mine the habits of every single citizen. But if they wanted to do that, they could do it via non-RFID identification cards too.
RFID isn't a boogyman. It's not a horrid violation of privacy. It's a less obtrusive bar-code whose worse abuses will be quickly checked by a cottage industry of chip-detectors and scanproof wallets.
Hopefully, atleast this will make people realize that animals should be given much the same right as humans
"An animal may have rights when it asks for them."
This may be a parahrased quote from a Supreme Court judge. If not, it's one that I'll wager they would agree with.
When your ape signs "please let me vote for president, I care about ecological progress" as interepted by someone without bias, and it can then sign "yes, I swear and understand" in court, it'll be able to win rights in a rather simple court.
But they can't. And so they don't have equal rights to humans.
OTOH, it's entirely civilized to kill humans. It's all about WHEN and WHY that defines civlization, not the actual killing or lack thereof.
And I stand by my comment about RFID scanners everywhere.
Did you ever notice how we have bar scanners everywhere--no, wait. We only have them in a few places. Mostly stores, plus a few inventory & hospital places.
RFID is a technology in much the same vein, and most of its uses will be of the same type.
How many places would have a legit reason to keep track of who enters and leaves? 1000+ scans a day isn't that hard of a target to reach
1000 scans a day, assuming that you are "at home" for only eight hours of sleep a day means that you suffer 62 scans every hour. More often than once every minute for the entire day you pass a scanner.
Unless you work with scanners all day long (waitress, Wal-mart employee), it's not going to be an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure.
Chat Room: A multi-user environment were messenges between users are posted immediately to an interface that is shared by all users, typically using a dedicated document window that does not require refreshing and that is not specifically saved to a web-accessable permanent file.
An IRC Channel is a "chat room." And little kids who break computers for fun are "hackers." Welcome to the English language, we're adaptive, not proscribed.
And when a judge gives specific prohibitions, he'll likely be as wordy as possibe so that the poor pedophile's lawyer will interpet the rule as "don't go into any online thing where you can communicate with little boys."
I'm just going to have to stare at you blankly, since the last Apple I used was a IIe and I have no idea WTF "Mach" is.
And you're on slashdot?
Mach is the BSD layer that OS X runs on, licensed using the BSD license.
Contact me off-list or go to www.theFGA.com for a better way to use the OGL. WotC's FAQs are for people who create supplements and don't want to bother with a lawyer; they're far more restrictive than the actual OGL istself, in large part due to the d20STL.
Look up the arguments for "copyrightability of software" if you have Lexis. You won't find the same ones I listed, but you'll find what would probably be referenced by the plantiff's attorney to stop a "duplicate and sell" RPG.
It's really an academic exercise, though. Anyone with the artistic ability to re-create a whole RPG system without infringing on the clear copyrights RPGs do have (layout, expression, et al) has the artistic ability to just make an RPG distinct enough to stand on its own. And is probably smart enough to exploit whatever advantages they can find.
You could also subscribe to OGF-L at the opengamingfoundation.org website, and ask if anyone has the arguments.
Governement-endorsed monopolies in a free-market system are bad.
Yeah. What we need are competing power wire systems! I want a forest of wire strung about my city, darnit!
Without so much as a phone call between the publisher and WotC, all of the following have become D&D-compatible RPGs:
- Babylon 5
- WarCraft
- Everquest
- Conan
- Lone Wolf
- Slayers
- Traveller
- Trinity (A failed product line from White Wolf!)
- Judge Dredd
- Stargate SG-1
Not to mention all of the new-RPGs that have a market they never would have reached without the OGL and the SRD:- Engel
- Mutants & Masterminds
- Dawnforge
- Grim Tales
- Arcana Unearthed
- Darwin's World
- Testament
- Spycraft
.The OGL does exactly what Ryan Dancy said it would do: make more RPGs on the market, which means that those who want to write have a better chance of making a profit and those who just want to play have a MUCH wider range of choices.
And all this happened without a single red cent being passed from the producers of any game I mentioned to Wizards of the Coast, aside from the authors buying one copy of their books. (Which was unnecessary at the very start, and isn't necessary now if you open the book to check for chargen in the RPG shop.)
Comparing the OGL to MS's "Shared Source" program is as petty and wrongheaded as complaining that Apple's shoveling bullshit by not forcing Mach to become GPL.
Got a cite? I'd like to see something dicussing this.
:(
I wish I did. Most of the conversation happened on the OGF-L listsev, which as long since degerated into an impotent group with no meaningful discussion and no archives.
Try making an RPG that's rules-identical to Storyteller 2.0. Watch how fast you wind up in court for "violation of copyright upon trade dress" or even the very untested "game as a character" theory. You can't copyright Monopoly or Football or Roleplaying Game, but there's enough credible legal theory to aruge that an RPG is complex enough to deserve copyright protection that, at the least, you'd have to go to court to fight it.
This is why I always found the d20 license to be bizarre. They can't actually stop people from making compatable works, or from indicating compatability so long as there's no confusion as to source, etc. You really don't get anything out of it. And yet people just keep on going for it. Weird.
Not all that weird, when you realize three very important things:
Factor in the shrinking viability of the public domain due to MPAA/RIAA and the "software as art" crowd, and you've got a cottage industry that would much rather spend its dollars making RPGs than fighting lawsuits.
To say nothing of the commericial value of being able to use a specifically designed trademark that WotC markets as meaning "uses the same basic rules as D&D", and uses on every RPG book they print.
If you read the OGL carefully, you'll quickly realize that's a load of balls. Take special care to read the section on "product identity" which includes such things as creating fscking characters.
Product Identity means that you or WotC or White Wolf can seperate character from stat-block. You can make all the stat-blocks you want for all of the characers you want, and use WotC's system (pure or highly tweaked) to add all the stat-blocks you want.
You just can't write "Elminster on Slashdot" or "Geminidomino does Dragonlance" and point to the OGL to say "but you said it was open!"
(Oh, and WotC/Hasbro is pretty good about online bits. They assume that if you're sharing new rules you're using the OGL, and will tell you what you need to fix if you cross the line. And if you're not using rules, but just running a "fan-site" -- well, even back to WotC's inital purchase of TSR they were sane about it.)
Are these terms copyrighted for RPGS?
No. They are too general to be trademarks, and you can't copyright single words.
In fact, you can't even copyright single rules. Whole games neatly put together--maybe. RPG books --yes. Single rules or names for rules? Not unless they're Exalted style "power of obscure poetry."
Fun fact:
Wizards of the Coast, in many ways the geekiest mecca of nerdom, was for many years home to a literal swinging community.
Trust me, nerds rarely stay virgins. Chicks dig the whole "roleplaying" thing, too.
Got a link?
I have a feeling that archiving of broadcast television is against a whole bunch of laws, though my knowledge of American Law is nothing to speak up about.
It's not.
I'm an american, not a lawyer, but if I was told that my archive of VHS tapes that were broadcasted that I only watch in my home was somehow illegal, I'd fight the fine all the way to the Supreme Court.
Were I to sell or rebroadcast any of it without the permission of four or five corporate persons I'd be screwed, but keeping it for my own use is 100% AOK.
Reading an ebook in the path:
Read it on a PDA. The thing is no more succeptable to being dropped in the tub than a book is.
Oh, and a properly done zero-DRM ebook should sell for about as much as a paper copy. DRM or poor quality would, of course, be acceptable if the price is comparably reduced.
Surprisingly, he does not realize that one of the advantages that a tank has is a low profile.
The same profile is had by dogs and horses. And yet humans still survive.
"Giant" walking robots could exist, but they would fit the same niche as WMDs, not tanks -- strategic displays of strength as psychological warfare, not open-field gun platforms.
OTOH, railgun equipped slow-moving mechs might replace the super-artillery role once played by battleships. Having a big gun you can fire from the sea is good and all, but one that you can move inland is even better. (Why the legs? To make it easier to set and brace the weapon. The thing would probably still have tracks for long-term movement.)
But how can anyone play a first person shooter on a gamepad? Absolute motion axis suck for aiming. Anyone who says otherwise is a console system apologist, and in denial.
EVERYONE sucks the same, though.
With PC FPS, you have the weenies who do nothing but play FPS games, and who can pick a pixel in the blink of an eye. They're simply not fun to play against -- nor fun to play as when your friends aren't.
Halo is great for multiplayer, because you sit there and game and no ammonut of practice with the game makes you wholly incapable of being beaten by you friend on the counch next to you.
This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago.
They were. Even after the shuttle was built, replacements have constantly been at the same design stage this Russian thing is at.
Then comes te question: Do children have rights? Do mentally ill people have rights? Do people that can't communicate have rights?
Yes, yes, and yes.
But in all three cases, not equal rights to normal healhty adult citizens. At the least, all three you mentioned have legal guardians.
Animals do have "rights", but these are usually protected less as rights inherent to the animal and more as laws against cruel behavior.
ah.
;)
Try "but it's MURDER!" for a better effect.
Damn troll.
Or selling cocaine to finance the war on drugs...
*sigh*
The government wouldn't sell cocaine to raise money. The CIA may launder money throguh drugs to gain intelligence, but that's another matter entirely.
The rest 95 % of the world mostly disagree.
No. They just have a different meter.
"During warfare" and "in defense of a life by an officer of the law as a last resort" are still legal killings EVERYWHERE.
Oh, and the world is ~6.3 billion. The USA is ~295 million, and Europe is only ~482 million.
We're 4.6% of the world, you're 7.7%. The other 87.7% agree more with us (government can execute) than disagree (government cannot execute.)
I believe any and all life should be respected
And yet you think that I don't. How odd.
The term you're looking for is "treasured almost equally", not "respected." Animistic tribes respected animal life more than you or I, and yet they still ate them.
But I can only hope that in the future, we can artifically generate food in a way without harming any life
Any "artificial" food source would qualify as life -- in fact, by the measure of "kill no living thing", you're not allowed to drink cold medicine.
fact whether it fits in with our narrow-minded version of intelligence and sentience
Communication is a rather good way to measure intelligence. Sure, that old tree MIGHT be able to do fractal equations in its head and compose epic ballads, but if there's not way for us to know that, then it's unreasonable for us not to treat it like a free-growing wood pile.
I differ with your position, but it's a free country, so we can have different positions on just about anything. However, the terms you're using to defend your position are simply wrong.
You might think it sounds farfetched but it's basically inevitable...
"Inevitble" means "it *will* happen, and there's nothing you can do about it."
The sun going nova is inevitable. George W. Bush's presidency ending is inevitable.
The government doing something horrible is NOT inevitable--be that nuclear war or RFID tracking of citizens.
In your headlong rush to be clever you failed to notice, or deliberately avoided noticing, that bar codes cannot be read without being on the outside of something
RFID tags can be read by a bunch of folks for a bunch of reasons, but the "why" is relatively low. Wal-Mart could track your time in their store via the RFID tag in the shirt you bought there, but that'd only affect the portion of their customer base that buys shirts at Wal-Mart. They could do the exact same thing with random surveys and in-store video tracking, with the added benefit that no one gets wonkey.
The federal government could require RFID tags on all state IDs and data-mine the habits of every single citizen. But if they wanted to do that, they could do it via non-RFID identification cards too.
RFID isn't a boogyman. It's not a horrid violation of privacy. It's a less obtrusive bar-code whose worse abuses will be quickly checked by a cottage industry of chip-detectors and scanproof wallets.
Hopefully, atleast this will make people realize that animals should be given much the same right as humans
"An animal may have rights when it asks for them."
This may be a parahrased quote from a Supreme Court judge. If not, it's one that I'll wager they would agree with.
When your ape signs "please let me vote for president, I care about ecological progress" as interepted by someone without bias, and it can then sign "yes, I swear and understand" in court, it'll be able to win rights in a rather simple court.
But they can't. And so they don't have equal rights to humans.
OTOH, it's entirely civilized to kill humans. It's all about WHEN and WHY that defines civlization, not the actual killing or lack thereof.
And I stand by my comment about RFID scanners everywhere.
Did you ever notice how we have bar scanners everywhere--no, wait. We only have them in a few places. Mostly stores, plus a few inventory & hospital places.
RFID is a technology in much the same vein, and most of its uses will be of the same type.
How many places would have a legit reason to keep track of who enters and leaves? 1000+ scans a day isn't that hard of a target to reach
1000 scans a day, assuming that you are "at home" for only eight hours of sleep a day means that you suffer 62 scans every hour. More often than once every minute for the entire day you pass a scanner.
Unless you work with scanners all day long (waitress, Wal-mart employee), it's not going to be an issue.