1.
Trademark
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The trademark owner can be an individual, business organization, or any legal entity. A trademark may be located on a package, a label, for the sake of corporate identity, trademarks are often displayed on company buildings. A trademark identifies the owner of a particular product or service. The unauthorized usage of trademarks by producing and trading counterfeit consumer goods is known as brand piracy, the owner of a trademark may pursue legal action against trademark infringement. Most countries require formal registration of a trademark as a precondition for pursuing this type of action, the United States, Canada and other countries also recognize common law trademark rights, which means action can be taken to protect an unregistered trademark if it is in use. Still, common law trademarks offer the holder in general less legal protection than registered trademarks. A trademark may be designated by the symbols, ™ ℠ ® A trademark is typically a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these categories, such as those based on colour, smell. Trademarks which are considered offensive are often rejected according to a nations trademark law, the term trademark is also used informally to refer to any distinguishing attribute by which an individual is readily identified, such as the well-known characteristics of celebrities. When a trademark is used in relation to services rather than products, it may sometimes be called a service mark, in other words, trademarks serve to identify a particular business as the source of goods or services. The use of a trademark in this way is known as trademark use, certain exclusive rights attach to a registered mark. Different goods and services have been classified by the International Classification of Goods, in trademark treatises it is usually reported that blacksmiths who made swords in the Roman Empire are thought of as being the first users of trademarks. Other notable trademarks that have used for a long time include Löwenbräu. The first trademark legislation was passed by the Parliament of England under the reign of King Henry III in 1266, the first modern trademark laws emerged in the late 19th century. In France the first comprehensive system in the world was passed into law in 1857 with the Manufacture. In Britain, the Merchandise Marks Act 1862 made it an offense to imitate anothers trade mark with intent to defraud or to enable another to defraud. In 1875 the Trade Marks Registration Act was passed which allowed formal registration of marks at the UK Patent Office for the first time. Registration was considered to comprise prima facie evidence of ownership of a trade mark, in the United States, Congress first attempted to establish a federal trademark regime in 1870
2.
Dice
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Dice are small throwable objects with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers. Dice are suitable as gambling devices for games like craps and are used in non-gambling tabletop games. A traditional die is a cube, with each of its six faces showing a different number of dots from 1 to 6. When thrown or rolled, the die comes to rest showing on its surface a random integer from one to six. A variety of devices are also described as dice, such specialized dice may have polyhedral or irregular shapes. They may be used to produce other than one through six. Loaded and crooked dice are designed to favor some results over others for purposes of cheating or amusement. A dice tray, a used to contain thrown dice, is sometimes used for gambling or board games. Dice have been used since before recorded history, and it is uncertain where they originated, the oldest known dice were excavated as part of a backgammon-like game set at the Burnt City, an archeological site in south-eastern Iran, estimated to be from between 2800–2500 BCE. Other excavations from ancient tombs in the Indus Valley civilization indicate a South Asian origin, the Egyptian game of Senet was played with dice. Senet was played before 3000 BC and up to the 2nd century AD and it was likely a racing game, but there is no scholarly consensus on the rules of Senet. Dicing is mentioned as an Indian game in the Rigveda, Atharvaveda, there are several biblical references to casting lots, as in Psalm 22, indicating that dicing was commonplace when the psalm was composed. Knucklebones was a game of skill played by women and children, although gambling was illegal, many Romans were passionate gamblers who enjoyed dicing, which was known as aleam ludere. Dicing was even a popular pastime of emperors, letters by Augustus to Tacitus and his daughter recount his hobby of dicing. There were two sizes of Roman dice, tali were large dice inscribed with one, three, four, and six on four sides. Tesserae were smaller dice with sides numbered one to six. Twenty-sided dice date back to the 2nd century AD and from Ptolemaic Egypt as early as the 2nd century BC, dominoes and playing cards originated in China as developments from dice. The transition from dice to playing cards occurred in China around the Tang dynasty, in Japan, dice were used to play a popular game called sugoroku
3.
Lou Zocchi
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Louis Zocchi, Technical Sergeant, USAF, is a gaming hobbyist, former game distributor and publisher, and maker and seller of polyhedral game dice. Lou Zocchi was one of the first editors for Avalon Hills magazine, The General, and he also playtested such early wargames as Bismark, Afrika Korps, Jutland, Stalingrad, and a number of titles Avalon Hill did not publish. Zocchi was the first U. S. distributor to sell nothing, as a board wargame designer, his credits include Luftwaffe, The Battle of Britain, Alien Space, and Flying Tigers, as well as the 3-, 5-, 14-, 24-, and 100-sided die. Zocchi contributed to the series of books by Guidon Games that began in 1971 with Chainmail, Zocchi produced the superhero RPG Superhero,2044 in 1977. Zocchi distributed the Wee Warriors line, Zocchi helped Judges Guild out of cash-flow problems in the early 1980s by paying them $350 each time in return for the right to reprint out-of-print Judges Guild supplements. Mike Hurdle of Holly Springs Mississippi purchased Zocchi Distribution in February 1998, Zocchi and his company GameScience have published a number of games over the years, but are best known for making dice, and inventing the Zocchihedron die. Zocchi is a figure at gaming conventions like Gen Con and Origins Game Fair. Zocchi has designed a few himself, including Hardtack. In 1987, Zocchi was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gamings Hall of Fame and he was honored as a famous game designer by being inducted into the Game Designers Hall of Fame and featured as the king of clubs in Flying Buffalos 2009 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck. GameScience is still trading, and Zocchi is still active in the gaming community, force and held the rank of Colonel. Most dice, according to Zocchi, do not roll accurately because of flawed manufacturing processes, the dice favor certain numbers and are more likely to land on those numbers. The result is that plastic dice originally molded evenly are unevened and unbalanced, Zocchi demonstrates the imperfections of dice with statistical results and with photographs of uneven die edges, faces and vertices. His demonstrations are sales pitches for his precision edged dice manufactured by his company, unlike other gaming dice producers, Zocchi guarantees in a video published on YouTube that his dice roll rightly and never break. However, tests by Jason Mills in 1987 and published in White Dwarf magazine showed that his Zocchihedron had an uneven number distribution. The modified layout assigns one number from each tens-cluster to each ring of numbers around the die, only white dice with black numbers use the older number distribution. Corrected dice are manufactured in other colors, due to safety concerns, the 4-sided die produced by GameScience has truncated points. Mr. Zocchi has invented and produced several non-standard dice and these are a 3-sided die, a 5-sided die, a 14-sided die, a 16-sided die, and a 24-sided die. All these except the 7-sided are available in translucent plastic
4.
Polyhedron
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In geometry, a polyhedron is a solid in three dimensions with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The word polyhedron comes from the Classical Greek πολύεδρον, as poly- + -hedron, a convex polyhedron is the convex hull of finitely many points, not all on the same plane. Cubes and pyramids are examples of convex polyhedra, a polyhedron is a 3-dimensional example of the more general polytope in any number of dimensions. Convex polyhedra are well-defined, with several equivalent standard definitions, however, the formal mathematical definition of polyhedra that are not required to be convex has been problematic. Many definitions of polyhedron have been given within particular contexts, some more rigorous than others, some of these definitions exclude shapes that have often been counted as polyhedra or include shapes that are often not considered as valid polyhedra. As Branko Grünbaum observed, The Original Sin in the theory of polyhedra goes back to Euclid, the writers failed to define what are the polyhedra. Nevertheless, there is agreement that a polyhedron is a solid or surface that can be described by its vertices, edges, faces. Natural refinements of this definition require the solid to be bounded, to have a connected interior, and possibly also to have a connected boundary. However, the polyhedra defined in this way do not include the self-crossing star polyhedra, their faces may not form simple polygons, definitions based on the idea of a bounding surface rather than a solid are also common. If a planar part of such a surface is not itself a convex polygon, ORourke requires it to be subdivided into smaller convex polygons, cromwell gives a similar definition but without the restriction of three edges per vertex. Again, this type of definition does not encompass the self-crossing polyhedra, however, there exist topological polyhedra that cannot be realized as acoptic polyhedra. One modern approach is based on the theory of abstract polyhedra and these can be defined as partially ordered sets whose elements are the vertices, edges, and faces of a polyhedron. A vertex or edge element is less than an edge or face element when the vertex or edge is part of the edge or face, additionally, one may include a special bottom element of this partial order and a top element representing the whole polyhedron. However, these requirements are relaxed, to instead require only that the sections between elements two levels apart from line segments. Geometric polyhedra, defined in other ways, can be described abstractly in this way, a realization of an abstract polyhedron is generally taken to be a mapping from the vertices of the abstract polyhedron to geometric points, such that the points of each face are coplanar. A geometric polyhedron can then be defined as a realization of an abstract polyhedron, realizations that forgo the requirement of planarity, that impose additional requirements of symmetry, or that map the vertices to higher dimensional spaces have also been considered. Unlike the solid-based and surface-based definitions, this perfectly well for star polyhedra. However, without restrictions, this definition allows degenerate or unfaithful polyhedra
5.
Game
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A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is carried out for remuneration, and from art. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are considered to be work or art. Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational, attested as early as 2600 BC, games are a universal part of human experience and present in all cultures. The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Mancala are some of the oldest known games, ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word game. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that the elements of games, such as play, rules, from this, Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances. A piece of entertainment is an if it is interactive. Movies and books are cited as examples of non-interactive entertainment, if no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge, if a challenge has no active agent against whom you compete, it is a puzzle, if there is one, it is a conflict. Finally, if the player can only outperform the opponent, but not attack them to interfere with their performance, however, if attacks are allowed, then the conflict qualifies as a game. Crawfords definition may thus be rendered as, an interactive, goal-oriented activity made for money, with agents to play against. A game is a system in which players engage in a conflict, defined by rules. A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, according to this definition, some games that do not involve choices, such as Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, and War are not technically games any more than a slot machine is. A game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context, a game is a form of play with goals and structure. When you strip away the differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits, a goal, rules, a feedback system. Games can be characterized by what the player does and this is often referred to as gameplay. Major key elements identified in this context are tools and rules that define the context of game
6.
Role-playing game
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A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines. There are several forms of RPG, the original form, sometimes called the tabletop RPG, is conducted through discussion, whereas in live action role-playing games players physically perform their characters actions. In both of these forms, an arranger called a game master usually decides on the rules and setting to be used, acting as referee, while each of the other players plays the role of a single character. Several varieties of RPG also exist in media, such as multi-player text-based MUDs and their graphics-based successors. These games often share settings and rules with tabletop RPGs, despite this variety of forms, some game forms such as trading card games and wargames that are related to role-playing games may not be included. Role-playing activity may sometimes be present in games, but it is not the primary focus. The term is sometimes used to describe roleplay simulation games and exercises used in teaching, training. Both authors and major publishers of tabletop role-playing games consider them to be a form of interactive and collaborative storytelling, events, characters, and narrative structure give a sense of a narrative experience, and the game need not have a strongly-defined storyline. Interactivity is the difference between role-playing games and traditional fiction. Whereas a viewer of a show is a passive observer. Such role-playing games extend an older tradition of storytelling games where a party of friends collaborate to create a story. Participants in a game will generate specific characters and an ongoing plot. A consistent system of rules and a more or less realistic campaign setting in games aids suspension of disbelief, the level of realism in games ranges from just enough internal consistency to set up a believable story or credible challenge up to full-blown simulations of real-world processes. There is also a variety of systems of rules and game settings. Games that emphasize plot and character interaction over game mechanics and combat sometimes prefer the name storytelling game and these types of games tend to minimize or altogether eliminate the use of dice or other randomizing elements. Some games are played with characters created before the game by the GM and this type of game is typically played at gaming conventions, or in standalone games that do not form part of a campaign. Tabletop and pen-and-paper RPGs are conducted through discussion in a social gathering
7.
White Dwarf (magazine)
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White Dwarf is a magazine published by British games manufacturer Games Workshop serving as a promotions and advertising platform for Games Workshop and Citadel Miniatures products. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone initially produced a newsletter called Owl and Weasel, the magazine was hugely influential in the 1980s when it helped popularise role-playing games in the UK. This included material for the big three role playing games of the time, AD&D, RuneQuest and Traveller, in addition to this a generation of writers passed through its offices and onto other RPG projects in the next decade, such as Phil Masters and Marcus L. Rowland. This would often be in the form of an attractive and interesting single task for either existing or new characters to resolve. These could either be slipped into existing campaign plots, or be used stand-alone, just for a fun evening, the last Dungeons and Dragons article appeared in issue 93, with the changeover being relatively abrupt and obvious by issue #100. In this respect it took some of the aspects of the Citadel Journal. The magazine has always been a conduit for new rules and ideas for GW games as well as a means to showcase developments and it often includes scenarios, campaigns, hobby news, photos of recently released miniatures and tips on building terrain and constructing or converting miniatures. Today, the magazine exclusively on miniature wargames and thoroughly covers the models, miniatures. Grombrindal the White Dwarf is also a character for the Dwarf army. It is never stated who exactly the White Dwarf is, but it is implied that he is the spirit of Snorri Whitebeard, the image of the White Dwarf has graced the covers of many issues of the magazine. The image was used on the character sheet for the Dwarf character in HeroQuest. In December 2004, White Dwarf published its 300th issue, in the United Kingdom and North America. Each issue contained many special freebies as well as articles on the history of the magazine, the magazines content is divided among the three core games, focussing on that months new releases from Games Workshop. The monthly battle reports are a regular feature, Battle reports detail a battle between two or more forces, usually with their own specific victory conditions. The reports follow the gamers through their selection, tactics and deployment. The format varies - ranging from a simplified, generalized style to a more detailed, on 26 May 2007, White Dwarf celebrated its 30th birthday with celebrations in Games Workshop stores around the world. In June 2010 Andrew Kenrick replaced Mark Latham as editor, Andrew had previously been sub-editor, as well as sub-editing other Games Workshop material such as the most recent edition of Codex, Space Marines. Jes has previously edited the Battle Games in Middle-earth magazine, on 1 February 2014, White Dwarf moved to a weekly release
8.
Design patent
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In the United States, a design patent is a form of legal protection granted to the ornamental design of a functional item. Design patents are a type of design right. Ornamental designs of jewelry, furniture, beverage containers and computer icons are examples of objects that are covered by design patents, a similar concept, a registered design can be obtained in other countries. In Kenya, Japan, South Korea and Hungary, industrial designs are registered after performing an official novelty search, in the countries of the European Community, one needs to only pay an official fee and meet other formal requirements for registration. For the member states of WIPO, cover is afforded by registration at WIPO, a US design patent covers the ornamental design for an object having practical utility. An object with a design that is similar to the design claimed in a design patent cannot be made. The copy does not have to be exact for the patent to be infringed and it only has to be substantially similar. Design patents with line drawings cover only the features shown as solid lines, items shown as dotted lines are not covered. This is one of the reasons Apple was awarded a jury verdict in the US case of Apple v Samsung, apples patent showed much of their iPhone design as broken lines. It didn’t matter if Samsung was different in those areas, the fact that the solid lines of the patent were the same as Samsungs design meant that Samsung infringed the Apple design patent. Both novel fonts and computer icons can be covered by design patents, icons are only covered, however, when they are displayed on a computer screen, thus making them part of an article of manufacture with practical utility. Screen layouts can also be protected with design patents, in China, Canada, Japan, South Africa, and the United States, a design patent application is not published and is kept secret until granted. In Brazil, the applicant can request that the application be kept in secrecy for a period of 180 days from the filing date and this will also delay the prosecution and granting of the application for 180 days. In Japan, an applicant can request that a design be kept secret for a period of up 3 years after the registration has been granted, in 1842, George Bruce was awarded the first design patent, U. S. The design patent was for a new font, in 1879, Auguste Bartholdi was awarded design patent U. S. Patent D11,023 for the Statue of Liberty and this patent covered the sale of small copies of the statue. Proceeds from the sale of the statues helped raise money to build the statue in New York harbor. In 1919, three design patents were granted for the badge of the American Legion, U. S, patent D54,296, the badge of the American Legion Womens Auxiliary, U. S
9.
Patent
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A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an invention. An invention is a solution to a technological problem and is a product or a process. Patents are a form of intellectual property, the procedure for granting patents, requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national laws and international agreements. Typically, however, a patent application must include one or more claims that define the invention. A patent may include many claims, each of which defines a specific property right and these claims must meet relevant patentability requirements, such as novelty, usefulness, and non-obviousness. Nevertheless, there are variations on what is patentable subject matter from country to country, the word patent originates from the Latin patere, which means to lay open. More directly, it is a version of the term letters patent. Similar grants included land patents, which were land grants by early state governments in the USA, and printing patents, a precursor of modern copyright. In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the granted to anyone who invents any new, useful. The additional qualification utility patent is used to distinguish the primary meaning from these other types of patents. Particular species of patents for inventions include biological patents, business method patents, chemical patents, the period of protection was 10 years. These were mostly in the field of glass making, as Venetians emigrated, they sought similar patent protection in their new homes. This led to the diffusion of patent systems to other countries, by the 16th century, the English Crown would habitually abuse the granting of letters patent for monopolies. After public outcry, King James I of England was forced to revoke all existing monopolies, the Statute became the foundation for later developments in patent law in England and elsewhere. Important developments in patent law emerged during the 18th century through a process of judicial interpretation of the law. During the reign of Queen Anne, patent applications were required to supply a complete specification of the principles of operation of the invention for public access. Influenced by the philosophy of John Locke, the granting of patents began to be viewed as a form of property right. The English legal system became the foundation for patent law in countries with a common law heritage, including the United States, New Zealand, in the Thirteen Colonies, inventors could obtain patents through petition to a given colonys legislature
