[x]Blackmoor Vituperative

Monday, 2005-10-17

A Creative Commons primer

Filed under: Intellectual Property — bblackmoor @ 09:54

Tom Merritt at CNet provides a pretty good primer for what Creative Commons is, and addresses some of the confusion that people might have about it.

Sunday, 2005-10-16

The Prestige

Filed under: Movies — bblackmoor @ 23:10

Here’s the best movie news I have heard in a long time: Christian Bale (of American Psycho, Equilibrium, and Batman Begins) and Hugh Jackman (of X-Men, Kate & Leopold, and Van Helsing) are this close to signing on to appear in the film adaptation of The Prestige, the 1996 novel by Christopher Priest. Anything I could tell about the novel would give away the trick, so to speak: go read it. Even more good news: Christopher Nolan (of Memento and Batman Begins) is slated to direct. If the studio will stay out the way, this could be a truly great film.

PeerGuardian 6B

Filed under: Technology — bblackmoor @ 12:21

PeerGuardian has been updated to version 6B. This is an important security update, because the list servers for the previous versions have been compromised. There is more to the story, which you can read at the new Phoenix Labs web site, but the bottom line is that you should update to the newest version of PeerGuardian ASAP.

Thursday, 2005-10-13

Doctor Madblood Presents Satan’s Slumber Party

Filed under: Television — bblackmoor @ 11:41

Dr. MadbloodDoctor Madblood Presents Satan’s Slumber Party, 2005-10-15

Madblood: “Sybil’s Sisters Strike Back”

Dr. Madblood (Jerry F. Harrell) gets wedged into a tough spot when the Sybil Of The Swamp (Jewell Willis) puts him in charge of her four striking young student sybilettes, poor man. Is the swamp witch hightailing it out of Pungo to avoid the arrival of a malevolent maestro from warmer climes of a land “down under?” Why does a tete-a-tete with the ghost of Baron von Basketcase (Craig T. Adams) lead to head games that get all blown out of proportion? With most of the household out for the night, how did Max manage to end up with *more* than the usual mayhem at the Manor? Can he endure an evening of nabbing a nameless mind-numbing nemesis?

See where it happens!

Portions of Dr. Madblood Presents are filmed at the Hermitage Foundation Museum, 7637 North Shore Road, Norfolk, VA 23505, 757-423-2052, www.hermitagefoundation.org. Take a tour and tell ’em Madblood sent you! See the doctor there, in person, on Sunday afternoon, October 30!

Don’t Miss “Dr. Madblood Presents” at 8 PM every Saturday on WSKY, SKY4 (On Cox Channel 4; DirecTV and Dish Network Channel 7296).

Tuesday, 2005-10-11

Eegah.com

Filed under: Movies — bblackmoor @ 14:35

The movie Eegah! was one of the goofier experiments on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it just got a little goofier. This has to be one of the funniest, most detailed online spoofs of a movie I have ever seen: eegah.com.

Selling out for Profit

Filed under: Television — bblackmoor @ 14:19

Profit DVD bannerYes, that’s right: I’m selling out and adding an ad banner to my blog — at least for a while. You see, after I mentioned the very cool and before-its-time show Profit, I was contacted by the distributors, who said they were trying to get the word out on the DVD, and asked if I’d put a banner on my site for a while to help. I said, “Sure!” And so, there the banner is, in all its commercial glory.

So what are you waiting for? Go buy the DVD, already!

Saturday, 2005-10-08

Pythons battling alligators for top of Everglades’ food chain

Filed under: Ecology — bblackmoor @ 16:48

gator and python in a fight to the deathThe Burmese python is challenging the native alligator for the top of the Everglades’ food chain. In a particularly freaky skirmish of this war, two of these apex predators killed each other in a fight to the death just a few days ago.

Returning to Wikipedia

Filed under: Gaming — bblackmoor @ 14:27

After taking an extended break from Wikipedia, wherein I spent no more than a few minutes of my time once a month to add a paragraph here and there and revert any vandalism on the Open Gaming article, I am newly inspired to give it my full attention. Ironically, you can thank Axon, the Wikipedia editor who drove me away from Wikipedia, for that: his constant false complaints to Wikipedia [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] (does this guy need a hobby, or what?) were making my semi-retirement from Wikipedia as much of a nuisance as my previous activity was. So then, why not be active? Ergo, for the foreseeable future, I’ll be focusing on Open Gaming and related articles, and trying to find ways to improve and expand it/them. I will be happy to discuss the content of the article with anyone who has an actual interest in improving it or adding objective, verifiable information. Let bygones be bygones: grudges are a waste of time.

Friday, 2005-10-07

Why OpenDocument Won

Filed under: Intellectual Property,Technology — bblackmoor @ 13:01

David Wheeler has written a great article on Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn’t). I won’t bother excerpting it here: you should go read the whole thing.

Microsoft’s attack on Linux foiled — for now

Filed under: Intellectual Property,Linux — bblackmoor @ 12:52

The U.S. Patent Office has rejected two Microsoft patents over the FAT file format, but the software maker said Wednesday that it’s not ready to give up its battle to protect its widely used method for storing data.

The patent office delivered its ruling late last month but made it public this week. With one of the patents, the decision is what’s considered a final rejection, while with another it’s considered nonfinal. In both cases, Microsoft has the ability to pursue its claims further.

The rejections come after a re-examination of the patents was sought by the Public Patent Foundation, which argued that they were invalid because there was “prior art,” that is, evidence that others had done similar work before Microsoft’s patent application. A U.S. Patent Office examiner issued a preliminary rejection of one Microsoft patent in September 2004.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft’s Linux-related patents rejected)

Don’t celebrate yet: money is the engine of our legal sytem, and Microsoft has a lot of it. It’s only a matter of time until they buy what they need to shut Linux down within the USA. To be clear, I do not begrudge Microsoft their millions: I believe that they earned most of it. What vexes me is that our legal system and our legislators are open to the highest bidder.

It will get worse before it gets better.

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