MattSource

The other day a friend of mine, who is chair of the Source Code Department and MIT, told me there were mountains and mountains of my intellectual property in M. Night Shyamalan's film The Lady in the Water. Actually, she's the former chair. Actually, just a former faculty member, with tenure. Except not with tenure. Actually, she just ran inside the department one day to use their restroom.

The point is, I had to respond, so I naturally issued some press releases that anyone who saw the movie would be infringing on my copyrights, trade secrets, intellectual poverty, and that I may even consider it an act of military aggression. Then a peculiar thing started happening: people began to have concerns about whether seeing the movie might subject them to lawsuits by ... I don't know, someone. There are a lot of litigious people in the world.

Not one to sit around while people were concerned about something, I decided to write up a license for whatever intellectual property I possessed, if any, and indemnifying people, if any, against lawsuits by me for infringing the copyrights, etc. that were violated during the production of the movie, if any.

Each person who would like to see the movie should purchase one license ($10). Families get a bulk rate if they submit to DNA testing that confirms they are, in fact, a family. Then you're free to head out to the theater and give them about $10 per person with a clear conscience.

Here is a detailed list of the intellectual property that has been wrongly included in the film:

1. Source code, except not really
2. Methods
3. Concepts

Hm... now that I think about it Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has a couple of concepts in it too... I'll look into that and get back to you.

Eek

Ted is linking to me now, so I guess I better try to keep up a little. Okay: the politically-oriented rants about geeky stuff will appear over there from now on. Here I'll focus on engineering and technical topics. And poker.

I've officially downed the AJAX kool-aid. In addition to providing slick, responsive interfaces, it helps enforce separation of the various application layers. In fact, I'll be recommending it even to beginning programmers, so that they never develop some of the bad habits that make PHP guys infamous.

Other news: good week at the tables, up about $180. Also got PokerStars to run pretty-well in Wine. No chat though... and typing bets in with numbers doesn't work. You have to use the slider. Still a pleasant surprise how far that project has come....

More Others news: I got a hyundai accent and you can have the engine if you bid today, because it's going electric. That's right! No more foreign oil for me, thank you. Except in the other 800 products I use that require it... meh.

Alright, I've got to go email everyone and get my readership (readercanoe, really) back.