September 27, 2002

Vivendi Universal has stated there are no plans to sell their successful gaming division, which includes Blizzard, maker of the Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo lines of games. Other publishers in the division are Sierra, and Universal Interactive. 11:01:53 PM

The Chicago Reader carries a summary of all the name-calling following film critic Roger Ebert’s alleged shouting incident in the Toronto International Film Festival when he and other American critics was unable to get seats for a film showing. (via Jim Romenesko's MediaNews) 8:55:44 PM

Theftware Not content with facilitating the piracy of music, videos and other copyrighted items, companies that produce peer-to-peer tools such as Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire hijack the sales commissions that would otherwise be paid out by Amazon.com and other large web sites. The victims are mainly little sites, including possibly charities that have already noticed drop-offs in the money they get. Amazon.com has cut of these companies when they are found out. While they claim their end-user licensing agreements (the EULA people agree to but never read) allows them to do this, I hope a massive lawsuit for fraud is brewing. 8:46:58 PM

Some variants of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) for use by the US and other militaries will be equipped with a 100 kilowatt laser capable of targeting air and ground targets 10 kilometers a way. (Via Slashdot) Meanwhile the US Army and Israel and working on anti-missile lasers for theatre usage, all of which is making the future look more like Star Wars. 8:46:26 PM

MSNBC introduced its Weblog Central today with links to it’s weblogs (including the interesting Comic Log and the perpetual well of stupidity from Eric Alterman) and ones selected by readers. So far they have not included Radio Userland in the list of Weblog types, a large oversight espcially since they included Weblogs.com in their Weblog index list. 8:44:45 PM