forrest - you're overthinking it. The plane doesn't have to move relative to the ground. The plane has to move relative to the air. You blow a fan at the plane with enough power to produce wind equal to take off speed, and the plane will lift up. It will do this even though the plane didn't move at all relative to the ground. What's more, the moving treadmill has NO effect on the plane's motion (disregarding friction) because the wheels spin independent of the plane's motion. The plane moves... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:54 PM on January 30, 2008

Do people from Southern California view us folks from the hurricane-prone areas in the same way we view those of you who live in an area consistently devastated by fire fueled by the Santa Ana winds? By that I mean, with a jaundiced, "why don't you just move then?" eye?

[...]

So, are people all over Southern California really falling apart over these fires?

To an extent, yeah, that's the way I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:44 AM on October 26, 2007

I might make it, but christ a month is a long time away to be planning something, and my experience with LA meetups is that although LA is a fantastic place it does draw flakes that can never seem to make it to these things (me included at least half the time).
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:50 PM on October 16, 2007

Why even bother with pruning crap comments in contentious threads? I can see when somebody is being an ass. Ten people will jump up to proclaim that somebody is being an ass.

I get that conversations tend to progress more smoothly when you don't have people being an ass, but why not let their words stand and represent them?

The first 10 to 20 comments matter because they set the tone for the thread, but after that, why not just take a here be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:21 PM on July 31, 2007

Because then it's 10 times longer than it needs to be and it doesn't end well - if it ends.

Well, it will end when the thread is closed to new comments after 30 days or whatever, but beyond that... So What?

Pages scroll, it doesn't matter how long they get. It's not like having a few threads that are 10 times longer than they would have been takes significant resources from the site, and after they scroll off the front page,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 8:31 AM on August 1, 2007

I don't know. Generally, I couldn't care less what gets deleted, but in this case it does seem that it crossed a line into excessively heavy moderation.

I read about half of the article when it was linked off some other site. There's no reason that article shouldn't have been linked off of MetaFilter that I can see, and the fact that it's been posted several times now suggests that others would agree.

Heavy moderation in Ask is fine and probably... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 8:57 AM on July 19, 2007

My real reason for posting was to find out if anybody wanted to go out taking pictures with me or was planning to get together for something else interesting before the party, but these ideas all sound good.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 8:36 PM on July 13, 2007

I must be on my way to becoming a cranky, old man because I'm really starting to get annoyed by catch phrases.

It used to be that I'd read something like "overthinking a plate of beans" and a switch in my head would trip. Basically, I'd just instinctively ignore the person since they were obviously some kind of a me-tooer trying to gain acceptance from the clique by emulating what they perceive to be alpha-mannerisms.

Now though,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:10 AM on June 30, 2007

And, if EBK can't make it, then I might -- just so jonson doesn't get a big head and remembers where his user number ranks in the scheme of things here in LA.

Seriously, I might make it, but I'll have to see. That Friday may be rough -- particularly as I'll be starting a giant road trip a few days after that.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 12:00 PM on June 18, 2007

I know (as do plenty of other people on this site) that Christmas and possibly even tales of the virgin birth of Christ probably came from Mithras. However, I'm not at all familiar with Mithras going into the desert or wilderness or being a man who suddenly gained a messianic or cult like following. Mithras was pretty much a god from the start.

So, even if we're to assume that you were trying to answer the later question, can you provide a cite to where the story of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 9:44 PM on June 13, 2007

Yeah, what the hell? They use my suggestion, and not only do I see no mention of willnot in the special thanks credits, I didn't even get a best answer mark in the thread.

Ah well, I guess it's true. Those big famous TV stars just don't care about the little people.

It was pretty cool watching the dynamite blow up. If I was the prisoner, I probably would have wanted to move as far away from the dynamite as the cell allowed as opposed to huddling... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:44 AM on May 31, 2007

I can try to make it.

Is it just me, or do we get something like 20 new MetaTalk posts every time an LA meetup thread gets posted?

I don't notice that much volume most of the times, but as soon as an LA meetup gets posted it screams right off the front page.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 5:40 PM on May 4, 2007

Those comments should NOT have been deleted.

That was a bad decision.

I don't think I've read an obit thread on the site yet where there wasn't at least one person coming in with a negative view. Personally, I hate the obit threads, but whatever. Silencing dissenting voices just because it hurts some people's feelings is not a good direction for this site to take.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 7:53 PM on April 12, 2007

It was nice meeting everybody or seeing everybody again.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:00 PM on November 5, 2006

Ways this could have happened:

Hotmail stops picking up POP Mail, reklaw notices he isn't getting e-mail any more, does a web search for fixes or just happens upon an article with information to forward to your ISP asking to have forwarding set up. Reklaw does this, but doesn't remember doing it.

Hotmail stops picking up POP Mail, ISP sends a courtesy e-mail to users who were using POP pick-up from Hotmail to say, hey, this is going to shut off,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 4:47 PM on October 26, 2006

® = & reg ; (without the spaces)
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 1:31 PM on October 17, 2006

There is another class of thread. Stuff I'm following/reading, but that I haven't favorited. If there was a way to track threads I've clicked into, that would be super duper swell.

I know I could do it myself by actually favoriting stuff, but that seems like such a big commitment to make to a thread, and what's one more DB table/column/whatever between friends?
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 4:37 PM on October 12, 2006

I wasn't suggesting adding a bookmark flag. I was suggesting that you could very easily track and provide a view of threads I "Recently Viewed".

This seems to perfectly match your stated goal:

I don't want to do anything that requires active input, because few people would use it. I'm trying to automate views of the data that we have already, without any need for user education or new flags or anything.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:18 AM on October 13, 2006

The 14th isn't good for me. The 21st probably works though.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 7:52 AM on September 11, 2006

I was annoyed to see yet another person complaining about all the YouTube links. However annoying all of you whiners think the youtube posts are, I promise you that your endless bitching is much more harmful to MetaFilter.

But, because you linked to all posts tagged youtube, I found this thread about a kid doing re-enactments from movies like Star Trek and Willy Wonka. I missed the original post, but it was awesome, so thanks for bringing it to my attention whiney and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:29 PM on June 25, 2006

God I'd like to strangle whatever asshole convinced people that a good post requires supplementary links. Every single time I see some self-appointed post quality cop nattering on about a single link post I want to scream.

What makes a good post? It's amazingly simple.

1. You go about your day of surfing the internet.
2. You find something kind of cool or interesting or different that you think the people of MeFi might find... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 8:04 AM on June 3, 2006

The 20th SUCKs for me. Most of the rest of next week is still open though.

The Golden Gopher was a cool place but not great for photographs if people are looking for that kind of thing.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:34 AM on April 12, 2006

I don't think the question was will Matt deliver records if the government asks. Of course he will, and the original poster seems to understand that.

I think the question was how long does Matt keep records since the original poster feels (I'm assuming) that it would be better if Matt kept them as short a time as possible as then he would be unable to deliver that which does not exist.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 9:15 AM on February 9, 2006

Isn't log cleaning moot anyway? I was under the impression that Matt was saving IP addresses in the database for each comment posted (or at least for each login).

Is that not true? And, since there's also a time stamp, all anybody needs to do is get access to the database.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:54 AM on February 9, 2006

Matt
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 2:37 PM on January 13, 2006

LA people have enough trouble actually getting to meet-ups. This show up whenever you show up stuff is just way too zen for me.

I am planning to stop by -- you know, whenever.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 1:26 PM on January 11, 2006

pics taken by willnot have thus come.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:42 PM on January 11, 2006

By the way, is there any way to find out the exact longitude and latitude from looking at Google maps?

Type an address into google maps, click the link this page link. Lat and Long get added to the query string of the URL that is generated. ll=x,y

I'll try to make it to the party. Wednesday looks better for me next week, but either is probably workable.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:27 AM on January 6, 2006

There's a function here. It's in PHP, but the basic formula is there, so maybe you can figure out how to convert it.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 1:33 AM on December 22, 2005

Sorry - I see you already have it working in Colfd Fusion, so you clearly know the formula.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 1:34 AM on December 22, 2005

I think I'll probably make it.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 1:56 PM on November 16, 2005

Sorry, I wanted to make it, but I just couldn't.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 2:16 PM on November 18, 2005

I might be able to make it although the 20th through the end of November would be bad for me.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:36 PM on November 9, 2005

juiceCake - That's kind of a weird example to use since it seems to refute rather than support what people are saying upthread. I hate when pundits claim to be taken out of context for getting called on their BS, but I think we really need a little here.

When I read this:

Thanks for the explanation, anapestic. To be honest, I was not certain of the group's goals. I never bothered to check them out. I just had an understand, from wherever... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:20 AM on September 3, 2005

but I think it's a bit early to corral everything into one big post.

Sure, but can we limit it to 5 big posts a day? It's actually a little bit absurd. As of this writing, we've got 9 already this morning. There were 10 yesterday. All told, I count 28 posts on the front page right now.

Maybe there's too much for 1 big post, but there has to be a middle ground between 1 and 56% of all the posts in the past couple of days.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 9:56 AM on September 3, 2005

The benefit of Live Preview is fewer calls to the server. The volume of comments is much higher than the volume of posts, so there's less (practically no) benefit for posts in terms of saved bandwidth and server utilization. And, as dobbs rightly states, there's plenty of downside to live preview.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:22 AM on August 28, 2005

I'd argue that none of us is in the position to argue whether copyright infringement is a good thing if, ultimately, it brings the original artist more visibility.

Well, you can argue that, but you'd be wrong. Copyright isn't a natural right. It's a temporary grant that the public extends to the author (at least in the US, and in my opinion everywhere). The public is well within its rights to take back that right as it sees fit.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 4:36 PM on August 22, 2005

I HATE(!) it.

I find that having the text appear in the edit box and preview area at the same time is very distracting, and I think it's less likely that people will really review their stuff now in this one step process.

I seem to be in the minority though, so carry on with your love fest.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:17 AM on July 21, 2005

I'm in (natch). I'll need someplace that takes credit cards though since I don't think I'll be getting any of your fancy-schmancy non-Euro currency just for the one night (and after paying for this Internet connection, I'm all out of the Euros I bought anyway).
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 9:09 AM on May 23, 2005

How on earth could TV guides be equivalent to The Bible or Mark Twain both of which (depending on the bible version) use archaic versions of English?
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 9:17 AM on April 24, 2005

Oh, I see. It's just looking at number of words per sentence and number of syllables per word. Whether those words make any sense to the reader are beside the point.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 9:25 AM on April 24, 2005

Well see women wouldn't be funny because depending on the women you could only take somewhere between zero and three.

Five-year-olds is funny (and yeah, kind of sick) because the numbers are so much higher. It's like asking what's the wildest thing you'd do for $10 versus what's the wildest thing you'd do for $1 Million. The stakes are just so much higher, and there are so many more interesting avenues to go down.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:58 PM on March 22, 2005

I can probably make it.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 7:41 AM on March 9, 2005

It was fun if sparsely attended. Here's the MeFi Girls Gone Wild shot.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 7:31 PM on March 13, 2005

wasn't worse than the "Is anybody having fun" question

I didn't see that. Link?

link

And, This One seems similar.

And the Buffy one seems like a poorly veiled attempt to poll everybody about their favorite episode, but I suppose there has to be some slack for chatty questions.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 10:49 AM on March 2, 2005

Not sure how you steal somebody's creativity. I'm imagining some kind of anti-muse going around bestowing writers block on unsuspecting creatives.

I've always been a fan of Calvin and Hobbes though, so my vote is for best of the web for sure. Arhhhhhhh Matey!!!
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:39 AM on February 27, 2005

In case you missed it many, many times above, everyone agrees with you, Alex, that Watterson still owns Calvin and Hobbes. Nobody disputed his ownership of the comic strip.

I don't agree that he still owns Calvin and Hobbes. I think that as soon as he published Calvin and Hobbes or even shared it with a single person, he ceased to own Calvin and Hobbes. What he does own or have (assuming he hasn't sold it) is a limited grant from the government that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:00 AM on February 28, 2005

I didn't say it was "probably wrong" I said it was "probably illegal". My ethics tend towards the categorical imperative, and I ask myself if the world would be a better place if we were all free to cut across each others lawns, and I arrive at the conclusion that I believe that would be a better world. I ask myself if the world would be a better place where creative expression could be easily distributed and not subject to artificial scarcity and I arrive at the conclusion... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:17 AM on February 28, 2005

This is an aside BlueTrain, but in a thread this long it hardly matters. So, if the law of the land is in support of slavery, and somebody violates that law but helping a slave escape to the North, you believe they are immoral because they are thwarting society's laws for purposes of selfish gain?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that freeing a slave is equivalent to freeing creative expression. I'm just curious about following your arguments to their logical conclusions.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 11:30 AM on February 28, 2005

[+] is better, and since the more inside is part of the posting text, and gets slightly lost when you click into the thread, a subtle visual indication to hilight where the more inside content starts would be nice too.
posted to MetaTalk by willnot at 3:27 PM on February 17, 2005