I was going to post almost exactly the same thing, spock.

Thanks very much, lots of good reading here.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:38 AM on January 6, 2006

9/10.... "by hook or by crook" was an outright guess, the others not so much. The one I missed was "admiral".
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:09 AM on January 6, 2006

It's dangerous to lock people up for having ideas you don't agree with.

Government should never be allowed to suppress non-violent dissent, or ideas that don't match the status quo. Not ever.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:52 AM on January 4, 2006

adamrice: maybe it's because, while they vehemently despise non-whites, very few of them would actually go so far as to kill them, particularly en-masse. They don't want to believe just how evil their antecedents were, so they deny that the Holocaust ever happened. They're nasty people, by and large, but not that nasty. I can't imagine why else they'd deny it.

Holocaust denial, btw, is very foolish. I ran into a denier in the early BBS systems,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:15 PM on January 4, 2006

If it's true, this is a BIG DEAL.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:20 AM on January 4, 2006

Reg-free link for those who don't want to bother.

Link generator for reg-free links.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:20 AM on January 3, 2006

I don't get why people use these, really.... you hardly ever have to type a URL in. And you can specify any text you like as the visible anchor. If a long link would mess up your article, you can anchor it to just one or two words.

It takes about five minutes to learn to build a link. It will work as long as the destination site does.... so if urlx or tinyurl go down (certainly possible), your links are unaffected.

For instance, a URL to go... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:26 AM on January 3, 2006

Stay the course, my ass. 300 billion for the invasion and lining the pockets of Halliburton... less than 20 billion (about 6.5%) for actually getting the country going again.

You can bet the conservative radio stations will be spinning this one like mad..."we've spent enough on those bastards, let them fix it themselves now."

If the mission was raping US taxpayers to make Halliburton rich, well...mission accomplished!
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:35 AM on January 3, 2006

Ok, I don't want to know. Got it. So is this another one of those links I'm not supposed to click? I get confused about this stuff. :)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:18 PM on January 2, 2006

mediareport: Heh, that's me. I didn't write that here because I didn't think it would be that interesting to this crowd... folks seemed interested in solutions, not general discussion. Loquacious' plea for help-only seemed pretty heartfelt.

In my first draft, I talked about why the Unices, with their multi-user roots, were less likely to make this kind of mistake. I ended up pulling that part, but it was another reason I didn't post it here.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:10 PM on January 2, 2006

The Mexican government claimed very strongly that it saw one or more UFOs a year or two ago... whatever happened to that story?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:59 AM on January 2, 2006

Continuing SprintF's comment... "...and there should be a corporate death penalty."

Monsanto should be first against the wall.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:46 PM on January 1, 2006

I must express doubt about those being unmodified cars. The thing where there are four of them spinning together is particularly questionable, as is the scene with two cars spinning in tandem.

I think there was more involved than just cars. I strongly suspect they were physically linked in some way. The shots are carefully designed to hide the spots where such linkages would presumably exist, so I'm going to run with that theory until proven wrong.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:03 AM on December 31, 2005

We probably have plans NOW to invade Canada. Doesn't mean we'll actually ever implement them, but if our military intelligence people have any clue at all, we'll have very detailed plans on how to annex both Canada and Mexico as quickly as possible.

In fact, with the amount of money we spend on the military in this country, I'd be pretty annoyed with them if we didn't have a working plan of battle to deal with every country in the world, from Switzerland to Swaziland.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:38 PM on December 30, 2005

delmoi, the reason for that is pretty simple... the Earth is an analog device.

Time, for most folks, is a way of measuring when the Sun will rise. But the Earth is a big, semi-liquid ball that wobbles its way through space. Each rotation is unique; they CAN'T tell you absolutely precisely when the Sun will rise, because it's different every day. And it's very gradually slowing down.

So they add the leap seconds, willy-nilly, when the Earth... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:45 PM on December 30, 2005

It looks like the blog's comments have been heavily edited. Almost all posts mentioning bad stuff coming from Alaska's IP space seem to have been removed. At this point, there is little reason to read anything past the original blog entry. The really interesting part seem to have been excised.

Hopefully that will save some time for a few folks.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:44 AM on December 30, 2005

Gyan, it doesn't matter whether it works or not. Really, it doesn't. The simple fact is that at least some of the time, we're going to be torturing innocent people.

As a matter of fact, we are 100% of the time torturing innocent people, when you remember that our legal system is based on 'innocent until proven guilty'. These people don't get trials and THEN get tortured... someone points the finger at them, carts them off to prison, and tortures them (sometimes to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:14 AM on December 30, 2005

b_thinky says: Yes, and by watching Nightline and The Daily Show you are better informed than the entire CIA.
Argument by appeal to authority is pretty weak when you consider just how badly they got it wrong about the WMDs. It was obvious from an armchair that there couldn't possibly be any nuclear weapon program in Iraq, despite assertions to the contrary. Chemical and biological were possible, but the loud claims of nuclear made the whole thing pretty damn... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:18 AM on December 30, 2005

Gyan we shouldn't be torturing just because we shouldn't. Period. End of report.

However, on top of that argument, you ALSO have the fact that virtually all experts in the field say it doesn't work. In fact, I've never seen even a single argument from anyone remotely credible that it does.

As the ambassador said, we're selling our souls for dross.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:21 AM on December 30, 2005

Rancid Badger: those are some pretty strong assertions, and I haven't seen anything supporting them... summary executions in Guantanamo and torture in the Federal prison system are both new to me. (I'm aware that some people died under torture in Guantanamo, but that's not _quite_ the same thing.... summary execution has to be deliberate, I believe.)

Do you have anything to back yourself up?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:26 AM on December 30, 2005

Max, a couple of years ago, they released a PC game, "Tron 2.0". It got somewhat mixed reviews, though I liked it very much. On a high-res display, I think the real-time generated graphics looked MUCH better than the original movie.

We can now render, on our desktops at 60 frames per second, what it once took months and months to do. If you have any kind of a recent graphic card, you have more power under the hood than probably existed in the entire... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:38 PM on December 29, 2005

PP, what people are saying is that the body count matters. They are asking if the Iraq clusterfuck is worth 2,000 deaths and 15,000 casualties. So far.

You assert that it is, and other folks are pointing out that you have nothing at risk. You're saying that other people's kids should go die for your cause.

If you really believe in that cause, then you should have your ass, or the ass of a son or daughter,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:34 AM on December 29, 2005

If you're really into music, this is actually a bit outdated... it was, after all, written more than three years ago.

If you're serious about good quality, use lossless. Hard drives are large and cheap; a 250gig hard drive, which you can find for like a hundred bucks these days, will hold 4 to 5 hundred albums, losslessly compressed.

FLAC is a good format choice, because it has good tag support, and you can use it fairly easily from within... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:52 PM on December 27, 2005

monju, if the source isn't that good, then the ER-4s wouldn't show you that much difference. You should first compare the headphones with a lossless source and get comfortable with how they sound. Once you choose the one you prefer, then experiment with the lossy compression.

By way of comparison, I was checking to see what difference a headphone amp would make on my Senns. With 128k MP3, I couldn't hear anything different. Starting with LAME-encoded tracks at... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:15 AM on December 28, 2005

Looks like the nameservers for MySpaceAlbum are down. (ns1.dreamhost.com and ns2.dreamhost.com.) Neither answers queries for www.myspacealbum.com.

Links will probably start working when dreamhost realizes something's busted. :)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:34 PM on December 26, 2005

Yuck.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:59 PM on December 25, 2005

I guess I'm just without taste and clueless in the matters of Christmas lights. Most of those look fine. The one with the reflection into the water is quite beautiful, IMO.

Plastic N' Bricks leaves a bit to be desired, but it might just be a bad picture. The hues seem strange.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:46 AM on December 24, 2005

Isn't it interesting how these really terrible, damaging stories always break about two days before Christmas or some other major holiday?.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:51 PM on December 23, 2005

This is an obvious advertisement, yet my post to that effect was removed. What's going on?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:26 AM on December 22, 2005

Octothorpe, I had the very first comment here, and it was "You can use these wallets to buy delicious Pepsi Blue"... but it was deleted. Maybe this is a friend of Matt's or something?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:09 AM on December 22, 2005

mathowie, as far as I'm concerned, I DID save the pepsi blue comment for a pointless product announcement post that offers nothing interesting.

It smells very fishy.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:24 AM on December 22, 2005

The voiceover when you float your mouse cursor over the coffee cup is semi-random... it has a couple of "common" sounds, and then some less common ones... I heard at least three that didn't happen often. I won't spoil them.... but some of them are pretty funny. :)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:54 PM on December 18, 2005

I'm not sure if they were mentioning it here or not, but that Orlowski guy at the Register has a serious axe to grind. EVERY article that is critical of Wikipedia over there was written by him. And it's not just one or two... he's fired off at least a dozen salvos, each one nastier than the last.

He's basically using the Register as his soapbox. He's on a crusade against the Evil Wikipedia.

If I were the Register, I'd look pretty dimly on my... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:54 PM on December 17, 2005

Well I, for one, didn't even know it was OUT YET. I thought it wasn't out until the 20th.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:55 PM on December 16, 2005

Interestingly, he used a new game from Bullfrog, called "The Movies". It's a good game. It has the classic Theme Hospital feel to it, though of course it's all in 3D.

There is an explicit area of the game that's designed to do exactly what this fellow did... make semi-real movies.

The fundamental problem, sadly, is that all the scenes you can shoot are pre-scripted; you have a large library to choose from, but there's simply no... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:10 PM on December 16, 2005

Megafly, they were largely inspired by our Revolution, in fact, and Ben Franklin spent a lot of time there, consulting with the new government. (and, apparently, really going nuts with the ladies.... into old age he was never hard-pressed to find someone to sleep with. :) )

They gave us the Statue of Liberty for a reason.....and no, not because of ol' Ben's virility. :)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:58 PM on December 16, 2005

You don't have to kill a Christmas tree by cutting it. As long as you leave three branches on the stump, the vast majority of trees will regrow quite quickly. They only die if you cut ALL the branches off.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:26 AM on December 16, 2005

Soyjoy, if you have a yard, plant five pine trees. Stagger the planting, so that you put one (or more) in every year. (if you have the space, plant two each year... pines are pretty robust, but accidents happen.)

After five years, cut the largest tree. Leave at least three branches on the stump. Repeat this every year. The tree you cut will regenerate over a five year period, so if you get five good ones, you get a live Christmas tree every year, from the basic... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:07 AM on December 16, 2005

Personally, I think they're a lot more likely to be offended by the very mediocre moviemaking than any Christian overtones. It's an awful movie, a tremendous waste of money.

As I recall, the Christianity stuff didn't get strong until late in the series. I was rather repulsed, as a kid, by the last two books, without really understanding why.... they left me both cold and a little creeped out. I didn't figure out the reason for many years.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:20 AM on December 16, 2005

The SL scripting language is both annoyingly limited and very powerful. Self-replicating objects, unfortunately, are one of the easiest things to do. SL is probably the first game to reach broad usage where any resident is technically capable of crashing the entire game. The Unix equivalent would be the 'fork bomb'. In Unix, the way that's generally handled is with kernel-arbitrated limits on how many processes can be spawned by particular users. SL might be forced to implement something... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:27 AM on December 15, 2005

SomeOneElse... Linden Labs wouldn't get mad at you if you found a bug in their code and crashed some servers doing it... as long as you document what you did, file a bug report, and don't do it again until they fix it. What they don't like, and apparently are going after, is deliberately malicious behavior.

They're really very reasonable people; they don't like it when people take their service down on purpose, but they're not all paranoid and weird.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:52 PM on December 15, 2005

The article says, "Environmental protection measures rule out cremation." Talk about a dumb law!

My father thought it was deeply selfish, nearly sinful -- and he wasn't really religious -- to take up valuable land with your corpse. And that was back before there was any particular scarcity. He thought cemeteries were essentially a giant jobs-protection racket. In California, at least, cemeteries are required by law to be kept maintained,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:49 AM on December 14, 2005

This article seems to be confusing the 800XL with the 2600. The 2600 was the first of the general-purpose home videogame systems, and was very successful. But it was cheap, slow, and appallingly primitive. The XL-series machines were full-fledged computers with powerful graphics and sound systems, probably better than what the 64 was offering. The 64 was architected very differently internally, and was obviously a cleanroom implementation. It was so successful largely because it was cheap,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:34 AM on December 14, 2005

Dag Maggot, you can stop waiting now. The Ur-Quan Masters is a nearly perfect remake. It's better than the PC version you probably played, because they included the speech from the 3DO flavor of the game. I thought it added quite a bit... the voices are uniformly good. The Spathi, Druuge, and Zoq/Fot/Pik are awesome.

For those who haven't encountered it yet, Star Control 2 stands very, very tall in the annals of gaming. The graphics are a bit simplistic now, but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:42 AM on December 13, 2005

Yes, penguin, it would be wonderful to wear one while sipping Pepsi Blue. :)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:06 AM on December 12, 2005

books, if you use non-saline solution, it does hurt like crazy. It's very painful. If you use saline, however, it's completely painless. It's easy to make your own.

Keep in mind that commercial saline has preservatives (thimerosal mostly, I think) that you may not want in your sinuses. Making your own is better, but remember you have to make it fresh daily... it doesn't keep at all, even in the fridge.

If even saline solution hurts, you may... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:48 PM on December 11, 2005

At least he doesn't eat dog food.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:48 AM on December 11, 2005

I could, of course, make some really horrible comment about BEING dog food, but I shall refrain.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:48 AM on December 11, 2005

Ok, ok, I know it's dumb to treat this thread with any seriousness at all. I realize that, yet here I am commenting anyway. Sigh.

Last I checked, science fiction was about telling stories of the possible future, and how humans might react to those conditions. The fact that many of them ended up being right wasn't due to any particular ability to see the future, but rather from influencing young people to actually go out and create the inventions described. Clarke... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:14 AM on December 11, 2005

.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:21 PM on December 10, 2005