> Sure, but that doesn't explain why they would block "blogs and forums" as a category of which metafilter is a part.

Keep in mind, that's the category that 4chan would probably be put in. That's why it gets blocked.

Metafilter (and most blogs, and most forums) is just collateral damage, a victim of being tarred with a very broad brush.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:32 AM on July 23, 2008

This bad news for the citizens of Kleenex Island.
posted by StickyCarpet

I see their export embargo has really been hitting you hard.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:25 AM on July 23, 2008

I agree with the deletion in retrospect, but at the time it drove me a little bonkers; I had written up what I thought was a good, sincere, helpful response ...

... and the thread got canned somewhere in the two minutes between Preview and Submit when I was typo-fixing.

Obviously this is a sign that I should just lighten up and shoot from the hip more.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:34 PM on July 7, 2008

Anyone complaining about this should take one big step back. This is how the justice system in the U.S. is supposed to work. The whole function of the Grand Jury is to keep someone from being prosecuted for an act that's technically illegal but the community thinks was justifiable. If you can't get a Grand Jury to indict, that's a good sign that either it shouldn't be illegal, or you're enforcing the statute wrong.

Here, that's exactly what... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 7:01 PM on June 30, 2008

I really think the whole line of argument over "he shot some guys in the back, that's MURDER" misses the point. The U.S. system (as implemented in Texas, anyway) contains, quite by design, features that try to prevent someone from being prosecuted for a crime if it's not considered offensive and worthy of condemnation in their community.

Or, to put it differently, the system is not designed to be enforced by robots; in order to go to jail for a long time, you... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:03 AM on July 3, 2008

Well, I'm certainly not complaining; there's nothing I like more than Internet Justice and Creepy Body Parts.

If we could get both at once, all the better.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:38 PM on June 20, 2008

Apparently, this is the smartest website in the world?

Pfft, it doesn't even use CSS.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:08 PM on June 20, 2008

I meant to link to this. I'm not sure that fixing the link is really an improvement, though.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:22 PM on June 20, 2008

I prefer A, but I'm concerned that it might not render well on a very small screen (e.g. cellphone).

Not that MeFi in general renders very well on a phone to begin with (I always end up with a column of single words, so the whole site reads
like
bad
free-
verse
poetry).
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:13 PM on June 20, 2008

The "I am not your lawyer/doctor/mechanic, and this is not legal/medical/mechanical advice..." seems reasonable and prudent for a professional to write, and if it makes them more willing or able to help strangers on the Internet, I'm all for it.

However, what's always struck me as weird are the non-lawyers, doctors, etc., that feel the need to point out their non-lawyer/doctor/mechanicdom at the beginning of each discussion.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 9:16 AM on June 4, 2008

I thought that I've seen over 300, but I can't actually find one now. It'd be cool if there were a way to find by number of responses (absolute) in addition to just favorites.

Also, it would be interesting to look at how favorites and number of comments track each other, and what were some of the posts that created the greatest deviation from the norm (most favorites with least comments and vice versa). I'm not sure what kind of post would lean dramatically one way or the other...
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:06 PM on May 26, 2008

About what time do people think they'll be showing up and staying 'till? I'm flying back into DC that night, and I'm not totally sure when I'll be getting in; it might be fairly late but if there's a good chance people will be around I'll try to make it over.

I missed the last one but had a great time the one before that...be great to see everyone again.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 3:33 PM on May 19, 2008

We need a stylesheet that transforms MeFi into 132CPL line data, so we can read it off of huge reams of greenbar.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 11:19 AM on April 30, 2008

blasdelf, that totally made my day. Rock on.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 11:53 AM on May 1, 2008

Metafilter: tickling the balls of certainty with the feather of solipsism.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 11:33 AM on April 30, 2008

Darn; I think I'm still going to be out of town on the 28th. Last one was a great time, hopefully it won't be too long until the next.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:02 PM on March 23, 2008

Can't get behind this one. It would be one thing if nasreddin were name-dropping from Who's Who in 18th Century Philosophy in a current events thread, but this was a thread about Thomas Jefferson. If referencing Rousseau or Voltaire isn't appropriate there, it isn't appropriate anywhere; if that's the case I think it says something rather poor about the intellectual depth of the community.

Also, supposing that someone was... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 6:51 AM on March 17, 2008

slogger: "And for what it's worth, the "395 comments (213 new)" never displays correctly for me. Even after I post a comment in a thread, when I return to the front page the count will remain unchanged."

Yeah it doesn't seem to work well for me either. I can't quite figure it out; sometimes it's like it chooses a random number about halfway through the thread, and decided that's what I've read to (and refuses to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:13 PM on February 22, 2008

Is having a "CC yourself" checkbox really a 'power user' feature? Really?

There are lots of trivial mail systems that have those things. Hell, when I sent an ecard – a freaking ecard – yesterday, it had such a box. Lots of 'send this article to a friend' systems do, too. It's pretty common/standard. If you have an email account, it's not really hard to figure out the concept. It's just a nice way of keeping track of everything you send.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:02 PM on February 22, 2008

The Jabber server would be pretty cool.

Emacs made so much more sense to me after I saw the MIT LISP Machine's keyboard.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 3:00 PM on February 1, 2008

But couldn't fridges could be built to operate like that: put a heat exchange coil outside and the rest inside, assuming your fridge is going to stay in one spot? Maybe some kind of hybrid system that also has the standard compressor and so on for days when it isn't cold enough outside? Considering it's running constantly, it could be worth the added cost. There must be a way to take advantage of all that bloody cold air outside.

This is called a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:49 PM on January 27, 2008

There is a public parking lot up the street from Dremos that usually has space; IIRC it's metered but you can put in enough for several hours. I've never had any luck parking in the actual lot belonging to them.

But I'd definitely metro.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:00 AM on January 10, 2008

Oh, and I found out today that there is free parking (evenings/weekends only) adjacent to the metered lot, under the Arlington County building near 14th and N. Uhle Streets. (Actual entrance to the garage is off of Uhle in the corner between the two buildings; there may be another entrance on 15th.) It's only about 1500 ft from Dremos.

Anyway, I'll try to be there as well.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:22 PM on January 12, 2008

The way it's looking now, I'm going to head over directly from work in a couple of hours. Hope to see you guys there.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 1:42 PM on January 22, 2008

Well, that was a good time. (Aside from the part where I may or may not have given some random fellow with a ponytail the wrong idea. Awkward.)

Glad everyone seems to have made it home okay. Can't wait to see the photos, especially since I was lame and didn't bring anything to actually take photos with.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:01 PM on January 22, 2008

Well, I'd just like to chime in to say that I've found this thread quite fascinating. I honestly had never put a lot of thought into my username; it never really occurred to me that people would treat an obvious handle differently than a more natural-sounding name.

I guess I've spent so much time both on the Internet and in the world of Amateur Radio (where people are frequently identified by their callsigns; trivially resolvable to real names and addresses, granted)... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:58 PM on January 16, 2008

I think we should instead talk about the devices Apple would make if they worked exclusively under contract to secretive government agencies.

They would make 800MHz PowerPC computers. Each one would come in a suitcase, weigh 45 lbs., and cost twenty-five thousand dollars. It would require six weeks of training per operator to learn how to use, which the government employees would ignore, and the devices would sit in a warehouse, unused, for ten years... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 11:04 AM on January 16, 2008

What percentage of users post answers, under their 'real' account, in their own anonymous askmefi threads?

Wouldn't this be considered a pretty dick move? I mean, unless you're posting in your own thread to clarify or steer the discussion in some way -- which would probably blow your cover and totally remove the anonymity from it -- there doesn't seem like any good reason to self-post.

So I'd hope the percentage would be zero,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:34 PM on January 12, 2008

As long as you don't wear a fedora, matty, it's all good...

But anyway, on reconsideration I can imagine now there are reasons why people might self-comment in an anonymous AMF that are perhaps not quite as rare as I was imagining they would be.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:48 PM on January 12, 2008

There's nothing wrong with it. It's not a dick move. … Anonymous questions are submitted by a user; they show up sans identifying information in an anonymous question queue on the admin page; we approve them or not depending on whether they're an appropriate use of the service.

Thanks, cortex, for clearing that up. I didn't realize that approve/deny queue was anonymous (at least nominally, without going to a lot of extra effort) to the approver.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:29 AM on January 14, 2008

Wow, the StalkerSocial Explorer is pretty neat.

Is the recent Flickr uploads thing broken, or has nobody really uploaded anything in the last day?
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 7:53 PM on January 12, 2008

This thread was so much more fun before the question got explained. Oh, well.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 7:53 AM on January 10, 2008

I understand the threading/no-threading issue, but I wonder if there's some sort of middle ground. I think what people want is a way of finding parent/child comments. While threading is one way of accomplishing that, it seems like you could also do it with "smart quoting" of some sort.

E.g., have a button that, when clicked, quotes the post, but also inserts some sort of invisible tag to the original; maybe just an anchor-link (like many people and some... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 2:38 PM on January 6, 2008

RichardP beat me to it; this sounds precisely like the MTU fragmentation problem that's been happening intermittently to me for a while.

If you want to be absolutely sure, you can establish the maximum MTU size manually using ping. Here's an explanation of how it's done. (Nutshell: ping -f -l mtusize address, where mtusize is the size in bytes of the packets you want to send.)... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 1:23 PM on January 3, 2008

Oops; yes, RichardP, you're right about the flags. It's definitely -D -s, not -f -l.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 11:25 PM on January 3, 2008

From what I can tell based on that Experts Exchange (ugh, I can't believe they're still around) posting, a compromised site would have an obfuscated JS applet in it; MeFi -- at least when I view it -- has nothing in the code.

It might be enlightening to open the raw HTML for the Metafilter main page on the machine in question (the one that's showing the message), and compare it to a known-clean machine's output. If you stuck it up via Pastebin* or something similar, it... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:14 PM on December 30, 2007

The one weekend I'm out of town...

Oh, well. Hope it's a good time so that they'll be another one soon.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 4:43 PM on December 28, 2007

Ayuh.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:35 PM on December 21, 2007

The whole "IANAL" thing always struck me as odd. Saying "I am a lawyer but I'm not your lawyer, this isn't legal advice," makes sense -- it's a lawyer covering their ass. But if you're not a lawyer, why give a disclaimer at all? I find legal topics interesting, but I'm just some schmuck on the Internet. I don't really feel the need to tell anyone that I'm not a lawyer, because I've never said that I was.

It seems... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 10:28 PM on December 21, 2007

Seems like overkill-- better to implement something on the browser side.

I disagree. I think it's not inappropriate to do on the server/content side, if it's something a lot of users may find useful. The point of the browser is to display the page, full stop. Some browsers may do various things to it at the direction of the user, but a site shouldn't assume that the user's browser will do anything (besides... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:43 PM on December 16, 2007

I actually thought it was pretty cool, and I always was sorry that other sites (Facebook, etc.) didn't take the cue and do it also. It's pretty handy to know what's "public" information about someone and what's being shared with you because of a relationship of some sort.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:22 PM on December 16, 2007

Wow, and I was just taking the piss there for a minute...

I've seen the to-cache-or-not-to-cache argument go around a few times on other sites (cf. Slashdot's FAQ); I am personally in the pro-cache-links camp as long as the caching system respects robots.txt.

But IMO the real problem occurs even before you get to the decision of whether to put the cache links on the page: it's getting the caching system 'primed' before the site goes down to begin... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:38 PM on November 24, 2007

Durh ... and by "respects robots.txt" what I really meant was "respects Cache-Control" (RFC 2616). I really should have known better; toxic is quite right. Also, I will preview.
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 8:41 PM on November 24, 2007

I think (hope) the one Geoff is thinking of is the one I remember.

The ones suggested by blaneyphoto and MarvinTheCat are both also definitely related, but they're not the one I was thinking of. (Thanks though, both of you.) The question I remember was definitely a "how do I get a job doing..." and not a "how much should I get paid for..." type question.

I feel like we're getting closer though. Anyone else remember the same thing?
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 1:25 PM on July 16, 2007

Awesome -- thanks, everyone!
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 9:30 AM on July 17, 2007

Thought that it might be worth pointing out that some people are still experiencing this problem.

Is there any way to find out what sever along the path is dropping the ICMP Type 3 packets, or at least figure out if it's on the customer's ISP's side, or MeFi's ISP's side (the two places where complaining might possibly get anything done about it)?

It's seems a little odd to tell people that they have a problem in their router, when it's only one... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kadin2048 at 12:33 PM on May 11, 2007