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January 2001 Archives
January 31
"Because in the end..." One of the most insightful, engaging, and well written sites (not to mention the one that got plenty of us blogging in the first place) stops updating, at least for the near future; the tear-jerker of a last entry touches on so many things- relationships, art, emotions, careers, etc - it perfectly encapsulates so much of what made the page great. We'll miss you, Jack Saturn.
That being said, I can't wait for the book.
posted by NickBarat at 5:39 PM PST - 7 comments
Splat! It has all the usual stuff like yourname@spl.at e-mail etc...
BUT you should check out this link...
'Help The Girl'
It's a weekly serial where you can vote to control the characters...
posted by jonpanky at 2:50 PM PST - 5 comments
Libyan gets minimum of 20 years for Lockerbie Bombing by Scottish Court. Why are British courts handing out such tiny sentences? After all, in America it's not uncommon for people to receive 99 years for a single murder. Some people are doing over 10 years for rape alone. This Libyan could have easily received the death sentence if he were in the US, as it was similar in scale to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Yet, in the UK, it's possible to kill people through negligence, and get away with it. Just last month an uninsured driver was speeding, killed a pedestrian, fled the scene, and although found guilty, only received a
driving ban!
Is the UK overly soft in its sentencing? Or is the USA overly draconian?
posted by wackybrit at 10:20 AM PST - 23 comments
Sega bails on another piece of hardware. It looks like the dreamcast is dead. They are stopping production and reducing the price to clear the dreamcasts they have remaining in stock.
posted by bytecode at 9:01 AM PST - 20 comments
Feeling Safe about the Keeper of Domain Names Anyone notice that at least at 10:30am EST that Network Solutions homepage brings up an Error page? Doesn't that make us all feel safe.
And then there was the Registrars.com registrar transfer form which didn't think the domain I was trying to transfer had been registered (but if you used their WHOIS it showed it was).
posted by matte at 7:39 AM PST - 18 comments
Had this idea about a year ago over beer, when netthings were a-cookin', fleshed it out with some geek-comrades, pitched it under an NDA to a VC, got the green light, and then chickened out and went back to the day job. Once you really thought it through and calculated the wired populace as a percentage of the unwired, we figured, the idea was fabulous, a service to The People
and a MoneyMaker. Now
someone else seems to have had the same idea, more or less. I wish them luck. If it takes off, I'm gonna feel mighty dumb, and if it tanks, mighty lucky.
Now I can finally ask the MeFi jury...Silly thing or smart?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:34 AM PST - 17 comments
Salon tightens its belt... No surprise there, things are tough all over. But what caught my eye was a quote in paragraph 5 from an industry pundit who said he "hasn't seen any site that can be profitable with a revenue base of less than $15 million per quarter". What future does the web have if every site that creates its own content has to bill $60 million a year?
posted by BGM at 1:19 AM PST - 12 comments
The first chapter of Eric Schlosser's new book piqued my interest;
this
and
this solidified my desire to read Fast Food Nation. Has anyone else read the book yet? Comments?
posted by JDC8 at 12:07 AM PST - 11 comments
January 30
CNN portalizes? Not exactly, but the portal is clearly the model for their new design, which resembles nothing so much as a tall Yahoo. Headlines, except for the top story, are smaller and scattered about the page in more than one category -- something they've done for some time, but now with magnified effect (I counted
six links to Lockerbie stories). Have they forgotten that their mission is delivering
news?
posted by dhartung at 11:00 PM PST - 8 comments
k10k hits 100! Can't let today end without a little applause for k10k's 100th issue. And it's a doozy. (Be sure to check out all the random splashes.)
posted by fraying at 8:06 PM PST - 8 comments
Censorware.org one of the best censorware pages, has died. "Due to demands from some of the people who contributed, in however minor a fashion, to this site, it has been taken down." Dagnabit! Anybody have any idea why? The site had one of the neatest pages on the net, estimated how fast it was going to show how impossible it was to keep up. Free spxxch loses an important defender.
posted by mrmorgan at 8:31 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Disney will finally shut down Go.com Guess I wasn't the only one to think Go was a bad idea. Ever since Disney started doing the Go thing, their Disney.com site went from useful to down-right nasty. They might as well have called it goaway.com. I just hope what they mean by streamlining is take away the crap and make this stuff useful. The move was praised by Wall Street analysts. "Good riddance"
posted by jdiaz at 6:56 AM PST - 7 comments
While
IjustGotFired.com seems to be in full-swing, handing out free @ijustgotfired email addresses to the many people who are finding themselves being cut in the world of lay-offs, the site's founder, Wrybread, of
WryBread.com fame (a great site to waste enormous blocks of time at, looking at fun-but-useless mayhem type of stuff), has been unusually quiet with his own site since November.
Anybody in the S.F. area know anything about this? He didn't walk perilously close to the edge of the Earth and fall off, did he?
posted by lizardboy at 5:49 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
The Bush voucher plan A British opinion on the Bush education voucher plan. Is it too bold or too timid? We have read pros and cons on vouchers but this tackles the issue from a different slant.
posted by Postroad at 5:04 AM PST - 12 comments
One of the best movie news and gossip web sites,
Roughcut.com, has just closed, a victim of the AOL Time Warner layoffs. Luckily, the single best thing about Roughcut, David Poland's daily column "The Hot Button," will live on via
Poland's personal site.
posted by aaron at 12:48 AM PST - 3 comments
I'm surprised that none of us thought to post this: January 28 was the
15th anniversary of the Challenger explosion. For most of us Generation Xers, that day was the ultimate "where were you?" event, a moment as defining to our generation as the JFK assassination was to Boomers. Or at least that's what the media wants us to believe. In any case, it affected most people very strongly, and threw a hell of a monkey wrench into the US space program that we're arguably still recovering from. Worse, the shuttle's almost guaranteed to blow up again at some point, due to design problems and the inherent risks of space flight. So where were you on that day? How did it affect you? Do you think the nation was permanently affected?
posted by aaron at 12:33 AM PST - 65 comments
January 29
Physics problem A "Discovery" program for kids at MSN.com explores the physics of skydiving, specifically the trajectory of an object dropped from a moving plane. Problem is, their demonstration animation looks completely phucked. More inside...
posted by Tubes at 8:46 PM PST - 8 comments
Reed's Law is about how, under certain conditions ("Group Forming Networks") the value created by a network, rather than being quadratic as predicted by Metcalfe's Law, becomes exponential. What's interesting is his discussion of the kind of networks he's talking about (chat rooms, eBay and … MetaFilter?) and what happens in them. Trouble is, I can't quite follow him! Can you?
posted by rodii at 5:18 PM PST - 1 comments
Government waste. While the report had very
libertarian leanings, John Stossel's special on how royally inept our government is at accomplishing
anything is an indictment of the entrenched ways of doing things. There
must be some sort of crossroad where liberal social policies can meet with real accountability without bureaucracy.
posted by owillis at 3:48 PM PST - 21 comments
See? Y'all sent me off to TVTechnology, and I found something interesting... Remember a couple years ago -- The Day The Pagers Died? They died because Galaxy 4 fell over, which in turn was because its Satellite Control Processors broke.
Both of them.
4 other birds are down one processor; a total of 25 are in danger -- all built on the Hughes HM-601 satellite 'bus'. What is it we always say about genetic diversity being good? Wouldn't you hate to be the engineer on the hook for *this* 12 billion dollars?
posted by baylink at 1:31 PM PST - 7 comments
GOP measure to allow for our govt to assassinate those deemed worthy of it. introduced by Bob Barr in Senate today. I assume they mean non-Americans?
posted by Postroad at 1:12 PM PST - 19 comments
IE 6.0 beta? It looks like they leaked a copy (Win 2000 only). Many screenshots. More integration with MSN, sidebars (explorer bars), media player, etc.
posted by tremendo at 8:54 AM PST - 18 comments
Catcher in the Rye just turned 50 and J.D. Salinger is staying true to form by doing nothing to mark the occasion. Even his publishing company is saying very little about the anniversary. I don't think it's right to stay silent about perhaps the greatest American novel of all-time. I've loved this book ever since I first read it. Hail to Holden Caufield, and Kudos to Salinger for writing the book.
posted by Bag Man at 12:53 AM PST - 27 comments
January 28
There's been a lot of talk of late about signal-to-noise ratios here on MeFi (er, Ashcroft who?...). Generally, we think of noise as something that always degrades the quality of a signal. Sometimes, however, the opposite can be the case. Here's a neat
little demonstration of a non-linear system in which noise can be used to
amplify a signal that would otherwise be too be faint to detect any other way. It exploits a phenomenon known as
Stochastic Resonance.
posted by lagado at 7:50 PM PST - 25 comments
Quoth the Ravens,
nevermore. 34 - 7, and the Vince Lombardi trophy goes back to Baltimore. My favorite spots were...
posted by baylink at 7:07 PM PST - 35 comments
This is pretty damn cool:
your bookmarks, napsterized. A new app (windows only, sorry) to let you share your favorite sites with everyone and allow others to search for them. If they add a hotlist, ala napster, this could be one killer app.
posted by mathowie at 2:02 PM PST - 7 comments
When I Am King seems to be the latest supercool discovery in online comics. This guy updates weekly, and he's got 18 episodes so far.
posted by David Gaddis at 12:20 AM PST - 37 comments
January 27
Like the rest of Europe, Germany is going through a histrionic BSE scare. So Germans switched to sausage and pork. And then they were told pork contains anabolic steroids. So they switched to venison. And then they were told it might have BSE too. So the Germans, who hate veggies, are starting to "starve."
And raid zoos for meat. Hey, where'd all this paté come from?
posted by aaron at 11:01 PM PST - 5 comments
24 hours to go. Am I the only one who can't wait for the new tribes to square off? Place your bets at
SurvivorDeadPool.
posted by Basta at 2:51 PM PST - 13 comments
DirecTV takes a stand and VIA satellite, "
killed pirated pieces of hardware that had enabled viewers in the U.S. and abroad to see a broad range of programming, including premium channels and pay-per-view events that they had not paid for." I didn't even know these pieces of hardware existed, but there are
whole sites dedicated to satellite hacking which tell you
what to do now if you had one of these. I hope if you have one of these cards you didn't have a Super Bowl Party planned.
posted by Mark at 12:01 PM PST - 13 comments
Winamp 3.0a2 has been released to the general public. Beware it's Alpha 2 so some things aren't complete, such as the EQ, but it still has some nice new features such as the Thinger and the ability to layer and alpha blend skins.
posted by physics at 10:30 AM PST - 15 comments
IT gets a domain. The interesting thing is now maybe less how world-changing
IT might be (most dreamers I know, at least, have gone from wide-eyed Bradburian dreaming to the expectation of disappointment to resigned cynicism by now), but how the commercial game will play itself out. I feel all dirty now.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:33 AM PST - 6 comments
January 26
"My Untold Story" - What if we threw a presidential campaign and nobody came? Ralph explains how he tried to engage the press, and why it didn't work.
posted by fleener at 6:29 PM PST - 20 comments
U.S. sending Patriot missles to Israel Iraq moves troops close to Syrian border and announces it is a military exercise. The U.S. moves Patriot missle outfit to Israel with some troops and announces it is a military exercise. My trainer told me that sometimes you can overdo the exercising.
posted by Postroad at 5:00 PM PST - 4 comments
So, who are you going to vote for? Yes, it's that time again, as the 2004 presidential campaign gets underway!
The Des Moines Register asked registered Iowa Democrats to declare their favorites. Who are you supporting?
posted by aaron at 12:49 PM PST - 12 comments
:-( Despair, INC. Secures official trademark registration for ":-(", announces plans to sue millions for trademark infringement.
posted by Hackworth at 11:55 AM PST - 13 comments
SurvivorBlog2 - Crazier than the first time around Now, if only Yahoo would add this as a module for my start page.
For those who followed SurvivorBlog1, all the old contestants are back in the peanut gallery and there's a heap load of drama, cat fights, & smack talking going around for SB2. Sick, twisted, embarrassingly addictive.
posted by jujubee at 11:53 AM PST - 9 comments
Mostly BS. In it, we learn the World Economic Forum wants to revamp its public relations, and that the next WTO Ministerial (previously in Seattle) will be held in Qatar. I read elsewhere the tiny nation doesn't have enough hotel rooms, so attendees will stay on luxury cruiseliners anchored in the harbor.
posted by capt.crackpipe at 10:32 AM PST - 6 comments
More than Missing Dubyas Following up
yesterday's iffy Drudge link, a bit more conclusive (MSNBC) reporting of the so-called "pranks" that bitter Clinton & Gore staffers pulled before leaving their offices. (more inside)
posted by Dreama at 10:29 AM PST - 25 comments
yahoogroups conversion of egroups is in full swing. I've been through the conversion from onelist to egroups, but now with this they're mandating a conversion to the Yahoo ID and killing off the old sign-in system - which was email address + password. Why *must* I have a Yahoo ID?
posted by artlung at 8:14 AM PST - 30 comments
January 25
Malawi's albinos are discriminated against. People are suspicious of their pale skin and yellow hair.
so they've formed the Albino Association of Malawi which is lobbying for such rights as an end to workplace discrimination and government aid for their unique medical needs. the ministry of health considers the group's demands reasonable and is working on solutions which would include education for comunities on how to look after albino children.
posted by palegirl at 9:18 PM PST - 3 comments
In case other forms of
augmentation isn't a viable option, now women can order
Bloussant, "
an all-natural herbal tablet, which, when taken daily will increase ... bust size by up to two cup sizes." The site also has the commercial for the product in Windows Media and QuickTime formats.
posted by tamim at 7:28 PM PST - 12 comments
Two of the biggest tech news sites seem to be coming up a little short in the creativity department.
ZDNet and
CNet News have both been redesigned recently, and their new similarities are astounding. Worse still, they both now feature
huge,
ugly ads (which we're supposed to "explore") that completely overwhelm the page.
posted by fraying at 6:40 PM PST - 24 comments
I'm something of a bibliophile; at age 17 I have a personal library of over 600 books and I read about 120 books every year. One of the cool things I discovered on the 'net last year was the growing number of personal book review sites. A couple of my favorites are
John Regehr's Book Pages and
Danny Yee's Book Reviews. Both sites provide literate, enjoyable commentary on a wide-range of books. Assignment: Anybody else out there found any good book review sites? If so,
please share and explain. :)
posted by hanseugene at 4:05 PM PST - 29 comments
"States' Rights" hit the UK? First abolishing tuition fees, now providing long-term care for the elderly: the Scottish Executive is making life, um, "interesting" for its progenitor in Westminster. The downside of an unwritten constitution?
posted by holgate at 3:13 PM PST - 7 comments
Goodbye, farewell, and chicken butt. One of the most brilliant comedy sites ever, Computer Stew, is going away. If you've never watched any of these amazingly funny web-shows you have about 24 hours to do so.
I highly recommend you do.
posted by bondcliff at 9:10 AM PST - 5 comments
We are the world. No matter what you think of this expansion into Ecuador to stamp out the drug trade in Columbia, you have to love the great economic ramifications for locals as they open facilities and raise prices for their wealthy neighbors from the north. No mention, alas, of the prostitutes who usually move close to military facilities.
posted by Postroad at 6:58 AM PST - 5 comments
Statement of Senator Feinstein opposing John Ashcroft. I hope he doesn't get in. A friend of mine told me he saw some "Roe v. Wade is dead" demonstrators on TV outside the capitol building and the first thing he thought was Triumph of the Will had descended upon Washington.
posted by kliuless at 6:53 AM PST - 5 comments
Strangest Story Ever Told - The Weird Legend of Jesus in Japan Little known religious fact #2: Jesus didn't die up on his cross at Golgotha. That was actually his brother. Christ himself fled across Siberia and, after a brief detour through Alaska, landed in Japan, where he got married and raised a family.
Warning: some wacky religious notions will be mentioned in this article.posted by lagado at 4:08 AM PST - 15 comments
Lisl Auman will spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime that she didn't commit. I was made aware of this woman's plight by a brief mention in
Hunter S. Thompson's ESPN column. This woman is serving a life sentence for a murder that was commited while she was in police custody. Surely, a travesty such as this cannot stand.
posted by Optamystic at 2:18 AM PST - 7 comments
January 24
Hey Teen Activists! Want to protest the evil capitalist confab at the World Economic Forum in Davos, but you just don't have the time? Well, now you can! Thanks to revolutionary (no pun intended) Swiss technology,
hellomrpresident.com will allow you to send messages that will then be
projected via laser onto the side of a mountain overlooking Davos! Starts today at 1700, though it doesn't say whether that's UTC or local time. Five hours a day for five days. Let us know what you get projected! (They have a webcam up, so you may be able to grab a jpeg of your thought.)
posted by aaron at 11:18 PM PST - 9 comments
And you thought US environmental policies were bad. Europe is facing a major environmental crisis that it
seems unwilling or unable to act on -- deforestation,
flooding, desertification and more. From the article:
"One fifth of the land in Spain is already so degraded
that it is turning to desert" -- and it's as bad if
not worse elsewhere on the continent & in Britain.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 8:35 PM PST - 2 comments
Google Editorializing? Someone forwarded me this search on google. Look at the first link. Is this pure editorializing or just dumb (pardon the pun) luck?
posted by TNLNYC at 1:36 PM PST - 9 comments
The (Net) King is Dead! Long live the King! Alas, Time Warner finds a way to repurpose it's dead Pathfinder into another of its new but also ailing properties. Didn't they learn the first time? Or is it more of a "Well, we have this highly visible domain...." Hmmmmm.
posted by bkdelong at 10:22 AM PST - 4 comments
This is, of course, intended as humor, albeit rather coarse humor, but it's all too depressingly accurate. Why does customer service suck so badly these days? [Spotted at
Joel on Software, whom I haven't disagreed with much lately... probably because he hasn't
said much lately. :-)]
posted by baylink at 10:08 AM PST - 58 comments
Basques separatists: a long-standing problem The Basque separatist movement is symptomatic of ethnic , religious, and cultural desire to be distinct and to have their own "place." And yet, at the same time, the world moves toward globalization, with economics becoming trans-national. A push and a pull at the same time. Can this contradiction be resolved without violence?
posted by Postroad at 9:15 AM PST - 4 comments
If you want to try playing with little planets or images of them, try visiting these websites...
Webearth -- builds a LIVE vrml model of the Earth as it is right now. It draws from current composite satellite photos. Or you can play with a VRML Moon, Venus, Mars or Jupiter, if you'd prefer. (Note: this site does require a VRML 2.0 compatible plug-in, like Parallel Graphics Cortona VRML Viewer.)
Here's an oldie, but a goodie... Same concept, just not live. Earth and Moon Viewer uses various static composite satellite images from many different points of view, and it lets you zoom in and out ... (to a certain extent).
Webwide World lets you zoom in on an earth-like planet... not quite the same thrill, but the images the site produces are beautifully gem-like. And the planet it produces is huge. You'll be able explore islands off the coasts of islands off the coasts of islands.
And for more satellite image zooming pleasure, you can't beat Microsoft's Terra Server.
posted by crunchland at 7:38 AM PST - 2 comments
Pope John Paul II has been busy protecting his conservative legacy by appointing
a record number of new cardinals. This expanded group of cardinals will vote for the next pontiff and so a continuation of the Church's present course on abortion and birth control is quite likely.
Still, it's a little known fact that the Vatican actually ceased to the home of the
true Catholic Church on
October 9th, 1959 and that John Paul II is, in fact, a
heretical anti-pope.
posted by lagado at 3:57 AM PST - 26 comments
January 23
Telegraph Codes. Was doing some searching the other day to remind myself what code traditionally goes at the end of a wire story (it's "-30-" of course) and stumbled upon this gem. Best of all, it's not political.
posted by kindall at 8:34 PM PST - 4 comments
San Francisco Muni to consider naming stations after advertisers. If you've been in SF (or any major US city) recently, you've probably noticed the buses covered with ads inside and out, the two stadiums named after corporations (all US stadiums seem to be now), and subway platforms coated in billboards. Now, they're considering selling the names of each station off to the highest bidder. Is this going too far or should a city do anything to make a buck?
(I'm reminded of the book Generation X where the author jokes about rampant advertising, and how one day you'll ask your friend what time it is, and he'll simply say "Pepsi")posted by mathowie at 4:09 PM PST - 40 comments
Cookie the clown died yesturday. My favorite clown of the long running 'Bozo Show' recorded in Chicago.
"I am the luckiest guy in the world to have worked at a job I loved, and I'm going to miss it dearly," Brown said upon his retirement in 1994.
posted by john at 3:58 PM PST - 3 comments
Ashcroft sings! Actually, seems like it was 4 or 5 years ago, but hey, it's still catchy. MP3 contained at link to TheSmokingGun.com
posted by daver at 3:03 PM PST - 5 comments
'Chinese' New Year news fest The generally wonderful Guardian Weblog has a special page of hard-hitting Chinese news links in honor of Lunar New Year beginning Jan. 24. (Commonly called Chinese New Year, but the Vietnamese celebrate it, too.) These include a link to a
Foreign Affairs discussion of the Tiananmen Papers, believed to be internal Chinese documents about the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. (Earlier MeFi linkage of a Tiananmen Papers article can be found
here.posted by jhiggy at 11:48 AM PST - 1 comments
A while back, you'll remember, a professor from Princeton cracked the SDMI watermark, but couldn't publish [
MeFi search], and weren't awarded the prize because they wouldn't NDA. Well, a French team has also cracked it, and not being bound by the US DMCA,
they've published. Good thing? Or bad?
posted by baylink at 11:47 AM PST - 3 comments
Darwin's Paradise Lost. I'm really suprised no one's mentioned the oil spill that's threatening some of the most rarest animals in the world right now. With oil spill after oil spill, it really amazes me that we're not experimenting with safer,
cleaner fuels. Although I wonder what would happen to wildlife should you spill 144,000 gallons of
ethanol or
biodiesel....though you can't really spill
hydrogen or
solar fuel, can you?
posted by bkdelong at 11:12 AM PST - 17 comments
A guy paid $5000 to a bank for a list of 4 million credit card numbers, complete with name/address of the owners. He proceeded to start making false charges to those cards totalling some $37 million. He's going to jail. My question is, what the
hell was the bank thinking? Why are they selling something like that? Didn't they recognize the potential for abuse? What possible legitimate use could such a list have?
posted by Steven Den Beste at 8:47 AM PST - 8 comments
dumb. (but then again, posting a large image file isn't really clever either.)posted by tiaka at 7:53 AM PST - 15 comments
News.com gets redesigned and ordinarily I wouldn't consider this newsworthy, but the incredible overrun of annoyingly large banner & Flash ads is the matter at hand here.
posted by hijinx at 6:12 AM PST - 32 comments
Armenian holocaust You accuse Turkey of what they did to the Armenians--all a part of history--and you lose out. Thus, the Unite;d States has yet to cite Turkey, our needed ally, of what is known to have taken place, despite the many protests from the Armenian community in America.
posted by Postroad at 5:49 AM PST - 5 comments
January 22
One wo/man; many, many votes. From the seventh circle of hell comes the second-last sign of the apocalypse; the voting form for the bloggies. I know which site I voted for... you're reading the damn thing right now. Go MeFi!
posted by Neale at 9:19 PM PST - 38 comments
Jesus gets his own Theme Park This strikes me as bit too odd to appeal to many, but maybe I just don't appreciate the idea of laser shows combined with Hebrew prayers or chomping a hot dog at the site of crucifixion.
posted by tdstone at 5:48 PM PST - 18 comments
Erik Davis on Feed: "I feel compelled to mention the strangely underreported fact that, thanks to the FCC, all U.S. cell phones will soon be required to pack GPS units (or some equivalent tech) that will allow their location to be fixed the moment that 911 is dialed... the FCC has also ruled that wireless carriers, and not users, own GPS location data, and can freely sell it to third parties... your radio-cum-PDA-cum-cell phone... may want to tell you about the great deal on Beanie Babies or Canon’s 15 x 45 image-stabilized binoculars that awaits you two shops down to the right."
posted by Tubes at 1:40 PM PST - 19 comments
John Gilmore (via Wes Felter) lets the dogs out on the new Mac DVD-R drive. Seems it's a DVD-General drive, rather than a DVD-Authoring drive, and, therefore, there are lots of things you might want to do with it that you can't.
This is how Apple can fit a $4500 drive into a $3500 machine.
posted by baylink at 12:09 PM PST - 23 comments
First day in office and this is what we get. Dubya cuts off U.S. funds to international family-planning groups offering abortion and abortion counseling. Why do I get the feeling this is only a calm before the storm?
posted by NickBarat at 9:32 AM PST - 68 comments
Co$ Tackiness The Church of Scientology spinoff Narconon completely rips off the Urban75 Web site (including similar meta tag content). Jeeze....talk about unabashed design stealing.
posted by bkdelong at 8:24 AM PST - 6 comments
organ transplant needs Only the extreme of religious people might object to organ transplants, but what do we do with an increasing need and insufficient donors?
posted by Postroad at 6:03 AM PST - 33 comments
Erasing the Jewish past in Israel? Some months ago I had read that there was an attempt being made to eliminate traces of the Jewish past in and near sacred Jewish shrines in order to make Israeli claims invalid in any forthcoming peace talks....is this an example of what was meant?
posted by Postroad at 4:08 AM PST - 13 comments
January 21
"One giant leap backward for sports womankind." Playboy runs an article about female sports-casters. (ESPN and ABC told them to "get stuffed" when asked for photos and bios.
Bravo!) And there was a reader poll. The winner of the poll was supposed to get an offer of a million bucks to do a nude pictorial in the mag. (She declined. An even bigger
Bravo!) More interesting is that third place in the poll went to woman who described herself as having "reached the 175-pound mark during her third pregnancy, at age 38". (I wonder if it was a protest vote, like when "
Hank the angry drunken dwarf won People Magazine's online "Most beautiful people" poll. [I voted for him.]) Of course, the kicker is that Playboy is run by
Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter. He retired from the business a long time ago. So, today's quiz: Is Christie Hefner a symbol of the success of American Womanhood, or a traitor to the cause?
posted by Steven Den Beste at 5:03 PM PST - 43 comments
"The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we
can imagine." I defy anyone to read
this and not find at least one thing which dumbfounds them. For me: the woman with the knife in her neck, Canadian election open mike gaff, C***fest at Penn State, obscene Furby, the dominatrix who lost one and what she did.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 4:19 PM PST - 3 comments
A unusually even-handed article about Ecstasy use. The author describes his own experiences in the mid-80s with the now-popular drug . Nice to see a mainstream publication tackling this issue in the right way.
posted by brittney at 1:34 PM PST - 11 comments
"Every school has its story, every room its ghost." Ian Dugay writes about the terrors of elementary school; his experience might be rather particular (if you read it, you'll understand that I don't mean that in a Columbine kind of way), but he can't be the only one with unpleasant memories -- how do
you remember grade school?
posted by lia at 10:44 AM PST - 17 comments
From the Bad-Rumors-That-Unfortunately-Turn-Out-To-Be-True Department:
Britney Spears
confirms duet with Madonna. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
(I admire Madonna's knack for perpetual self-reinvention and surprising everyone with what she's cooked up next, but really, this is something I'm sure I'd be
quite happy to live without.)
posted by lia at 7:51 AM PST - 34 comments
Steve Jobs on selling apps based on life beyond the Net "I edited a digital movie of my children using our iMovie software," he said. "It took me about an hour, and when I showed it to my wife, she started crying. It was clearly the most emotional thing I've ever done on a computer in my life." ...
"The Internet is a wonderful thing and for a while it was such a blinding bright light that it obscured every other bright light," he said. "It's a wonderful thing, it's a magical thing, but there are other wonderful things too. Music is a wonderful thing. Movies are wonderful things."
posted by allaboutgeorge at 3:52 AM PST - 13 comments
Global Trends 2015 A paper published “under authority of the Director of Central Intelligence.” In which, we find the CIA believes “US global influence [will] wane” and that countries which “fail to benefit from globalization, are prone to internal conflicts, and risk state failure.”
I can see Uncle Sam pointing and saying “Shapen up, or
else.”
posted by capt.crackpipe at 2:18 AM PST - 23 comments
January 20
Alternative Television. Until I saw this show, it had never occured to me that the television medium was conducive to producing anything that could be labelled as 'art'. I would rather watch this than one more minute of 'standard network programming.'
posted by kristin at 12:55 PM PST - 6 comments
"Mistakes We Knew We Were Making" Dave Eggers' new appendix for the paperback edition of
AHWOSG, extends the self-analysis even further. "Typical conversation a month after publication: 'Would it be possible to remove my name?' 'Of course.' 'Why?' 'Well, no offence, but I really didn't think anyone would see the damn book.'"
posted by holgate at 10:40 AM PST - 11 comments
Clinton stressed that most of the people he would pardon have long since paid their debt to society and that the main intent of his executive action was to lift restrictions on voting and employment.
That explains why Patti Hearst and the presidents brother gets one, and Leonard Peltier does not. I guess Bill know which side his is buttered on, and realizes he is going to be spending way more time with the FBI than with Indians in the coming years.
Who else should have been pardoned? Who should not have?
posted by thirteen at 7:38 AM PST - 16 comments
Is
this the next
Craig Shergold? A hundred and fourteen
thousand emails so far and it's only going to get worse. Will it mutate? (The Shergold story has appeared in different versions.) I think this will be around for a long time. "The only mistake Street said he made is not including an end date. He doesn't know if the responses will ever stop." Hoo boy. No kidding.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 4:22 AM PST - 7 comments
Bill Maher savagely attacks the handicapped. I know its not the brightest or wittiest of shows, but I was amazed when I read the transcript for this episode of Politically Incorrect from last week. Skim the assaults on the overweight at the beginning if you like, but the real action is in the last topic of conversation before the show is over, where Bill compares mentally handicapped children to dogs and Martin Short calls him a "hideous, cold person."
posted by ztt at 12:49 AM PST - 49 comments
January 19
Government hacking abound! I hate it when a group of kids do a big .gov and .mil defacement. Then all the other kids start puffing themselves up and try to outdo each other. S'cuse me while I break out my virtual lawnchair... and please pass the mint julep.
posted by bkdelong at 10:40 PM PST - 3 comments
Dakar 2001 the 10,000+ km auto rally ends this Sunday. In recent years the rally has lost its luster. Even the website does not look exciting.
posted by tamim at 10:34 PM PST - 1 comments
This guy thinks all natural deaths are caused by vitamin or mineral deficiencies. And is a great read. Imagine Ross Perot saying this:
Well, when I practised for 12 years up in Portland, somebody'd come to me with a headache. Never had one, and I'd just walk up to them and tap them on their sinuses, and if they collapsed to their knees, they'd know they had a sinus headache. "Oh Doc, why'd you do that?" Well, that's a cheap lab test. Then if they had blood dripping out of their nose, it would take a $35 x-ray to see if they had a cancer in there. 35 bucks and a free lab test as opposed to 421 bucks.
I'm pretty sure he's a nut. But you can never tell.
posted by norm at 9:31 PM PST - 5 comments
Linda Tripp fired. What I don't understand is, why the hell was she still there after all the crap she pulled? If they couldn't actually fire her, she should have left on her own. I can't see why she'd stay except to be a, well, a b-word. And if it's traditional and expected that people resign their positions for the new administration, then why didn't she? Did she think she still had a job after tomorrow? Seems to me she only refused to resign as one last attempt to make Clinton look bad. I don't think it worked.
posted by dnash at 11:51 AM PST - 8 comments
Is Ska dead? Moon Records hadn't produced any of the really good Ska music for years, but I can't believe they've closed down. Is this it for Ska? Does anyone care? Do I care?
posted by Doug at 11:37 AM PST - 19 comments
It's uncertain how important online privacy is to President-elect George W. Bush. He indicated a general support for online privacy laws during the presidential campaign without indicating whether he leaned more toward industry self-regulation, technological solutions, legislative solutions, or some combination. A working document drafted by the Bush transition team on "technology proposals" echoes the same undefined support for online privacy. One analyst thinks his transition-appointments indicate a reference for industry self-regulation.
posted by jhiggy at 10:27 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
When pictures go bad... I'm not trying to start another link of gratuitous Bush bashing, honest. But this picture of him is simply
awful. Are news organizations deliberately picking the worst pictures to show, or is Dubya naturally unphotogenic? Is this an extension of his public malapropisms and grammatical errors? Is the man just awkward in front of a crowd? And how will this affect his ability to be a good President?
posted by solistrato at 8:53 AM PST - 32 comments
Beat poet Gregory Corso dies at 70. Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--
posted by dnash at 7:12 AM PST - 16 comments
I Am Not A DNA Sequence, I Am A Free Man! Yet more proof that NewLabour, and in particular Jack Straw, regards the further erosion of civil rights as a vote-winner. Volunteer to give a DNA sample in order to eliminate yourself from inquiries, and it'll be kept on the record just in case you're naughty in the future.
posted by holgate at 6:09 AM PST - 8 comments
Revolution in the Philippines! The Secretaries of Defense and Finance, the National Treasurer, and the entire administration of the Armed Forces have joined the giant People Power Rally II in the streets to bring down the corrupt Estrada administration.
posted by lia at 12:40 AM PST - 10 comments
January 18
Breaking up is hard to do... Bill Clinton tells a nation, "It's not you, baby...it's me." Actually, I noticed a few things about his farewell speech, and I thought I would - what else? - comment on it. Inside...
posted by solistrato at 8:02 PM PST - 22 comments
Well, only 10 shopping days left until Super B(bleep)l Sunday, and of course, everyone's ready for the big... commercials.
This one, from People for Eating Tasty Animals -- er, um, sorry; mispronounced that -- was refused by CBS, or so saith the minions at AdCritic. Hope they're planning a Superbowl focus page during and after the show. They really oughtta hold a vote. No, wait... it would take too long. :-}
posted by baylink at 5:19 PM PST - 7 comments
Tom Alciere Resigns - As a followup to the
thread from a few weeks ago. This is the newly-elected New Hampshire Representative who advocated cop-killing and wife-beating.
*sniff* I'll miss the funny lil' guy.
posted by JimmyTones at 4:07 PM PST - 5 comments
Now this is really evil. A woman put her twin babies up for adoption through a "private agency" in California and the agency was paid by an American couple here who adopted them. Then after two months the biological mother asked for a chance for one last good-bye with the babies alone, was granted it, and delivered the babies to a British couple who had also paid the "agency", who then took them to Arkansas and adopted them there, and then returned to Wales. Now the biological mother says she wants them back. The American couple wants them back. The Welsh couple wants them, too. British authorities have taken them away and they're being cared for in foster care. Some judge is going to have a real problem. Probably the "agency", actually a woman working out of her home via a web site, is going to have legal problems -- quite possibly including criminal charges.
Here's another account.posted by Steven Den Beste at 3:58 PM PST - 20 comments
Greymatter 1.2 For what it's worth, the notably talented
Noah Grey has just recently released a new version of his weblogging software GreyMatter. I've been using GreyMatter for my personal weblog for a few weeks now: anyone feeling frustrated with server problems over at
Blogger or just wishing for a little more control over their content might want to check it out. Let me tell you, it's a control-freak's dream program. And especially nice, it runs using Perl cgis on your own server, so there shouldn't ever be any accessibility problems. Noah is a great guy and really deserves more recognition for the wonderful job he's done on GreyMatter. Just thought I'd mention...
posted by hanseugene at 3:38 PM PST - 10 comments
Mafiaboy pleads guilty today in a Quebec court. I think that this case was turned into a witch hunt. The media as always he no idea what it was talking about. A lot of people could have done what he did, but he was stupid enough to do it.
posted by bytecode at 2:53 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Altavista to become only search engine Not really, but they do plan on enforcing several search-related patents that they have, hoping to increase revenue by extorting other search companies. "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents.... If you index a distributed set of databases - what the Internet is - and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents," says CMGI CEO David Wetherell.
posted by daveadams at 1:28 PM PST - 25 comments
She Hates Music. All music. A cranky Brit named Tanya Headon (hey, I dunno) frags everything you might like (well, mostly rock). Professional crank or insightful satirist?
posted by Skot at 10:07 AM PST - 28 comments
William Safire in the NY Times: "...to attribute racism to Ashcroft, who appointed more black judges than any Missouri governor and whose wife is revered for her years of teaching at mostly black Howard University, is to admit the bankruptcy of his opposition."
posted by ericost at 9:20 AM PST - 38 comments
Internet Visitation So much for quality time. A New Jersey court "permitted a divorced
woman and her daughter to move to California on the basis that the
child's father could exercise his 'visitation' rights by staying in
touch with his daughter online."
posted by frykitty at 8:33 AM PST - 13 comments
Compressed Natural Gas is much more cleaner than diesel, the dual-fuel engines run quieter and you get lower operating costs. It's certainly very promising, and the technology is already widely implemented from busses to vans to trucks. However, changing a truck to this system can be
costly, especially for small fleets. With this and the lack of fueling stations across the nation, do you
still think this might be a good option for the
future?
posted by tiaka at 6:52 AM PST - 28 comments
UK Govt. votes to ban hunting in England and Wales. Browsing the web last night, several national polls were showing that more of the British Public were against a ban than in favour. Will the MPs who turned up to vote but not to debate (not very democratic?) live to regret their decision as the debate turns from animal welfare to civil rights?
posted by nico at 4:48 AM PST - 29 comments
January 17
This is one amazing found diray! Once you start reading this transcription, it is very hard to stop. Incredible. From the site:
Walking to work the week before Christmas, 2000, I found a notebook on the sidewalk, on 5th street between Mission and Folsom. I thought to find a phone number in it and return it, but after reading it, I couldn't find any contact info at all. What I did find was a diary, spanning about nine months of someone's life. Here is the contents of the notebook, reproduced as faithfully as possible.posted by DragonBoy at 4:30 PM PST - 46 comments
DivX +
filenavigator = headaches for
MPAA. Of course the
SPA and
RIAA can't be too pleased about filenavigator either. I've checked and the DivX of Castaway is on the net already.
posted by john at 4:22 PM PST - 3 comments
Jason Newsted leaves Metallica. "Due to private and personal reasons, and the physical damage that I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love, I must step away from the band". Any enterprising bass players looking for an opportunity? :)
posted by pnevares at 3:32 PM PST - 15 comments
Welcome to the blob. Please watch your step. It looks like Viacom's going to swallow up Yahoo! and all its assorted properties. What does this leave untouched, by partnerships or redistribution deals or what-have-you? Anything? (Who was it again who was predicting that one large company that controlled everything called Omnivox? I remember reading about it somewhere when I was, like, ten or so.)
posted by maura at 2:56 PM PST - 11 comments
sorry this is a little mundane. however, i drive across these streets every day and i can't get over the strange synchronicity of this city. explained inside.....
posted by donkeysuck at 10:51 AM PST - 7 comments
Why can't more protest movements be like
this one? Neal Pollack, of McSweeney's, ushers a (very polite) call to arms.
posted by RakDaddy at 10:13 AM PST - 4 comments
Oh Mullet! As if the mullet was restricted to just rednecks from Virginia or something...the mullet is worldwide baby.
posted by j.toronado at 9:00 AM PST - 3 comments
January 16
Even the bad guys have PR sites these days. From the cuddly looks of this buddhist sect leader, you'd never have assumed he was responsible for the only large-scale act of terrorism in Japan in recent memory (the Tokyo subway Sarin gassing).
posted by Neb at 9:01 PM PST - 5 comments
Kids are smarter than ever before, AOL chat transcripts notwithstanding. It seems to me that the fact that IQ tests measure culture acquisition as much as anything else may explain a lot of this, but I wonder if there may not be something to the "visual literacy" idea: are we (as a species) building a new type of perception, or honing old cognitive tools into something which might as well be new? And, if so, where might it lead us?
posted by rushmc at 8:14 PM PST - 11 comments
CrackerJap is a web site run by three guys who were
hassled by Nintendo for using "Pokemon" in an HTML Meta tag in a file they no longer used online. Their web host killed their site instantly and they've only just found new hosting in the last few days. [There's a second reason they're interesting, inside.]
posted by Steven Den Beste at 7:12 PM PST - 16 comments
The nose doesn't know, it seems. We can't make sure they're properly sheathed (see condom mom below) but we'll give them a good swabbin' when they get home. I'm a decade past the drinking age, but this makes me hate my parents
en passant.
posted by chino at 6:59 PM PST - 2 comments
Am I Shot Or Not? (Yeah, I know, but Ashcroft stories are boring.) The Belgian embassy says that Kabila has been assassinated; the British embassy isn't so sure. Strangely, if he has been killed, it's likely to improve the prospect for peace, as the surrounding nations will try to use the power vacuum as an opportunity to negotiate themselves out of the civil war.
posted by holgate at 5:03 PM PST - 7 comments
High Tech Toilet Paper - "After top-secret tests in consumers' homes, company officials believe they've got a hit on their hands." Apparently most consumers prefer bath tissue which is slightly soggy. I really had no idea. Do people really do this?
posted by y6y6y6 at 4:24 PM PST - 31 comments
Holden Caulfield expelled. This article makes a case that Catcher in the Rye is being pushed out of classrooms for more "multicultural" books. Since when does opening the doors to diversity mean excluding others?
posted by croutonsupafreak at 6:10 AM PST - 35 comments
January 15
Justin's Relationship Resume is a very practical approach to surveying ones past, and is an interesting read. What level of relationship are you qualified for? [via dangerousmonkey.com]
posted by th3ph17 at 8:40 PM PST - 4 comments
tv = agressive behavior in children. Danny: What was the Donner Party?
Jack: They were a party of settlers in covered-wagon times. They got snowbound one winter in the mountains. They had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
Danny: You mean they ate each other up?
Jack: They had to, in order to survive.
Wendy: Jack...
Danny: Don't worry, Mom. I know all about cannibalism. I saw it on TV.
Jack: See, it's OK. He saw it on the television.posted by tiaka at 7:48 PM PST - 5 comments
Didn't get a chance to buy that scooter you wanted for Christmas? You can always jump on
one of these.
posted by moural at 6:43 PM PST - 4 comments
First gay marriage legal, for now "The Ontario government will face a court battle if it refuses to register two marriages performed yesterday at a Toronto church in a ceremony billed as the world's first legal homosexual wedding since the Middle Ages."
posted by sylloge at 3:15 PM PST - 11 comments
One word...Plastics. New techniques for restoring bones. Speaking of broken bones, is everyone else dreading the full media coverage of Ronald Reagan's slow liquefaction over the next several years.
posted by ritualdevice at 2:28 PM PST - 12 comments
Note to GWB Here's an easy, cheap way to improve the quality of education, and (ahem) get a grasp on world geography. Also a good lesson on how linked we all are. Maybe there's a foreign policy lesson here too. . .
posted by aflakete at 12:37 PM PST - 2 comments
Entropy in action, or a covert maneuver in the ongoing American war to implement anti-intellectual, low-culture values and destroy anything perceived to aspire to any qualities beyond the strictly utilitarian?
posted by rushmc at 10:11 AM PST - 11 comments
Iraq to Donate $94 Million to Poor Americans Interesting propaganda.
But more interestingly - disregarding the donor, would the US ever accept such a donation? (How could we admit a need for charity at home when we send billions in aid abroad?)
And what's next? We're not of a mindset to accept foreign meddling. What about UN relief efforts? International peacekeeping forces?
posted by Tubes at 9:32 AM PST - 14 comments
A corporate MetaFilter? The editors of
Suck present Plastic.com, a moderated web log with commentary, in collaboration with editors from about a dozen other leading cultural / news print and on-line zines
posted by MattD at 8:06 AM PST - 50 comments
January 14
Live audio description of Bush inauguration If you get PBS and if your PBS station broadcasts in stereo, you will likely be able to hear only the second-ever attempt at audio description of a live event - the inauguration of Bush. (The other live-described event was Clinton's inauguration.) This of course is audio description, ostensibly for blind viewers. Set your TV or VCR to SAP and compare the approaches of the standard announcers, who call the event assuming the viewer can see, and the describers, who don't. (No sexy Web page for this event.)
posted by joeclark at 5:52 PM PST - 9 comments
i don't know about the rest of you, but
this is the beginning what i fear about the new bush administration...
posted by o2b at 10:00 AM PST - 56 comments
Remember last year's story about the plane hijacker in the Philippines who jumped with a home-made parachute and died?
Here's the story from the point of view of the crew and the flight attendant who pushed him off of the plane.
posted by lia at 9:42 AM PST - 5 comments
January 13
In a perfect world , this would be in mass production. In black. With an espresso machine. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this earlier; most good, respectable geeks that I know would most likely kill for one of these.
posted by nickd at 10:54 PM PST - 7 comments
Dean Kamen denies everything! DEKA is currently working on several exciting projects. The book proposal referred to one. However, the leaked proposal quoted several prominent technology leaders out of context, without their doubts, risks and maybes included. This, together with spirited speculation about the unknown, has lead to expectations that are beyond whimsical. We have a promising project, but nothing of the earth shattering nature that people are conjuring up.
posted by palegirl at 9:47 PM PST - 12 comments
This and
this aren't exactly what you'd call urgent breaking news. (Respectively they're about the Ring of Fire and historical earthquakes.) So why couldn't the BBC take enough time on them to get their facts right? [More inside]
posted by Steven Den Beste at 5:25 PM PST - 8 comments
Raleigh N.C. area Fox Station removes Temptation Island from it's programing. Here is the stations reason why "We're not going to support a program that could break up a family," said Tommy Schenck, WRAZ's general manager. What makes this funny is this same man allows Riki Lake, with it's cheating couples and dysfunctional families to be shown 5 times a week. Needless to say, it has caused quite a stir here. What's everyones take on this?
posted by remo at 1:11 PM PST - 26 comments
The IDEO identity card project. I'm fascinated by the micro-genre of busness cards. There's something about that tiny space that seems to get people's creative energy going in ways that even the big wide-open spaces of the web don't (
not always in good ways). These designers are pushing the envelope in every direction: DNA, Bluetooth, plastic bags, incinerators, cameras, anonymity, you name it.
posted by rodii at 9:36 AM PST - 11 comments
January 12
Strings And Beads: Why worry about which device has the power to perform which function? Why not tie all your processing power together and use it to drive the functions you want where you want it? Full-motion video on your handheld? Sure!
posted by honkzilla at 1:04 PM PST - 6 comments
Is LiveJournal taking aim at Blogger? I use both Blogger and LiveJournal myself, one for my weblog and one for more of a web journal I write things in occasionally. I think both web apps have different strengths and purposes, but there are certainly marked similarities, especially in light of the successful server fund raising drives both services have recently completed.
posted by Axodys at 12:41 PM PST - 40 comments
Ang Lee to direct "Hulk" Now that's a "green destiny" I can't wait to see. Sure hope it comes to fruition before the estimated theater date of 2003. And they're going to set it in Berkeley, Calif. -- schweet!
posted by allaboutgeorge at 11:02 AM PST - 8 comments
Nude, Gay Marines? Isn't that what the web is all about? The right to be different? United States Marine Corps officials are investigating reports its troops are posing nude for gay pornography being sold on the Internet....
posted by murray_kester at 2:36 AM PST - 18 comments
January 11
A modern Dr Bowdler... (yeah, I know it's Salon, but...) A video-rental store in Utah offers "cleaned up" versions of modern films. First thought: is it legal? Post-DeCSS, one would think not: after all, the MPAA has done its best to protect its right to control the manner of reproduction. But are the studios not jumping to litigate, because they're happier to alienate Linux users with DVD drives than the LDS contingent in UT?
posted by holgate at 5:20 PM PST - 31 comments
This time it's for real: A
Stage Three Power Emergency has been declared in California this evening.
Rolling blackouts are expected, especially in Northern California. If MeFi goes down tonight, this is why. Nothing like government intervention disguised as "deregulation" to muck up the works.
posted by aaron at 1:56 PM PST - 27 comments
When captions catch your eye: Scrolling down the page, it's all blah blah blah Reno leaves blah blah blah disagreements with Freeh blah blah blah...wait a second - the
Drug Enforcement Agency Choir???posted by solistrato at 1:00 PM PST - 6 comments
Whoa man, look out!
This sewing machine's got attitude! Singer and Nintendo join forces to create a sewing machine that attaches to a Game Boy. After seeing Microsoft and La-Z-Boy team up, I guess they were feeling the technotextile envy.
posted by hijinx at 12:29 PM PST - 6 comments
Contact information viewable with Alexa toolbar? Disturbing. Anyone with the Alexa toolbar installed can apparently see your address and telephone number, along with helpful information like maps to your home. This information is in the public record, but providing it instantly can only lead to more stalking incidents. You may want to follow Leia's advice and visit Alexa.com's site editor to make sure you're protected.
posted by jmcnally at 10:44 AM PST - 16 comments
Friends of Bill W. Indeed... "For the past week I have read Jakob Nielsen's Flash alertbox over and over again and came to a startling revelation. It seems that Jakob got the title all-wrong. Flash is not 99% bad, as the usability guru says... Flash is 99% Proof, as in alcohol."
posted by DragonBoy at 8:35 AM PST - 20 comments
The Sputnik Apparently like a "super-dooper type of acupuncture", the Sputnik is "a 'Pied Piper' for worms". Don't ya just love medical jargon?
posted by Foaf at 7:29 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Norton's a racist. So now if you even mention the Confederacy in a less than evil light, you're a racist. I am really sick of people using the charge of racism to oppose those with other viewpoints. (More inside)
posted by CRS at 6:46 AM PST - 50 comments
StorTroopers! With their giant heads and interesting range of fashion accessories, these little buggers are taking the UK blogging world by, um, storm.
posted by Foaf at 1:25 AM PST - 11 comments
January 10
Piercing is a cool online comic by David Gaddis. It's received a minor plug
before but I think it deserves a little more attention. I don't want to give away too much but it's not some angsty ode to genital rings or anything. Caution: big files.
posted by davidgentle at 6:00 PM PST - 5 comments
This by far is the all-time worst use of flash ever. Boring, long, and utterly unimportant. It blows -- the competition away!
posted by rschram at 4:08 PM PST - 17 comments
Ebola is for wimps! Some Australian scientists were trying to come up with a mouse contraceptive vaccine, for use in pest control. And they succeeded. Unfortunately, the virus they created works by killing mice before they can breed, and killing them very very well. Oh, and it's extremely vaccine-resistant: 100% death without vaccine, 50% with. And any kid with a Li'l Johnny Gene Engineering Kit could conceivably make a human version. Anyone got some smallpox virus laying around?
posted by aaron at 3:44 PM PST - 5 comments
MacOS X comes of age. Microsoft has just announced that Microsoft Office will be released for the new Apple OS in the fall. "Analysts had warned that without a version of Office, or similar productivity suite, running natively under Mac OS X, Apple would face problems getting businesses to switch to the new operating system. "
posted by Brilliantcrank at 10:10 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Be all that you can be? From the announcement: "The Army announced today a compelling new advertising campaign, marking its first major change in advertising direction since 1981.
Ads unveiled today by Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera will open the innovative campaign, which centers on the message 'An Army of One.' "
posted by alethe at 7:32 AM PST - 15 comments
Charging for software as a service. As soon as the software vendors get this ironed out the hardware vendors are going to want in too. Soon you'll be paying monthly service fees based on how much you use your computer. (More ranting inside) ->
posted by monkeyboy at 4:09 AM PST - 19 comments
Author Caleb Carr argues in favor of
government regulation of the Internet. He suggests that if we don't have government making the rules, the corporations will make them instead. (Yeah, it's a Salon link. You got a problem with that? Keep it to yourself.)
posted by jjg at 12:29 AM PST - 21 comments
January 9
Clinton: "They thought the election was over, the Republicans did. By the time it was over, our candidate had won the popular vote, and the only way they could win the election was to stop the voting in Florida".
Give 'em hell Bill!posted by owillis at 10:51 PM PST - 16 comments
The latest iteration of the Great Chad Count of 2001 has been announced. Some news organizations finally announce specifics about their planned gang-recount. They'll pay a nonprofit firm to "inventory" the votes, but each news organization will decide separately what the results mean. And one paper is holding an entirely separate count of its own. Inside.com summarizes: "When the laborious process is completed in 8 to 10 weeks, look for an orgy of tea-leaf discernment as any news organization willing to share in the costs will be free to spin and analyze the results in any way they please."
posted by aaron at 10:28 PM PST - 2 comments
Barak offers Gusinsky asylum. Showing just how desperate Barak is to shore up support domestically, while potentially alienating Moscow
and Washington.
NOTE: Link only up publically for today, 1/10/01--stratfor is mostly subscription only. So here is alternate
AP link.
posted by aflakete at 10:14 PM PST - 2 comments
Winning isn't enough, it seems. GOP targets Florida Supreme Court Justices...
posted by black8 at 8:49 PM PST - 19 comments
New career option! Be slave worker on the Martian surface! This is pretty cool, actually. It's an internet based pilot study run by NASA to identify and classify all of the craters on the surface of Mars. This is a big job. All you need is a IE 5 or Netscape 6 web browser. Since its inception on November 17, web users combined have contributed 111,938 crater-markings and 26,877 crater-classification.
posted by lagado at 7:40 PM PST - 2 comments
NATO Ducks Uranium Ban Amid Clamor for Research. NATO partners split on dangers of depleted uranium weapons.
"U.S. attack jets fired some 31,000 rounds of depleted uranium (DU) ammunition during NATO's 1999 campaign to end Serb repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. About 10,000 rounds were also fired in neighboring Bosnia in 1994-95."Of course, this doesn't count rounds used during the Gulf War.
posted by Mr. skullhead at 5:00 PM PST - 1 comments
What is "IT"? National Medal of Technology winner demos some kind of hush-hush invention to Bezos, Jobs, and Doerr: the consensus view is that it's bigger than the PC. Either one of the most stunning inventions of all time or one of the most stunning publicity stunts of all time. Possibly both.
posted by grimmelm at 1:52 PM PST - 77 comments
Surfing in style with the new Lazyboy recliner - except the keyboard is on the left side. Probably so your right hand can use the remote control.
posted by fnirt at 1:17 PM PST - 8 comments
Time to wash up for Hindus. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for religion and such. But if you wash your sins away in
this river, you might wind up with something that
won't wash off.
posted by CRS at 12:19 PM PST - 8 comments
Time to short Microsoft stock. After building a behemoth though a quarter-century of tacitly encouraging piracy to increase market share, Microsoft appears to be getting ready to drink the anti-piracy kool-aid. Look for revenues to shrink accordingly.
posted by aurelian at 9:02 AM PST - 11 comments
Amok, amok, amok! For some reason, I find this hilarious. Imagine watching Clinton sprinting across the Whitehouse lawn trying to beat the monkeys to the waiting helicopter while the Marines fight a desperate rear-guard action. We don't have any of the cool stuff here.
posted by CRS at 6:58 AM PST - 2 comments
Is this plagiarism or not? Have to profess an interest here: I write for this site sometimes. But when I see they've created yet another "Hot or Not" ripoff I begin to wonder... will this joke ever end?
posted by tobyslater at 1:29 AM PST - 4 comments
January 8
These guys are at it
again.
"We will send about 20 men, their ages ranging from 25 to 77, to pull the 400-seat B747. We hope to set a world record."
And I was impressed by those World Ironman competitions...
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 10:02 PM PST - 3 comments
Broken Arrow: Goldsboro, NC. On Tuesday, 24 January 1961, at about 12:30 a.m., two hydrogen bombs fell to earth near the tiny farming village of Faro, NC...
An interesting read.
posted by milnak at 6:14 PM PST - 4 comments
beam me up! the ultimatetv thread made me wonder which satellite TV system would be best for me (and why is directTV evil?) -- anyway with this gadget you can watch
DISH channels plus upload AND download via satellite IP. too good to be true?
posted by subpixel at 5:26 PM PST - 12 comments
Microsoft unleashes their TiVo killer and it looks like it has everything you could ever want in a personal video recorder. Two tuners so you can tape one thing and watch another, DSS, 35 hours of recording time, and webtv/email functionality. Is it too much or will TiVo owners want these increased features?
posted by mathowie at 2:26 PM PST - 15 comments
Teenager jailed for his 'imagination.' A 15 year-old boy is beaten repeatedly by school bullies. His parents complain about it, but no one does anything. He writes a short story describing a bullied boy blowing up his school. Rumours swirl. Police raid his house but find no weapons or bomb-making stuff. Regardless, the boy is charged with "uttering a death threat." Today he was found guilty and sentenced to thirty days in jail.
posted by tranquileye at 2:15 PM PST - 36 comments
eBlots presents you with a picture. You type what you think/feel/see, and are presented with what everyone else thought/felt/saw. You're identified by a random color, so it's anonymous, and you can even have your eblots mailed to you daily.
posted by fnirt at 11:41 AM PST - 15 comments
The battle for unrestricted encryption continues. Professor Bernstein won't rest; he's not going to let this go. More power to him and let's hope he ultimately wins. [He's challenging the US government restrictions on private encryption on free-speech grounds, and so far he's won in every court where the case has been heard. The government has been using delaying actions, and their relaxation of restrictions may partially have been in hopes he'd give up, leaving them still capable of some control. He's not going to, though. He's got blood in his eye, so to speak.]
posted by Steven Den Beste at 9:32 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
LiveJournal's "Paid Accounts" model might be the route that Pyra wants to take with Blogger. I don't know much about LiveJournal's features as compared with Blogger, but they certainly have thought out their revenue model. Does anyone know anything about LiveJournal?
posted by jmcnally at 7:04 AM PST - 9 comments
High-tech world mafias breeze past borders. This is a good introduction to a disturbing and daunting problem that touches on many issues: online privacy, bureaucratic inertia, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the future of immigration policy. In the underworld, dealing drugs is day-trading while dealing humans is blue chip investing.
posted by aflakete at 1:41 AM PST - 5 comments
January 7
left-over gun shells poisoning the environment US and NATO forces left enough low-level depleted uranium shells lying around in bosnia/kosovo to cause an environmental hazard. I wrote whitehouse.gov and the d.o.d. about how important i think it is that we clean up this mess, pronto. i love using the word, pronto. this is important, and could really affect us if we don't fix it now.
posted by bliss322 at 8:01 PM PST - 26 comments
New administration, same old Zoe Baird problem. Labor Secretary-Designate Linda Chavez housed an illegal Guatamalan immigrant and gave her spending money in the early 1990s. Will it nuke Chavez's confirmation? Or will Senate Democrats not touch it out of fear of appearing anti-Hispanic?
posted by aaron at 4:17 PM PST - 24 comments
Eat your heart out, Burning Man... Allahabad may become the world's largest city for the next six weeks. It's expected that at least 20 million people will attend the Kumbh, but numbers could rise to
70 million. Wow.
posted by holgate at 7:14 AM PST - 10 comments
More guns then people "...they found there were 1.4 million guns in the state, just over one for each of the nearly 1.3 million residents..." yikes! good move on the free gun locks though.
posted by cburton at 2:17 AM PST - 7 comments
January 6
Any console gamers out there thinking about getting an
X-box instead of a
PS2? Which system has a brighter future?
posted by thirteen at 10:55 PM PST - 43 comments
I am making a list of failed and over-hyped Internet business jargon. Here is part of it: Java applets, Push, Web TV, ad-supported sites, B2C, B2B, proprietary music formats, WAP, 100% Flash sites, broadband. Do you agree? What is missing?
posted by tranquileye at 7:25 PM PST - 32 comments
X-inventions: The home page of a high school kid who shows you exactly how to build pneumatic cannons, hovercraft, lockpicks, high explosives, telephone bugs and a lot of other fun stuff. Impress your friends! Be the first on your block! (Remind me to be nice to the next teenager I meet.)
posted by Steven Den Beste at 7:01 PM PST - 6 comments
Welcome back, state's rights. As if Dubya's comments following his "ethnic" Cabinet appointments wasn't enough retrograde logic -- roughly: if blacks and hispanics (would only?) work hard and make the right choices in life -- he's now using language that has been used to mask agendas based on race from
before the Civil War through the
fight against integration. And it looks like that fight
ain't over, if you read "states rights" in today's context to mean the right to spend public funds on getting (primarily) white kids out of (primarily) black schools.
posted by subpixel at 5:49 PM PST - 13 comments
An interesting
place to work, especially for the Fox Mulders among us. (via
null device)
Oddly enough, the first time I tried to post this, my PC crashed. . . *X-Files theme*
posted by aflakete at 11:37 AM PST - 7 comments
Stuck in the past? Ok, while this is hardly news it's annoying as hell. No matter what I search for, it doesn't pull any articles up after 1/1/2001. What's worse is they don't appear to have ANY contact emails for anyone other then a frustrating "feedback" form. Grrrr. There's got to be other comprehensive live news search sites....
posted by bkdelong at 9:54 AM PST - 3 comments
Truth in advertising. All you have to do is look at the URL to know what this guy's site is about. (It's actually quite good, with a great deal of humor and also a great deal of substance.)
posted by Steven Den Beste at 9:30 AM PST - 6 comments
Donate a Mammogram! My aunt sent me this URL so
be nice. =) If you go there and click on the button, a woman gets a free mammogram at no cost to you. Corporate sponsors pay for it. Only one free mammogram donation per person. Sure it's corny but it's for a good cause. Besides, it is every man's sacred duty to do what he can to insure all the world's breasts are in top form. =)
posted by ZachsMind at 9:21 AM PST - 15 comments
Pixelflo launches Web Trumps - a new Top Trumps style game where you can play with your favourite web celebs, down-at-heel webloggers, and gods like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Based upon Dan Hon's
Blogtrumps. Several questions leap to mind, including the obvious one: it's fun, but
why?posted by barbelith at 3:49 AM PST - 9 comments
Oops! Drugs awareness officer dies from overdose.
I just saw 'Traffic' tonight...
posted by black8 at 2:19 AM PST - 3 comments
January 5
If computer engineering defined the last half of the twentieth century, then
biotech will surely define the first half of the twenty-first century.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:17 PM PST - 5 comments
Everquest claims a child's life, from the fatal neglect of a game-addicted father. Sentenced to 15 years in prison, the deadbeat dad squeezed his 9-month-old son and left him in a utility closet for over 24 hours while he played online. According to the prosecution, his son's crying was distracting him from the game.
I've been addicted to games before, and Everquest definitely
has a reputation for being one of the most addictive games ever, but this is just evil.
posted by waxpancake at 9:34 PM PST - 10 comments
Not Dubbing the Simpsons The Office de la langue française and others are up in arms (
ils capotent) about anglicisms in Internet discourse.
Business 2.0 talked about it. Branchez-Vous writes a short, cutting
article, giving those who pepper their French with English enough rope to hang themselves. («
Dans la catégorie "Un
mot français, un mot anglais et hop!," le prix revient à Rational Software France, the e-development company, qui a annoncé la nomination d'André Arich au poste de Partner Manager pour sa filiale française, ainsi que le lancement en France du programme de partenariat Rational Unified Partner Program (RUPP).») ¶ Strangely, French has a nicer word for E-mail than English does:
courriel.
(
Grand Dictionnaire is the
OLF's official bilingual tech dictionary.)
posted by joeclark at 7:38 PM PST - 14 comments
A fine football story for the year... Oklahoma won the National Championship, and Penn State did not do so well, however the local hero walks out of the hospital to get on with the rest of his life. Granted the injury was a bruise and Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli saved his life, but my question is how long before we'll see the successful repair of spinal cord injuries? Will
Christopher Reeve walk again?
posted by brent at 4:39 PM PST - 4 comments
Vatican's lines too long? The Pope has just closed the door to the bronze Holy Door in St. Peter's Basilica for the next 25 years. I have heard of crowd control but give me a break, can the lines really be that bad?
posted by Brilliantcrank at 3:29 PM PST - 11 comments
Where are search engines headed? Paid inclusion seems to be an increasingly popular strategy among search engines and directories. In addition to Yahoo and the ones listed in the article,
Go.com and
NBCi have recently implemented paid inclusion systems. Should we expect even more search engines to head in this direction? Does this worry anyone?
posted by Aaaugh! at 12:40 PM PST - 10 comments
Not the turtle, but maybe a relation? A company called Terapin is selling a recorder that can create CD-audio and CD-V (MPEG 1 video) disc recordings (CD-R and CD-RW), from real time sources. Now, this may seem like a day late and a dollar short, but DVD-R's are still 5 grand, and real-time MPEG video encoders ain't that cheap either. For 6 bills, who knows? Anyone got/seen/played with one of these, or knows who's selling them? I've got a few blank CD-R's I'm not using...
posted by baylink at 11:59 AM PST - 7 comments
Unenlightened geekdom. It started out as a discussion about the racial discrimination case
against Microsoft. It turned into an interesting (and depressing) dialog showing the ignorance of geeks (nerds, whatever) about racism in their industry.
posted by owillis at 8:35 AM PST - 59 comments
I need another MeFi posting like I need a... Here's an organization devoted entirely to *intentionally* boring a hole in one's head. Apparently, it helps your brain to "function better". Well, if you're willing to go through with the procedure, you've certainly got room for improvement in that department.
posted by jpoulos at 6:33 AM PST - 38 comments
Wacky! even Kooky, what do you think it is?
It seems that these days every other post has something to do with politics or dotcoms,
Art Bell is coming back and it would be fun to do something of his range. How about best/funniest ghost/supernatural pic you can find on the net and then your explanation. There was mine.
posted by tiaka at 6:23 AM PST - 3 comments
Sunspots apparently are the cause of recent protests and riots around the world. And this person has, um, "evidence."
posted by gluechunk at 12:28 AM PST - 6 comments
January 4
Somebody can't take a joke... A lewd e-mail picture showing the cartoon character Bart Simpson in a sexual clinch has cost
10 people their jobs at a big British insurance company.
Eighty others have been suspended
posted by murray_kester at 8:33 PM PST - 26 comments
MTV will run a continuous list of hate crime victims' names for 17 hours. Seems like a somewhat empty gesture to me...
posted by owillis at 5:52 PM PST - 28 comments
Etoys to lay off 70% of its workforce in their never ending quest for profitability. Does it really take 1,000 employees to run an e-commerce site? I hope not, since there will only be 300 left after today. I imagine most of those employees were in the fulfillment end of the business.
posted by mathowie at 4:54 PM PST - 13 comments
Stephen Wolfram [article from Forbes.com] could become the world's greatest thinker, or the world's biggest fool. Could he be the next Einstein?
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 4:40 PM PST - 9 comments
Durian is not the new budget chip from AMD. It's a big prickly fruit I've seen for sale in Chinese supermarkets and now I know what the real attraction is...
posted by xiffix at 1:41 PM PST - 11 comments
How deflating..... I am aphalled at the statements of the girl and her mother that if someone has low esteem then breast implants are the way to improve both self image and success! As if breast size is the only factor in social standing and prosperity. *sigh* Obviously television, societal rhetoric and socialization of body image opinion has truly sunk to new lows.
posted by bkdelong at 12:39 PM PST - 19 comments
Sunlight: It's What's For Dinner. This guy claims he's been living on nothing but water and
sunlight for about a year. :::Cough::: He also exhumes the hoary myth about using only 10% of your brain. My favorite is the author credit: "By A Staff Reporter."
posted by Skot at 9:11 AM PST - 11 comments
Uncanny. [Ok, so no one will grouse about lack of explanation, let's just say the link provided explores certain physical similarities between our president-elect and the common chimpanzee...aw, it would've been funnier without the explanation, but rules is rules]
posted by chartres at 9:07 AM PST - 1 comments
Speaking of suddenly appearing monoliths... A six-foot anatomically correct snow sculpture was found in Connecticut. It was destroyed so that "young eyes" would not view it.
Best Quote: "That was before she discovered that this rendering of the body part that puts the man in snowman was taller than she was, and hardened by ice. "
posted by champignon at 8:19 AM PST - 7 comments
Microsoft and Starbucks join forces to provide wireless Internet access for caffeine junkies. I was worried enough by this alliance ("Great Satan" and "Corporate Kudzu," etc.), but then I read that McDonald's is looking into doing the same thing. Sure, there is a certain convenience factor, but do we really need branded connectivity everywhere we go?
posted by mkhall at 7:03 AM PST - 12 comments
I was reading this article about the
new breed of modern airships when I stumbled over the line "Not your grandfather's airship". That started me off thinking about the "Not your father's X"
meme that's been part of the journalistic background noise for a while now. It seems to me to evoking something oedipal, a male child's revulsion of his father and his father's way of doing things. It's usually juxtaposed against technology or at least things that aren't all that old to begin with. Does anyone know who used it first? A
quick search of Google reveals it in everything from "
Cuba: not your father's stagnant nation" to "
XML: Not your father's HTML". Anyone got any favorites?
posted by lagado at 3:50 AM PST - 19 comments
January 3
Why HAVE the Republican and Democratic parties shifted about so dramatically? In most periods from 1789 to the present, the US has had two dominant national parties competing to control government: Federalists vs Republicans (1790s-1810s), National Republicans vs Democratic Republicans (1810s-1830s), Whigs vs Democrats (1830s-1850s), Republicans vs Democrats (1850s-present). Despite the changing names, the underlying coalitions have been remarkably stable. In effect, there have been only two main parties in American history: the northern party and the southern party. [via A&LD]
posted by rushmc at 9:08 PM PST - 7 comments
Visa in Financial Trouble... Can't buy a clue This takes the cake. Visa is announcing a new Animated Logo with a press release. This animated logo (with sound!) will be played when ever someone makes a wireless purchase with their visa, alerting everyone within earshot of what you are doing. In addition to the animated logo they are staking claim to the newest buzz word to make executives sound stupid: U-commerce.
[via
camworld]
posted by DragonBoy at 5:29 PM PST - 16 comments
Lawrence Lindsey, George II’s economic advisor, would have the rich pay less taxes, but to keep the revenue flowing, he’d
raise rates for everbody else. With both major political parties
relying on the same
corporate donors it’s no wonder the superrich and their kingdoms get away with
nearly anything.
posted by capt.crackpipe at 3:59 PM PST - 32 comments
Why McDonald's fries taste good - A very interesting article about Americans, food, and "flavoring." The statistic that made me gasp in shock was this: "About 90 percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes to buy processed food." Is it any wonder the nation is so fat? Good grief.
posted by acridrabbit at 12:45 PM PST - 23 comments
How you say Duking it out with Accenture for the title of most disagreeable computer-generated faux-English corporate nomenclature
de la semaine, a company with the perfectly good name Productivity Works has gone and screwed it up by renaming itself
isSound. "Because
the future is listening," the homepage tells us. What it's listening to is all of us stammering to pronounce an unnatural string of letters. In related news, despite admitting it still works,
isSound isShitcanning itsScreenReader, pwWebSpeak.
posted by joeclark at 12:38 PM PST - 5 comments
Privacy is an endangered species at work. Not that this is a surprise... but I'm wondering. Will we see a wave of MIS professionals who become conscientious objectors on this topic, similar to the responses engendered by 'defense' projects in the early days of computing?
posted by baylink at 8:35 AM PST - 4 comments
2001 - The year of new reason? "There is clearly only so much that people can take in terms of stories which range from the unnecessarily alarmist to the downright silly, and the news media are at last recognising this."
posted by todd at 5:17 AM PST - 4 comments
January 2
Let's give a big "Yahoo!" for censorship! Yahoo caves in and bans all "hate materials" from being sold through its auction service
anywhere, not just in France. What is "hate material," of course, will be defined by Yahoo itself, in ways they haven't yet bothered to deliniate. (I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that "No Fat Chicks" bumper stickers will still be allowed, along with anything else that denigrates groups that don't have politically-effective special interest groups behind them.) In addition, they'll now charge for listings. Are these smart ideas for a site whose auctions have a pretty anemic response rate in the first place?
posted by aaron at 10:13 PM PST - 15 comments
"Ante up!" Say the good folks at Pyra, as Blogger goes to telethon mode and asks for New Server donations. And they really suckered me in, too, because sufficient donations yield
free stickers!
posted by anildash at 6:33 PM PST - 139 comments
This is an amazing photograph of what the world looks like at night, from a low orbit. Although this is found in a subdirectory of NASA's
Astronomy Picture of the Day, I'm not sure how to get to this pic by surfing the site, nor do I have any information on what was used to do the photographing. The link was sent to me in an email.
Anybody know the details on this one?
posted by lizardboy at 5:07 PM PST - 13 comments
DotComGuy leaves house; world fails to care. For those who weren't paying attention to this, The Story Of The Year, some schmuck renamed himself DotComGuy, moved into a house, and lived off e-tailers for an entire year to prove that the Internet helps commerce. Or something. The experiment proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, nothing.
posted by solistrato at 4:28 PM PST - 3 comments
Aloha, Mr. Hand. Ray Walston is dead. For all you counting by threes, he would be the third, I guess. You can stop counting now.
posted by bondcliff at 12:51 PM PST - 7 comments
Predictions from an Icelandic prophet for 2001: Total war in the Middle East, a worldwide natural disaster, money market instability, the spread of mad cow disease, and oh yeah - an Oscar for Bjork.
I'm not sure what to comment on; what safe bets these are, or the interesting addition of Oscar picks in the predictions.
posted by jragon at 12:44 PM PST - 6 comments
January 1
Love your dog, but don't love your dog. If you know what I mean.
71-year-old man attacks 44-year-old son with a crowbar after discovering that his son's canine companion was also his
special friend. Dad got a suspended prison sentence; no mention at all of the son getting charged with anything.
posted by lia at 11:34 PM PST - 11 comments
"I wanted to be a mother who bakes. But then I found out it's illegal." While I can understand being afraid of a Hepatitis or E. Coli outbreak, I can't help but think this is simply another example of a school district of applying really stupid rules to a situation.
posted by ookamaka at 10:29 PM PST - 10 comments
Steven Spielberg to receive honorary knighthood One of the first signs that either each year is stranger or more of the same as the previous: Steven Spielberg will receive the Insignia of a Knight Commander of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire at a ceremony at the British Embassy on the evening of 29th January 2001. Americans admitted to membership of British Orders of Chivalry do not style themselves "Sir". He can, however, place the letters KBE after his name. Found at
badassmofo.
posted by riley370 at 3:18 PM PST - 5 comments
'Kilimanjaro in 5 Days' is a fun article I saw in 'The Charlotte Observer' when I was back east for Christmas. Mainly, it's fun for me because I climbed it myself, back in november 92, along the same route. The climbing costs are here. Anybody else been and want to comment on this article (or not been and want to comment)?
posted by Sean Meade at 10:18 AM PST - 7 comments
My wife and I watched
'Notorious' last night. We weren't far into it before we realized the plot had been lifted for
'Mission:Impossible 2'! It makes us think even less of the latter movie. What's more, we couldn't find anything in their publicity about stealing the plot. It had to be left to
the critics.
Can you name any reworkings of original plots that actually turned out good or better? (more inside)
posted by Sean Meade at 8:59 AM PST - 48 comments
JDoom. Get this. It's a patch for Doom that allows for 3D acceleration, dynamic lighting, free mouse looking, and remapping keys. Works with
ANY version of Doom. Simply Unzip
the file [737k] into your Doom dir and run JDoom.bat (for OpenGL mode). It also supports D3D (I'll explain inside). Some screenshots:
1 2 3. Doom shareware is available
here.
posted by grank at 3:27 AM PST - 4 comments
