MetaFilter comments by tiamat

378 MetaFilter comments by tiamat (displaying 51 through 100)

"The right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history." (youtube) A nice catch by The Daily Show.
comment posted at 2:03 AM on May-14-06

In nature, mothers aren't so motherly.
comment posted at 10:06 AM on May-10-06

Newsfilter: Chavez announces he may call a referendum asking voters to allow him to rule without further elections until 2031, well past the 2012 limit currently imposed by the Venezuelan constitution. Bluff? Naked power grab? Fatal mistake? Either way, watch what you say about it if you're in Caracas.
comment posted at 10:29 AM on May-8-06

The cast of Battlestar Galactica drawn as Simpsons characters. (via)
comment posted at 5:26 PM on May-7-06

Why We Fight, the BBC documentary from Eugene Jarecki about the American military-industrial complex and its origins (trailer@apple). For some reason its up in full at Google Video, so if you didn't get a chance to see it in the theaters, well, here it is! 1hr,40m - save it for later, perhaps. It's named after a series of war propaganda newsreels, directed by Frank Capra, demonstrating the need to enter WWII. These too are available on GV, as well as archive.org - to your surprise and delight. And for your convenience: Reels One, Two, Three, Four, Five parts 1 and 2, Six, and Seven
comment posted at 9:19 AM on May-7-06

My mother is very worried. ExxonMobil moved in and helped Bolivia develop, she says. Now they have food and medicine, thanks to the kindly hand of Big Business. But now Bolivia's kicking them out. After Exxon spent 3 billion dollars helping them! What will happen to the next poor country that needs Exxon's help?
comment posted at 10:05 AM on May-3-06

...Yet set against contemporary values of transparency and accountability, the Nixon-Meir deal of 1969 is now a striking and burdensome anomaly. Not only is Israel's nuclear posture of taboo and total secrecy anachronistic, it is inconsistent with, and costly to, the tenets of modern liberal democracy. At home and abroad Israel needs a better way to handle its nuclear affairs. The deal is also burdensome for the United States, not only because it is inconsistent with U.S. values of openness and accountability, but also because it provokes claims about double standards in its nuclear nonproliferation policy.

KCDX: Five years of non-stop rock. "There is no discipline at KCDX, where the song choices are as chaotic as a schoolyard at recess... The signal, which started broadcasting throughout central Arizona and much of Phoenix in 2002, played an eclectic mix that included hits by Huey Lewis and the News and an obscure 1971 tune about cannibalism by the Buoys. There were no commercials, no DJs, no way the station made money."
comment posted at 11:55 AM on May-1-06
comment posted at 12:14 PM on May-1-06

Trekkergate escalates! Canadian blogger J. Kelly Nestruck puts out the call for pics of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, closet trekkie. (I wonder if Harper has has an autographed photo of William Shatner?)
comment posted at 6:59 AM on Apr-27-06

“Smithy code” The secret lies in HBHG and DVC. According to news reports the Judge who recently ruled in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case has included his own code in his high court ruling (PDF). At this time, no one seems to have decoded it all...
comment posted at 7:20 PM on Apr-26-06
comment posted at 7:54 PM on Apr-26-06
comment posted at 7:08 AM on Apr-27-06
comment posted at 7:41 AM on Apr-27-06
comment posted at 11:37 AM on Apr-28-06

Happy 50th birthday (bugmenot) to "the box that changed the world". (Video interview with the author, here.) On April 26, 1956, Malcolm McLean, a trucker from rural North Carolina, hired a crane to hoist 58 trailer-sized steel cargo boxes onto a refitted oil tanker. This modest experiment would profoundly alter international trade and the global economy, eventually creating the "biggest real-time datastreaming network in the world."
comment posted at 6:13 PM on Apr-26-06

It is estimated that due to an infected polio vaccine, 10 million to 30 million people in the United States from 1955 through early 1963 were inadvertently exposed to live Simian Virus #40, a pathogen linked to various cancers. If it happened before, maybe it happened again. Perhaps AIDS was just another accidental contamination originating in an American lab - this time a hepatitis vaccine gone wrong. Why assume conspiracy Dr Cantwell?
comment posted at 5:25 AM on Apr-24-06
comment posted at 12:14 PM on Apr-24-06

The Laws of Identity was a white paper written about a year ago by Kim Cameron, chief Identity and Access Architect for Microsoft. In it, he described a set of laws meant to govern the next generation of access control on the internet (also of note is his discussion about the failure of Passport). These ideas eventually evolved into Infocard, Microsoft's specific implementation of the laws, and a key software component of a larger identity metasystem that Microsoft proposes to introduce. The implications of this are very real, and quite sweeping in magnitude, as this infrastructure might one day be able to completely replace the current "login/password" type of access control system. [more inside]
comment posted at 6:44 AM on Apr-23-06

Germano Facetti - who died recently - was art director at Penguin Books during the 1960s. He was responsible for some of the most striking book cover designs of the period. More here.
comment posted at 1:21 PM on Apr-19-06

Google Calendar has launched. It is compatible with yahoo, Outlook, and iCal and includes many other features.
comment posted at 12:51 PM on Apr-13-06

Unfortunately, MeFi blue didn't make it on to the Web 2.0 Palette. I never liked MeFi Link Yellow, anyway. via.
comment posted at 1:37 AM on Apr-4-06
comment posted at 1:44 AM on Apr-4-06

New York Times to release Bush/Blair memo tomorrow. The memo, which was mentioned previously, but never publically disclosed, confirms that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were determined to invade Iraq, regardless of UN approval, and despite what both leaders told their citizens. More troubling, the memo also indicates that Bush may have conspired to assassinate Saddam Hussein, which appears to violate Sec. 5g of Executive Order 11905, which states that "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." This executive order was considered the law of the land even after 9/11, when Bob Barr proposed legislation H.R. 19, which was never enacted into law.
comment posted at 10:12 AM on Mar-27-06

I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove "your software" that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this "hacking". I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity.
comment posted at 3:39 PM on Mar-26-06

Neil Gaiman gets cease-and-desisted. In a rather bizarre legal turn of events, Neil Gaiman posted in his journal today that he received a cease-and-desist letter from Mark I. Reichenthal of Branfman & Associates insisting that he remove an "unauthorized" link from tomatoesareevil.com to the official movie website for "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". (Interestingly enough, Reichenthal evidently has previously been deployed to defend the "... For Dummies" trademark.) Problem is that Neil doesn't own the site; they merely posted a photograph of him with a particularly evil-looking tomato, a tomato which Gaiman is turning into salsa in the hopes of becoming "the Paul Newman of satanic salsas." Neil's reaction: "What an astonishingly small amount of research they must do before firing off these bizarre letters."
comment posted at 5:25 AM on Mar-20-06

La Fuga - "The Escape" - can be found inside an old bank in Madrid. A "live immersive gaming" experience, its players try to "escape" equipped only with a networked PDA and their wits. Think of it as a cross between the Tactile Dome and The Game, with a bit of Myst and a dash of Cube mixed in.
comment posted at 10:11 AM on Mar-19-06

"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", by University of Chicago's John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard's Stephen Walt. Massive .pdf and shorter, edited version
comment posted at 2:34 PM on Mar-18-06

Vintage female nudes from the Jazz Age. Workers, avert thine eyes.
comment posted at 6:02 AM on Mar-18-06

War: Canadian-style A special report by 2 journalists embedded with Alpha Company of the First Princess Patricia's Light Infantry Battle Group puts human faces to the peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan. It's good to know that our troops stationed there will soon have a taste of home.
comment posted at 3:05 PM on Mar-12-06

9 year old boy wants to "print" the internet. Using a computer at a young age does not apparently make you smart. Makes me wonder sometimes why people even consider such things for a bet. Good luck kid...
comment posted at 3:25 PM on Mar-11-06

Google Image Search comes up empty on Darryl Littlejohn Is Google Image Search censoring all hits for Person Of Interest Darryl Littlejohn? Or is it possible that GIS has found zero image files with those keywords on the whole Internet? As of the time of this posting, GIS only returns 10 hits for Darryl Littlejohn, and none of them have any connection to the bouncer. I admit those two words ('Darryl' and 'Littlejohn') are rare, but since the bouncer is possibly connected to the Imette St. Guillen murder, I would imagine GIS would come up with something? I find it odd there aren't even any "false positives" for 'Darryl Littlejohn': files with those keywords which are not photos of the man. New York's favorite parole violator is conspicuous in his absence.
comment posted at 3:34 PM on Mar-11-06

Slobodan Milosevic dies in cell Slobo dead.
comment posted at 6:38 AM on Mar-11-06

"Desktop Earth 2.0 is a wallpaper generator for Windows. It runs whenever you're logged on and updates your wallpaper with an accurate representation of the Earth as it would be seen from space at that precise moment." The images are fantastic. Oh, and it's free. (See similar - via digg).
comment posted at 5:18 AM on Mar-11-06
comment posted at 2:04 PM on Mar-11-06

I will never mock curling again. This shot was from the winter games that just passed.
comment posted at 11:57 AM on Mar-1-06

Was U.S. Patent Number 7,000,000 reserved for DuPont? The USPTO issues utility patents every Tuesday. Patent numbers are normally assigned sequentially first to the week's general and mechanical inventions, next to chemical inventions , and finally to electrical inventions. In the Official Gazette (OG) published on February 14th, there was gap in the list of the list of electrical patents where the patent number 7,000,000 was supposed to be. And at the very end of the list of chemical patents you find U.S. Patent 7,000,000 assigned to E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company of Wilmington, Delaware. Just random chance, I wonder, or perhaps just another indication of the ability of corporations to influence U.S. government agencies?
comment posted at 3:32 AM on Feb-28-06

« previous page | next page »