MetaFilter

"This stuff is still great." Paul Ford reminds us, as ever, why we're here, and thinks smart about the downturn: "We thought that Metcalfe's law on networks and Moore's law on processor power would change everything. But people don't change every 18 months; cultures don't start moving faster than processors. People don't increase their value with the increase in value."
posted by holgate at 7:00 PM PST - 18 comments

The next must have tech gadget is on its way this fall. Sure it probably weighs 50 pounds, but it's just too damn sweet not to get.
posted by physics at 6:49 PM PST - 15 comments

eBay takes a leaf out of eToys' book. Everybody's favourite auction site is threatening legal action against EBay Pty Limited, an Australian company that’s been around for twenty years but only got online recently. eBay has the ebay.com.au domain name, so EBay bought ebayaust.com in late 1999 for their small business selling self-published books.

Now eBay wants EBay to stop using the name both online and offline, the latter of which seems highly dubious given the relative ages of the companies.

In what is becoming an increasingly global marketplace, where do we draw the line between disparate companies with similar names?
posted by Georgina at 6:26 PM PST - 6 comments

Canadian World Domination. It's all about the beer, the beavers, and total and utter capitulation from the rest of the civilized world.
posted by sid at 3:58 PM PST - 24 comments

Unholy war in the Holy Land Though the Israeli and Arab conflict seems nearly always on the front pages of the papers, here is a minor religious struggle going on in area, an area where claim, counter claim, strife, bitterness and emotional toil seem the order of the day. This just odd enough to stand as symbolic of the area and its uniqueness.
posted by Postroad at 3:21 PM PST - 3 comments

Thrown off the scent. A fascinating story about The Pill and its effect on women's mate choice, and the effect of these choices on evolution. T-shirts belonging to unknown men were given to women to smell. All they had to do was say which smelt best. Women on the pill chose exactly the opposite t-shirts to those that didn't - find me free will, personal taste and the nature / culture divide in that if you can... [found via Plastic - and if you want to talk about that, then click here]
posted by barbelith at 2:51 PM PST - 27 comments

Grrrlz R the future of computerz! A suprisingly warm-hearted and atypically unguyish analysis of the “ridiculous” new iMac colours and what they represent for future computer use. If Apple blew it by not letting teenage boys play games, are they smart to make iMacs attractive to sensitive, design-focused people (including grrrlz) as so-called digital hubs? Or will the boyz shoot ’em up on Wintel while the grrrlz rip boy-band MP3s on groovy iMacs? (My claim: Bondi blue remains the bestest iMac shade ever. Discuss.)
posted by joeclark at 1:59 PM PST - 17 comments

Joe Isuzu is Back!!! "He is not going to be this smarmy, lying, bad car salesman person. He is going to be more corporate."
posted by darren at 1:32 PM PST - 17 comments

Ted no longer 'owns' Braves Hey all of you who hate the Atlanta Braves: Here's at least one positive result of the AOL/Time Warner Merger.
posted by darren at 1:27 PM PST - 7 comments

hoursong: A streaming index of songs based on ideas and associations to a different theme. Whether it's the song, the artist, the album, the lyrics, the video, whatever; the theme can be tied to anything, and everyone can submit their own song that relates. You can also create discussion and song threads on every submission.
posted by magnetbox at 1:01 PM PST - 16 comments

The Marine Corps is preparing to unveil perhaps the biggest breakthrough in weapons since the atomic bomb — a nonlethal weapon that fires directed energy at human targets. The Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System is designed to stop an individual in his tracks and make him turn and flee.
posted by tremendo at 12:03 PM PST - 38 comments

Cam thinks Metafilter's 'ruined' Too many idiots and stupid posts? Thoughts?
posted by darren at 12:01 PM PST - 91 comments

Could sharesniffer be the reason I'm getting so many more netbios attempts on my ADSL machine recently?
posted by viama at 11:23 AM PST - 3 comments

Foot and mouth disease in cattle is not the same as Hand, foot and mouth disease in humans. This, I found out only today.
posted by ajbattrick at 8:57 AM PST - 4 comments

London's Millennium Dome for sale, or at least its contents, which are being auctioned today at bargain-basement prices (view live online here.) Meanwhile former Dome boss PY Gerbeau, hoping to buy the attraction itself, wins an injunction to remove hundreds of items from the auction. This photostory shows the carnage as the Dome's insides are ripped out in preparation for this year's biggest yard sale: a sad and humiliating end.
posted by tobyslater at 8:56 AM PST - 7 comments

You sleep around, you get diseases. A "proof of concept" virus based on Gnutella appeared last weekend; it's benign but the next ones won't be. Why do people do this?
posted by Steven Den Beste at 6:57 AM PST - 19 comments

When the muse has struck/knowledge and form are entwined/in geeky haiku - (how to decode DVDs) [via /usr/bin/girl]
posted by plinth at 6:13 AM PST - 8 comments

Proof that aliens *did* probe me.
posted by tiaka at 6:10 AM PST - 2 comments

The Bush Pardons More pardon fun!... An interesting flip side to the pardon coin.
posted by saralovering at 5:52 AM PST - 9 comments

OpenCola Soft Drink™ "source code" has been released under General Public License and is freely available for download from their website. It marks the first time that open-source licensing has been applied to a consumer product. Or so they say.
posted by Firda at 5:24 AM PST - 12 comments

AOL Dominates Web Traffic, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, who found that AOL Time Warner’s combined share of the time Americans spent online last month was 33(!) percent.
posted by frednorman at 3:39 AM PST - 8 comments

"Where does it take you when you make a sound out of a photograph?" To some very interesting places, if you're DJ Scanner and you're taking a break from turntables and samplers to play with something called a Metasynth. What pop star's picture would you want to see "photo-synthesized"?
posted by allaboutgeorge at 2:27 AM PST - 8 comments