MetaFilter

Free Speech 101 - We must acknowledge that people who use force to suppress the opinions of others are committing assault not merely on other humans and on the basic promise of free speech, but on democracy itself.
posted by semmi at 9:38 PM PST - 31 comments

The best guitarist you never heard in your life. Shawn Lane is an underground hero in guitar circles. Born 1963 in Memphis Tennesee, he joined Black Oak Arkansas at the age of 13 , beat Ted Nugent in a cutting contest, and made Billy Gibbons fall off his bar stool. Shawn now plays with the Jonas Hellborg Trio - Windows media clip here. I admit that fusion and guitar heroics are not to everyone's liking. But, if you like this kind of thing, you must agree that this guy is the the real deal.
posted by crunchburger at 9:21 PM PST - 19 comments

Cable channel FX to run 'American Candidate' competition. You heard me right, folks. Picture 'American Idol', but this time the winner gets to run for president. (Presumably via a whole lot of cash from FX.) Man, I can hear the Europeans mocking us already!
posted by tweebiscuit at 7:50 PM PST - 41 comments

Meet the "righteous babes" of the Libertarian Party In a welcome sign of new marketing savvy, North Carolina Libertarians have announced the "Ladies of Liberty" calendar. The fundraising, uh, tool features Lib candidates from across the country in patriotic and Vargas girl [probably nsfw] poses, and is the brainchild of the very glamorous state House candidate Rachel Mills. After her company's scandalous accounting caused Playboy to come knocking, Mills decided against using naked erotica as a campaign strategy, opting instead for a semi-clothed version. Don't get too excited, though; fellow state House candidate Jennifer Medlock says all of the women wear at least lingerie. She herself stops at a modest tank top, shorts and boxing gloves.
posted by mediareport at 4:00 PM PST - 27 comments

Ever wonder who collects information on DMCA violations?
posted by anathema at 3:02 PM PST - 9 comments

J'ECRIS JE DESSINE, Pour les enfants écrire, dessiner, lire sur Internet. Inventer des contes, faire des dessins, les publier.
posted by mikrophon at 1:11 PM PST - 26 comments

Robert (Willie) Pickton. Now charged in the murder of 11 Vancouver-area eastside prostitutes. Not sure if many outside of Canada have heard of this man. They've been digging up his pig-farm for months now and they keep uncovering more victims (now as many as Clifford Olson). There's still a lot more to search and a lot more women missing. How long have they known about this guy and when will the gruesome discoveries end?
posted by trillion at 12:48 PM PST - 16 comments

Avast, ye MeFi mateys!! I be Red Roger Rackham -- what be ye pirate name?? Nyar!!
posted by PeteyStock at 12:45 PM PST - 86 comments

Here's something that shouldn't be allowed to happen - The Congressional Medal of Honor Museum is threatened with closure.
posted by Pressed Rat at 12:41 PM PST - 7 comments

Drive on air. A new engine design that not only runs on air, but cleans it too.
posted by chrisroberts at 12:08 PM PST - 35 comments

Killings of dozens once again called "period of calm" by US media
What it boils down to is that from the perspective of many in the US media, Israeli lives are just worth more than those of Palestinians.
posted by mapalm at 12:06 PM PST - 30 comments

Celebrities killed graphic design. The sad and discouraging decline of magazine covers. With before and after pics. You have been warmed.
posted by magullo at 11:48 AM PST - 51 comments

Arming Saddam. "ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear," said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."

Does it matter if no one reports it? Does a tree falling make a sound if no one hears it? Are these facts not relevant to the war against Iraq? For your debating pleasure, a blast from the past.
posted by nofundy at 11:43 AM PST - 33 comments

The Rapture Index This rather bizarre site is the Dow Jones of the end of the world. From the site, "You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture. " Whacked...
posted by Coop at 10:57 AM PST - 23 comments

Smoke Gets In Your...Eyes? According to Geoffrey Gray in The Village Voice, a lot of ex-smokers like to...watch. Whether they're pregnant women, nicotine voyeurs or just regular, filter-tipped voyeurs[comes with a pop-up and probably isn't endearing to employers], it seems that even this intensely physical pastime is becoming virtualized. So be it. But...what does it all mean? Can smoking really be vicarious?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:36 AM PST - 31 comments

It's nice being green. The south Sahara's getting its groove back, after 4,000 years.
posted by DenOfSizer at 9:59 AM PST - 9 comments

Study: One in five start-ups dot-bombed "Nearly one in five start-ups backed with venture capital at the peak of the Internet boom went out of business before first-stage investors could sell their shares, costing them billions of dollars, according to a study released Thursday". Does 20% seem like too small a number to anybody else?
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy at 9:07 AM PST - 13 comments

This just in, file under "a" for addictive Horribly simple yet disturbingly addictive Friday Flash Spear chucker game
posted by bitdamaged at 8:52 AM PST - 34 comments

One Good Turn Deserves Another Mantaine Minis, 6, was living in a hut in a remote village in Kenya, in need of lifesaving heart surgery, when the improbable happened one day in June. A group of students and parents from the Langley School in McLean (Virginia) as on safari at the Masai Mara National Reserve, where Mantaine's father is a game warden. That's when someone from the village told a Langley teacher about Mantaine's heart problem. From there, things seemed to unfold quickly.
posted by tommyspoon at 8:35 AM PST - 5 comments

Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers That's the actual headline from the NY Times. Can you guess what the teachers are concerned about? A point the story doesn't mention: as these kids grow up, will they change what we consider proper English?
posted by smackfu at 8:21 AM PST - 33 comments

Spend a day at the race tracks. It's Friday, so click away. Play to win. Play to lose. It's all about the virtual Benjamins.
posted by Dukebloo at 8:15 AM PST - 4 comments

Time to repeal Godwin's law? Ward Sutton's most recent cartoon makes an explicit link between Dubya and Hitler that some might call a cheap shot (and the cartoon, admittedly, is kinda weak since by the second panel you can see where it's going). But he's not alone: Germany's justice minister, who oughta know something about Hitler, made the same comparison in all seriousness. This isn't your standard "worse than Hitler" rhetoric; there are clear tactical analogies that are above and beyond the cynical strategies of most other global politicians this century. Or are they?
posted by soyjoy at 7:53 AM PST - 50 comments

JK Rowling's expecting - twice over. A new baby's on the way and the new book's almost finished. Ain't life grand.
posted by zimbobzim at 7:27 AM PST - 10 comments

Another year, another Chat. This year's Loebner Prize competition will be held next week in Atlanta, GA (at SciTrek and GSU). The yearly contest is a modified "Turing test" (seminal paper here) where people try to guess whether they're chatting with computers or with people.

There are some resources for rolling your own AI bot, but before you begin, think about these two sentences and you'll see what a serious problem natural language is: "We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry" and "We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were ripe" (nod to this guy for the example). You have to know a lot about the world and the things in it to disambiguate the "they" in those sentences.
posted by zpousman at 6:34 AM PST - 15 comments

PeaceTrees Vietnam. Reversing the Legacy of War. "A group of American volunteers, including Vietnam War veterans, helped Vietnamese victims of the war move Thursday into a newly built 'peace village' on the site of a former U.S. Marine base. The 100 families who will live in the village lost relatives or limbs in explosions of bombs, shells or other ordnance left over from the war. PeaceTrees Vietnam, the Washington State-based nonprofit group which sponsored the $385,000 project, says it spent months digging out 339 pieces of ordnance both American and North Vietnamese to make the 100-acre site safe."

Beautiful project and story....but one can't help wonder how many years will pass before we reverse the legacies of today's (and tomorrow's) wars.
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 1:20 AM PST - 39 comments