MetaFilter

I simply don't know what to say about this site. I'm not one for theosophical discussions, but I thought that maybe somebody here would find this ... "interesting." Yeah, that's the word. Interesting. Here's a small excerpt:

You maybe academically retarded. Academia Retards By Fact Earth Has 1 Day When Dead Still, And 4 Days Within 1 Earth Rotation, losing 3 days retards humanity. Are you stupid and evil? If you are ignorant of natures harmonic time cube creation, then you were taught to be stupid and evil.

Quite an interesting way to try to gain believers, no?
comment posted at 1:52 PM on May-3-00

Instead of Yahoo's LSD design, AltaVista's new Raging Search site is Google's GLS (Goofy Logo, Search).
comment posted at 1:53 PM on May-3-00

Never, NEVER, NEVER tell someone "Sure, you can use my computer while I'm on vacation!"
comment posted at 9:33 AM on May-4-00

Cruise and Kidman, um, get religion? The story quotes a pair of gossip reporters as saying that the pair are ditching The Religious Technology Center, Inc., er, um, excuse me: The Church of Scientology.
comment posted at 9:25 PM on May-2-00
comment posted at 10:57 AM on May-3-00

The new Clearly Canadian bottles are really pretty. The site is nice, too. But why does the URL on the bottle point to clearly.ca, which isn't nearly as cool?
comment posted at 8:25 PM on May-2-00

Autobloggatio I had a good laugh not once but twice at the bitch-slapping I underwent for the putative sin of blogging myself on Metafilter. I had a laugh even though I thought the intent was to ridicule, slag, and deride. En tout cas, I blogged myself two different ways. On a couple of occasions, I pointed to pages I'd developed as a service to netters and bloggers Xenoblogs (list of un-American blogs) and the Buyer's Guide to Alternadomains. One makes no apologies for providing pages as a public service and making them known to the public. The other case involved ruminations on love at first sight. Lacking a discussion mechanism at my blog and knowing that people would have knowledge on the topic I had no access to (breeders, for example), I posted on Metafilter. IMHO this reveals an unserved need: Blogger et al. may make it possible to update your Weblog from any browser, but what we need is a way to automate discussion on topics blogged on individual pages. As it stands, bloggers are like home-office workers who have to meet clients at cafés: They have to go out of house. Is it possible that, for blogging to work at a level beyond howling at the moon or a tree falling in the wilderness, we need automated tools for dialogue at our own sites? Should Metafilter and (to a lesser degree) Webqueeries be the only collaborative Weblogs? Clearly this would blur the distinction between blogs and mailing lists, but so what? Among mailing lists, blogs, Yahoo clubs, and instant messaging, we already have a fractured set of media of two-way and multi-way communication. A bit more fracturing ain't gonna hurt; the horse has long since bolted from the stable. (Aside: Guestbooks work poorly in my experience. Even Zeldman's. Mine is a joke. In the immortal words of Bad Religion, there's no substance. A blog gives visitors something to talk about beyond "How do you like my page?")
comment posted at 5:17 PM on May-2-00

Pyra - a company built to flip? Sippey makes the most important statement and one that I have posted here before... Both Blogger, and Pyra are great products but where is the BUSINESS MODEL. Matt do not censor this please... it is a very valid point whether you like it or not...
comment posted at 5:24 PM on May-2-00
comment posted at 9:36 PM on May-2-00

I actually wouldn't mind seeing the plaintiffs behind this cease-and-desist order win their case.
comment posted at 5:33 PM on May-2-00

Google appears to be telling a story with their logo. Is this a fun and creative way to "extend their brand" (as the marcom kids like to say) or do they need to stop letting their engineers handle their logo design?
comment posted at 5:36 PM on May-2-00
comment posted at 8:17 AM on May-3-00
comment posted at 11:41 AM on May-4-00
comment posted at 3:12 PM on May-4-00

Pyra's killer app isn't Blogger, says Michael Sippey in the most recent Stating the Obvious. The Pyramaniacs started out to build a robust project-management tool, and got sucked into the swirling vortex that is weblog-world along the way.

"Pyra's killer app isn't Blogger, it's Pyra. Of course, that's mostly semantics, since Blogger's an application built on top of the Pyra framework. Which means that Pyra could not only be your next project management app, but your next content publishing platform as well. An integrated content, template, task, issue, and discussion database? Sounds like a killer app to me. Now they just need to figure out the business model..."

I would have thought the business model was obvious. Isn't it?

comment posted at 6:21 AM on May-1-00
comment posted at 12:28 PM on May-1-00

"we're just two schmucks who thought something was funny." Yet more elian/true news (like you needed more). The two playboy guys have backed down from the AP bully boys. if you are running a mirror site, send in a link to these guys and they'll link to you. With over 1,000,000 visitors in the past couple of days, it might be worth the e-mail.
Meanwhile Salon also has a run down on the story.
comment posted at 9:01 PM on Apr-29-00

Yeah, I think we'd definitely have to say that the ad campaign was a success. You'll note that MasterCard hasn't sent a cease and desist...
[ sent to me by a friend ]
comment posted at 9:34 AM on Apr-30-00

It's Penis Day at Wetlog, apparently. [ If you think only adults have penii, you might want to treat some of those links as adult content... ]
comment posted at 10:14 PM on Apr-28-00
comment posted at 3:34 PM on Apr-29-00
comment posted at 9:03 PM on Apr-29-00

So Dave has a distributable protest site up for the elian_true animation. What I want to know is, what does this mean: "Wazzup!!! To every tax paying American that felt they should have sent Elian Gonzalez to join his Mother (in the ocean)."
comment posted at 9:12 PM on Apr-28-00
comment posted at 3:45 PM on Apr-29-00
comment posted at 6:26 AM on May-1-00

I think this deserves the front page: the two Elian_True guys work for Playboy:

http://www.playboy.com/digital/inthenews.html
comment posted at 4:11 PM on Apr-28-00
comment posted at 8:33 PM on Apr-28-00
comment posted at 1:54 PM on May-3-00

Bad news for the Twins (I'll post a screenshot later in case they catch it.)
comment posted at 4:14 PM on Apr-28-00

my.MP3.com Loses to RIAA In case you didn't see it on Slashdot and everywhere else.
comment posted at 3:27 PM on Apr-28-00
comment posted at 8:39 PM on Apr-28-00

You know, we seem to be saying "wow" a *lot*, lately...
comment posted at 3:33 PM on Apr-28-00

Found this over at Free Advice in regards to the Elian Gonzalez Spoof Movie:

WHAT IS "FAIR USE" WITH RESPECT TO A COPYRIGHT? Copyrighted work may be used for certain limited purposes by people other than the owner under the doctrine of "fair use." "Fair use" includes reproduction for specific purposes such as:

criticism and comment, including parody
news reporting
teaching
scholarship
research

I beleive that the movie is protected. How else could have the South Park used the photo in last night's episode? I doubt the AP is going to go head to head with Comedy Central over the issue. It is just easy for big companies to threaten the little people and know that they will win. What a shame.
comment posted at 2:34 PM on Apr-27-00

Well, that didn't take long... Associated Press just dropped a "cease and desist" on the Elian-Wassup movie. Damn! The thought police are getting faster and faster these days.
comment posted at 1:53 PM on Apr-27-00
comment posted at 2:38 PM on Apr-27-00
comment posted at 2:38 PM on Apr-27-00

Crackpots brought to you by 'balance" is a piece over at the Boston Globe on the state of the media today. It focuses on the media's handling of the whole Elian G. business, but it also takes a different angle on the more general matter of being journalistically 'fair' . . . which I thought interesting too in the light of growth of online fora and web logs (and perhaps also ask-an-expert sites?) which are coming to be considered as legitimate news resources.
comment posted at 8:09 AM on Apr-27-00
comment posted at 10:51 AM on Apr-27-00
comment posted at 11:06 AM on Apr-27-00

This new "FreeNet" sounds like a perfect utopia, where all information is free like beer, and not just free like speech. Some of the provisions for the network, like not being able to remove a file, remaining anonymous, and not even being able to track down where the files are really coming from make it sound like a anarchist's paradise. I'm wondering though, will it be a place to exchange banned books, or will it be clogged with porn, warez, and mp3s? Will it be populated with idealists against censorship, or AOLers wanting free stuff? Do things always go to the lowest common denominator right away, or does it take time?
comment posted at 2:33 PM on Apr-26-00

Phil Katz RIP
comment posted at 2:34 PM on Apr-26-00
comment posted at 5:48 PM on Apr-26-00
comment posted at 5:49 PM on Apr-26-00

One loo or two? A recipe for disaster or a new camaraderie?
comment posted at 9:28 AM on Apr-26-00

There's a new version of icq out, although it looks like they're pretty close to their limit on adding buttons to the interface.
comment posted at 6:31 AM on Apr-26-00
comment posted at 9:31 AM on Apr-26-00
comment posted at 7:19 PM on Apr-26-00
comment posted at 8:26 AM on Apr-27-00

Bill Gates no Longer World's Richest Man. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Larry Ellison is an idiot.
comment posted at 7:20 AM on Apr-26-00

RedHat Linux security problem uncovered. Today, apparently it was discovered that if you install the Piranha package with RedHat 6.2 (ostensibly part of the default installation, but there's controversy over this), a default password is installed that would give anyone access to the Piranha configuration package; from there, it is apparently trivial to execute any command on the box that you want.
I find it very interesting that the fact that Microsoft had a "backdoor password" in a DLL made huge news (and it turned out to be patently false), yet this has gotten almost no press. I'd like to think otherwise, but I know it's because people hate Microsoft, and thus are eager to deride it... and yet here's proof that even the mighty Linux is susceptible to the same exact problems.
Next time you reach for the keyboard to cry out "nyah nyah!" at the discovery of some problem with Windows, remember this...
comment posted at 7:44 AM on Apr-25-00
comment posted at 9:19 AM on Apr-25-00