I am curious as to how stripped down this thing really would be. My guess is that it's easier for MS to simply disabled features than no include then, and that through some sort of non-arduous hacking you could enabled a lot of the features they are killing.

On the other hand, Vista is a monster, so the clearly would have to trim something off of it to even GET it on a PC with 80MB and still have any breathing room left over for anything else.

I still would like to see what some industrious hacked could get working that MS just disabled. Not that I would use the damn thing, mind you.

"Hughes believes that per-track purchases are going the way of the dodo..."

First, well, believing things doesn't make it reality, no matter how much money you have.

Second, sadly, he may be right. I know a lot of people who use these services and go on and on about how great they are (I pony up donation money to SOMA FM myself). I don't get it, myself, but I get why the RIAA loves it. It's basically subscription radio for them. One file, millions of payers. Yuck.

An Aussie filmmaker made an entire movie like this last year (almost last year to the day was the story I found): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6654971.stm

"Called Faceless, the film is the project of London-based Manu Luksch, who is both the star and director and describes it as a "science fiction fairy tale"."

I tried downloading the MP4, but no sound.

This is truly wonderful.

I can't remember a time in my own life without the presence of Jack Chick tracts in one way or another. They were all over my church when I was growing up (Southern Baptist) and I still find them in restrooms and on buses all over San Francisco.

The reveal at the end is incredible.
-----

#4 - I have that Liquid Television VHS the distributed a while back. I wonder if it has Thomas and Lardo on it? I should look.

Next Big Anti-Terrorism Story Prediction: AUTHORITIES FOIL TERRORIST PLOT TO VIOLENTLY SHAKE CARBONATED SODA BEVERAGES IN CANS AND OPEN THEM ON FLIGHTS!

Ah, conservative logic. This is a very subtle version of "If we make it illegal, then people won't do it and it will never happen." You know, like with drugs. This is always an unspoken premise in their crazy argument to make abortion illegal: If it is illegal, people will not do it. Well, that is the side they attempt to take in any case. The reality is that if it is illegal then they can punish people if they are caught, which in the end is the overriding philosophy of nearly everything conservatives believe in. It is also part of a larger philosophy of believing that if you can hide what you don't people to know then they will never discover it, which is quaint and pathetic all at once in today's world. Of course, there are place that truly believe it (I am thinking of www.afo.net Xtian internet filtering here).

I wonder if they are logging IP addresses of all people who DO search for "abortion" so they can get a nice map of which institutions to target for reeducation?

*heh* There is only one true Rolling Thunder for me, and that's William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones on a shooting spree in a brothel in Mexico to take down those bastards that killed his boy.

Of course, I am guessing that the book's Rolling Thunder reference is back to Operation Rolling Thunder.

Re regular 35mm projectors in theaters: That would be an $850 bulb. http://tinyurl.com/2ab3e7

2000 hours.

After reading this, I am going with #5's explanation. That's the most simple and sounds the most plausible for the size the bulbs are. 35mm projectors make up for that with power and size re hot spots (not that we didn't have to send some bulbs back when I was a projectionist) and an adjustable reflector. No adjustable reflectors in an LCD projector that I know of.

#10 - You can do that at Big Huge Labs too: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/magazine.php

They also have modules for motivational posters and Magic style trading cards.

I would say the reason I don't like the particular movie posters show is that they are too standard baby blue.

You can make your own from Flickr uploads over at Big Huge Labs: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/poster.php

"Why would you do this?" - The guy missed "Being Human 101" classes. Why do people do anything at all that isn't related directly to their survival or species propagation? We do those things because we can't not do them. We're either cursed or blessed with this drive, and which one of those it is depends on a lot of variables.

It is fascinating how many believers of the 19th Century School Of Humans Are The End All Be All Of The Almighty's Creation people this drew out.

I nominate you all for a little golf balls to the head by a pro golfer therapy. I mean, after all, you're just an anachronism, right. It's not like you're actually a human or a baby or anything.

AH... *luxuriates in his sinful decrepitude*

I can't believe they left off "Being a judgmental ass". Oh... wait, never mind.

Well, punishment is simple. Lob a few golf balls at him from 75 yards away until one clocks him square in the forehead or nose. Cheeks, chest, arms, shoulders, chin, teeth, and ears do not count. Forehead or nose. Any mis-calculated shots hitting him in the aforementioned places on his body can be discounted as mere efforts to scare him.

#93

Why is that necessary for you to be a good human being? A person with no faith and no beliefs at all can do all of the things that a person with faith can do to make the world a better place. In the end, what is the difference? Does it matter? Why does it actually matter if all we see IS the result of random circumstances? Why in the world is that important? This is the still the world we live in and we still must take care of it. Why is the idea of God necessary for people to treat each other with decency, love and respect? God can be taken out of all of these things and the world can be an equally wonderful place. Do people so desperately need intentionality and narrative in their universe that it is acceptable to pay the price of the very, very dark side of religion to get the small benefits that dwindle more and more every day?

Why is god necessary at all?

It is not.

There simply is no reason for us to have this idea now.

Being a good person should happen without threat of reprisal for not doing so.

Meaning in life does not need a mystical figurehead as the method of propulsion.

The beauty of existing without intentionality or meaning embedded into us is that we must make our own, and thus we must be solely responsible for our consequences.

"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences."
Robert Green Ingersoll

Pray your exhibit will witness to non-Christian visitors.

Ugh. "Witness" is the filthiest word in that stupid cult's vocabulary.

Witnessing: Never, ever, shutting the fuck up about the stupid shit you've decide to believe until the people that don't believe the same stupid shit also never, ever shut the fuck up about it.

The more they talk the more they convince themselves that it is reality. The more they talk, the more they convince themselves that everyone else is just stupid and evil. The more they talk, the less than think and look and participate in the world around them.

For every person that thinks "belief" is a positive force in the world, there are thousands of "believers" proving you wrong every second of the day.

"And people wonder what's wrong with America."

Well, could be that brainwashing about the great open spaces and the ability to do whatever you want to do in 'Merica. Turns out, your idea of freedom is what your neighbor's calls "masturbating in the window with the curtains open!"

I swear, it's like no one even LISTENED to the warnings from the 70s: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xq0Mni2KOu0

"Not satisfied with the pace of natural selection in driving evolution, Noller wants to push things further by creating his own genetically engineered creations. Having already created some amazing specimins by mixing the DNA of plants and animals, the doctor has now set his sights higher, and want to work on modifying humans, as well."

Donald Pleasence and Tom Baker! How can you go wrong?

FEBRUARY 1--Mississippi legislators this week introduced a bill that would make it illegal for state-licensed restaurants to serve obese patrons. Bill No. 282,

Next thing you know, no porn OR INTERNET CONNECTIONS to anyone purchasing those items with suspiciously crusty stains on their pants.

Dildos are only sensationalist to sexless TV reporters and their grandmothers that are watching their show.

I am flabbergasted that anyone still watches television news at all anymore. I haven't watched it for nearly ten years. It's just abysmal. The dying gasps of a bygone era known as the 70s, when Ted Baxters roamed the country in clouds of hair spray and dusty white cocaine residue.

Local News Summarized: CHILD MOLESTERS! CHILD MOLESTERS!CHILD MOLESTERS! [commercial] THIEVES! THIEVES! THIEVES! [commercial] OTHER VIOLENT OR ILLICIT BEHAVIOR FROM SOMEONE IN YOUR COMMUNITY THAT YOU THOUGHT WAS A FINE UPSTANDING CITIZEN [commercial] Weather! [commercial] Local sports. [commercial] TOMORROW ON LOCAL NEWS! CHILD MOLESTERS! CHILD MOLESTERS!CHILD MOLESTERS!

"Please drink more beer until the urge to correct subsides."

Oh, don't worry about that. I am planning on correcting the lack of beer today at 5 PM: http://www.strongbeermonth.com/

"As for "organic", many people are upset that words in the English language can have more than one meaning."

*heh* Misappropriated technical terms in particular are the ones that cause the most consternation, of course, because they often end up meaning exactly the opposite of the original.

Need I drag "virtually" into this discussion as a beaten, batter and bruised example of a word that has taken on the opposite meaning of its genuine meaning? :)

I've seen "begs the question" misused so often by so many people who should know better that I have given up on it ever being used properly by anyone outside of rhetoric of philosophy classes. Best to roll my eyes and say "Yeah, that person really should know better." The one that bugged me the most was, oddly enough, the silliest one. Gil on CSI misused it in this way, which is entirely contrary to the character that the writers are trying to portray. They want to make him seem like an erudite intellectual. Using "begs the question" as "leads us to ask" pretty much is like having him say "I love this organic salt on my potatoes!" as a chemist.

Chemistry folks (and science nerds) hate that "organic" was co-opted as a silly marketing term that was then coerced into being a genuine term in use by the FDA that supposedly means something.

Danke BERYLLIUM.

Ok, so I am going to speculate about why I think this is the case, and I would love more technically inclined readers to correct this so I can put this in my own knowledge base for work.

From what I can tell, TB keeps every email as an individual file and therefore they are easy to index and very easy to move around from computer to computer. I would think that the price for that would be that when the file is storage on the drive that the OS will round up a bit on how much space to allocate to email X because of the block size allocation of the particular operating system a person might be using. Just like when you throw a file around from Windows to Mac to Unix the file size "changes" in how much space the OS thinks it should take up. If you get a lot of emails, then you get a lot of rounding up from the OS for each individual email, which means you would get a larger overall amount of your drive's space allocated to all of these little files. The huge upside also is that all of your emails can't get nuked because a single database file was damaged like with Outlook or Entourage. Outlook and Entourage, though, will have their own way of deal with email internal to their application's storage system and individual emails won't be individual files on your hard drive, but just part of a database file (that can be easily damaged - I've repaired both an Outlook file and an Entourage file at work this week).

Does Thunderbird "compact" into a database when it does the compacting?

So, again, that's a speculation about why you end up with a lot of space being taken by TB files. I would love a more technical explanation than that, even. And a corrected explanation for the places I have clearly speculated myself into fiction. :)

DOH! The Castro Shopper link was already in the story. Bad me for not checking. *smacks self around*

I was down there last Saturday and it was really neat looking, albeit a little weird to see it a lot less colorful less the rainbow flags on the light posts. I was going to swing by Swirl and pick up some beer, but Swirl has been transformed into a 70s liquor store entirely, inside and out and it was closed.

If you want to see a great collection of photos of everything, head over to the Castro Shopper on Vox:
http://castroshopper.vox.com/library/post/increased-milk-production.html

*heh* I learned to play Fluxx after a day at the Oregon Brewers Festival. I have loved it ever since. It's fun precisely for the reasons that "gamers" hate it. Strategy can be planned and formulated and then you have to scramble to reformulate it. Primarily, for me, the game doesn't seem like work. One of the reasons I don't enjoy computer RPG games is the grinding tedium of them that makes them ultimately seem like very complicated but nevertheless tedious factory work. Fluxx is more like backgammon than anything else that I can think of. You can have a strategy, sure, but one little dice roll can keep you bumped and ruin everything you were working on for the whole game. That tends to be why chess players don't care for backgammon. :)

I purchase the 80GB iPod Classic just before a vacation only to find out... TA DA! No functionality with the Camera Connector. Luckily I bought it the day after the Classic went on sale and they traded me for one of the previous 80GB models that for the same price and I have been delighted with that iPod instead of the Classic. After reading the cascading list of complaints about the iPod Classic (not compatible with a ton of accessories, and slow response with the new interface, sound quality worse than the previous iPod, etc.) I was pretty happy I ended up with the one I got. Now I just to make sure it last a long time. :)

I can't let mention of Puppet Theater go by with a mention of the amazingly wonderful Dante's Inferno: http://www.dantefilm.com/

Not steam punk, but probably the best full length motion picture in puppet theater you'll ever see.

It was mostly on the circuit festival last year and was my favorite movie I saw in the theater last year. Looks like they have planned for a DVD release this year. If you ever get a chance to see it in a theater, though, please take the opportunity.

The best $5 you'll spend if you visit New York City is in Brooklyn and the NYC Transit Museum. When we visited in September 2007 they were showing a documentary about the art on the A Line. My favorite were the grackle sculptures in the 14th street station. I love, love, love the amazing art all along the stations there.

Depend on filtering tools too much and lose the ability to participate in the greater world.

Hm. The greater world, perhaps. The real world, not really. This isn't the real world. Think of all the things you've spent time on typing as responses over the years to something you didn't agree with. In your day-to-day life, do any of them matter? Is there really an impact on your life aside from you typing your own thoughts down to be briefly glanced over by other people and then either they are incensed with anger enough to respond or they will start drumming the drum of agreement as loudly as possible, like I have with this thread. (HEAR! HEAR! KILL SCRIPT FOR BOING BOING COMMENTS! ABOUT TIME! HOW ABOUT [insert site you visit/used to visit with high noise ratio from comment post] NEXT?!)

When I think back to all of my own wasted time spent on trying to say something meaningful or convincing in response to something or someone else on the internet, well, I am reminded of two great comics that commented on the nature of the internet: (1)John Grabiel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory from Penny Arcade and (2) The Diesel Sweeties strip with this quote: "I'm not gonna waste my time debating with you. Does this LOOK like the internet?"

If anything, the best you can hope for in spending time typing responses to anything online is to hone your own writing skills or your own line of thought about something. Unless someone basically comes out and makes you feel or look like an ass ("My mother was killed by a pack of feral cats! You bastard!") then the majority of us aren't going to remember much about anything we typed in response to some Internet Fuckwad's Shitcocking except what a Fuckwad that guy was with his Shitcocking.

Put me in the list of people that appreciate these kinds of tools. One of the great features of DOC BBS back in the day was the enemies list that would kill all posts by anyone on your enemies list. You could choose to have it notify you when those posts were killed too. (Not to mention that "ignore" is a mainstay in IRC.) I never viewed it as ignoring opposing opinions, only as filtering out the noise of trolls and people who ARE so strongly attached to a belief that anything and everything they say is wildly wrapped up in that belief to the point that it isn't worth reading. When you attached "That's not how Jesus would do it! / Jesus would approve of that!" to EVERY post you make and then proceed to explain why, then I'd rather skip it altogether. I'm going to anyway. I can't see how filtering it out is any worse than ignoring it altogether.

It's funny, too, that people do get so uptight about this form of self-directed censorship, but everyone does it anyway in one way or another. We may wander over to some blog or newspaper or video of an opposing view primarily to feel superior to the attitudes held there within, but most of us don't sit down every day and read things we disagree with. Most of us, mind you. Some people do because they like that sort of internal conflict or because it's part of their job. Overall, though, I am guessing the very few people here have a fat stack of bookmarks and RSS feeds of pundits daily espousing the opposite view of their own. We claim to like different point of views, but like everything else, we mean that we like different points of view within reasonable throwing distance of our OWN points of view. We practice this all of the time and never admit it, and now someone just comes out and says it and folks start reeling in their comfy chairs about what kind of bastard goes around not reading their posts about Ron Paul and Jesus and Huckabee and Obama and Clinton and how they will save the world after they are done stealing the election from their competition etc. ad infinitum.

Even stranger is the fact that this could have been kept completely under wraps for personal use only and no one would have known and no one would have cared. Now it's out there, and all the sudden people care? Why? Because you might get your LOLs and FIRST! posts blocked? What a tragedy. Because you might get your persistent never shutting up about Ron Paul posts ignored? More tragedy.

If you don't want to be filtered, try not to be noise.

Now make it work for Metafilter.

I'm a fan of France Gall's excellent Laisse Tomber Les Filles for weird, interesting, but also great to listen to and watch 60s pop videos

*heh* Yeah, same here CAVALAXIS. I think I was searching for the transcript while Doran was posting.

Alton Brown did this on Good Eats using a large terracotta flower pot instead of a trash can.

http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Season7/Q/QTrans.htm