Isn't this a symptom of autistic spectrum disorders? I know it's trendy for everyone in the geek world to claim Asperger's these days... But I know that I personally can have trouble filtering signal from noise in crowded environments, and that such environments make me particularly anxious.

I gotta say, with the exception of this (and of course all things fashion-related), Gaddafi and I don't agree on much.

I had great success with Google Desktop Search (on windoze) for a while. It would index my mail, files, and web history (if instructed to) - and the best part was hitting one key to get an instant, minimalist search box with auto-preview. From there, you could jump straight to what you were looking for, or open a further page to narrow the search.

Sadly, it doesn't work with Thunderbird 3.0, and Google doesn't appear to care, or even to be supporting it anymore. So now I'm on a hodgepodge of GDS, Windows built-in search, and the sucky T-bird search bar.

I honestly can't believe that nobody has duplicated this Spotlight-esque functionality yet. I realize there are other desktop search options, but none of the ones I've come across have that one-key mini search that goes away as easily as it is called up. For an operation that I'm performing dozens of times daily, that's pretty crucial. It even replaced the file browser for me - much easier to call up the GDS box & type a couple letters than to grab the mouse and drill down into some directory structure - even if I know exactly where I'm going.

No kidding. Back when he took all the site's content offline to "concentrate on fundraising" (can't find the relevant slashdot story right now), I visited the site to try & donate. Not knowing anything at all about what sort of stuff they'd leaked, I was hoping to get a quick sense of it to make sure it wasn't a scam or conspiracy nut-job site. But of course I couldn't, because all the content was offline. I wrote Assange to (politely) suggest that simply hiding everything was perhaps counter-productive to the goal of raising funds, and that he should at least post an explanation or fundraising goal, to let people know how much they needed to keep operating. His response:

"I understand you wish us to save the world, suffer assassinations, work for free and pay for everything out of our children's heritage,
forever, but it is just not possible. If we haven't proved our committment thus far we never will."

I still admire the concept, and the dedication. But the dude seems like a total dickcheese. As noted in other posts, that doesn't mean he's not bettering the world. But I think he'd be serving the purpose (of giving a voice to whistleblowers) a lot better by not trying to be a celebrity, and perhaps acting like less of a douche. For one thing, it diverts attention from the actual content, and funnels it towards "Is Julian Assange a Terrorist?" style fluff media. How many mainstream media reports did you see on the actual content of the recently leaked cables? Me neither.

o.k. - attention-grabbing subject line aside... I can't RTFA b/c it's slashdotted, so I don't know exactly what dynamic range we're talking about. But the much hyped Red Epic camera (sequel to the Red One) has full-motion HDR, and is shipping as of this month. Models with this feature range from around $10k to around $40k - so admittedly more prosumer than consumer.

It stores the extra data in a secondary video stream, so that you can tone-map in post. And apparently, it can be dialed up & down, so that you can trade off dynamic range vs. resolution (up to 5k) vs. framerate vs. compression. Pretty sweet.

Clearly, the people in the article have blocked Facebook messages from themselves. I've done this myself, in fact. It's the only way to keep the dozens of warnings I receive every day about how insecure Facebook is from clogging my inbox.

* bend joint
        * bend joint in other direction
        * eat
        * procreate

Big deal - I do that all the time! Only I don't normally stop to eat in the middle.

The expected /. reaction to any story about Facebook, already evident in this thread, is along the lines of "Donotwant", "Lame", "Privacy Fail", "When I want to talk to my friends, I pick up the phone", etc.

Two facts I think slashdotters overlook: 1) "regular people" (i.e. everyone else) *love* the epic load of crap pretend socializing that Facebook provides, and care very little about the security of their information. b) there are a lot more of them than there are of us.

Google spends all of its time trying to mine your info (as a byproduct offering some really useful services - unlike Facebook). So they care very much about the "Social Web". Facebook has a half billion people tripping over themselves to cough up their personal info and build the Social Web basically for free. Honestly, if Facebook had a good search engine & email client, a lot of people would probably never go anywhere else. Sounds like a legitimate threat to me - even if not a single one of them can fix their own computer or speak Klingon.

If anything saves us, I think it'll be the fickleness of the mob. Hopefully, someone else will come up with the next Big Dumb Thing with Extra Farmville!, and Facebook will lose its grip the way MySpace did. But I doubt it'll be because 500,000,000 people suddenly wise up and realize they're not "really" socializing.

NumberWang!

a red banner reading 'Your account was recently accessed from China,'

I wonder if that's at all irritating to users living in places like, you know - China.

So the Umbrella Corporation from Japan is conducting experiments to convert human energy into electricity?

Yeah, this will end well.

(Then again - if we end up with a Milla v. Carrie-Ann Moss girl-on-girl scene, who am I to complain?)

Wait - you mean in Sweden, defendants can rest assured that any impartiality, unfairness, or political influence on the part of the justice system will be discovered and corrected before they are railroaded into prison and forgotten about? I'd heard that all the women there are bisexual and made of nachos, but this truly is incredible news. Can I be Swedish? Please?

That phenomenon is not exclusive to ASL. (Depending on what you're into, of course.)

Does that mean that the screens will be showing porn whenever I'm in the room? Freaking SWEET!

Let's just hope the next war isn't fought with robots.

Wait - I don't get you. Are you saying you *wouldn't* welcome them?