Domain: lm.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to lm.com.
Comments · 11
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Re:Photo of dino
To see a drawing of this beast (Nigersaurus taqueti)
http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=1065 -
Re:The way they *are* depicted?
Disclaimer: IANAP
There are alot of inaccuracies in Jurrasic Park.
Just take the Velociraptor for example, it did not have that many similarities with the real Velociraptor mongoliensis ("Speedy thief").
It did however have many similarities with the Deinonychus antirrhopus ("Terrible claw"), wich was larger than the Velociraptor, had a more similar skull shape to the Jurassic Park version, had a very large brain in relation to it's body size (compared to other dinosaurs), and findings suggests it hunted in packs.
The Velociraptor on the other hand, was small, had a funny looking skull, was not very intelligent, and didn't seem to get along well with others of it's kind (killing eachother).
I guess they thought the name "Velociraptor" sounded cooler than "Deinonychus".
Btw, look at these excellent sketches of a Deinonychus and a Velociraptor (feathered):
http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=813
http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=1738 -
Re:The way they *are* depicted?
Disclaimer: IANAP
There are alot of inaccuracies in Jurrasic Park.
Just take the Velociraptor for example, it did not have that many similarities with the real Velociraptor mongoliensis ("Speedy thief").
It did however have many similarities with the Deinonychus antirrhopus ("Terrible claw"), wich was larger than the Velociraptor, had a more similar skull shape to the Jurassic Park version, had a very large brain in relation to it's body size (compared to other dinosaurs), and findings suggests it hunted in packs.
The Velociraptor on the other hand, was small, had a funny looking skull, was not very intelligent, and didn't seem to get along well with others of it's kind (killing eachother).
I guess they thought the name "Velociraptor" sounded cooler than "Deinonychus".
Btw, look at these excellent sketches of a Deinonychus and a Velociraptor (feathered):
http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=813
http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=1738 -
From what I understand,
the original source for that quote is Paul Ambroise Valéry.
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Unions in creative areasUnions make a lot of sense in several situations. Jobs like phone tech support are obvious candidates for unionization. Lots of people doing the same job in the same place.
But it doesn't stop there. Some creative jobs are organized. Hollywood is very unionized; actors belong to the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) or the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), musicians belong to the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) directors belong to the Director's Guild of America (DGA), drivers belong to the Teamsters, and most of the support people belong to the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Workers (IATSE). Lucasfilm's animators and CGI techs in Northern California belong to IATSE, which is trying to organize online entertainment shops. If you're doing web design or involved in running a web site, it might be worth talking to an IATSE organizer. They send people to ACM SIGGRAPH meetings in SF, so they're not hard to find.
A union shop is a great advantage in an industry with heavy time pressures. It gives the employees an effective way to push back. Anybody in those unions who works a 12-hour day gets paid major overtime. Get called in for a weekend emergency, and big bonuses apply. This discourages employeers from understaffing and overworking their employees. If a job needs to be done 24/7, it takes four full-time employees.
Organizing in the US is very tough. Over 90% of employees who try to organize a union are fired, even though this is illegal. Canada, for example, has stronger labor laws, and it's much easier to organize there. This is the main reason for declining union membership in the US.
Despite the obstacles, temps at Microsoft have successfully organized a union, and won a lawsuit against Microsoft.
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Re:Well first of all....
Damn straight! that may very well be out of my personal design theory! Tables are logical elements for organising data, not a tool to lay out your webpage! I couldn't put this better myself! Maybe if people paid attention to content, the internet would be a far better place. I suppose I'll go back to dreaming.
PS: I tried to come up with an alternate layout for
/., and made it in css. not only did it look sweet, but it was changable from a stylesheet! whoot! -
My creedo
1) no font tags. It slows download times, bloats filesize, and holds no weight for the colourblind. If you want to make colour or font size changes, be uniform -- use css to make certain pages are readable with/without your changes. My page is an example of css not going overboard.
2) no frames, unless you handle them right! Set targets! If someone hits back, It better not take them to the top of your site!
3) Indent paragraphs the way they should be -- with a <P>! Use a "text-indent: 20px" to get the appropriate result. Non css (that is, 2.0 and lower) browsers won't recognize this, but the result is not important at that level. It will still have a clear break. I have personally converted a <br> Text to a <p>text <</p> pair and saved 10 k off of a 55k document! Each tag went from 25 bytes to 7!
4) Break up tables. Nothing is worse than going to a page like stileproject and waiting for a half hour for it to load. break things down as much as possible. Not everybody is on the campus net, or on dsl.
5) keep all pages, unless they are about graphics or media, under 25k. most of my pages weigh a measly 2.6k. That is because I don't use images. I designed a portal template that takes at most 4k. Adding stuff later won't be much a burden on the webserver or the user that way.
6) finally, use xhtml where available. This way, you have validated code, and little handheld web devices can grab your data in the future.
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Re:That doesn't work...check out my patent rant for a little more of what I wrote on this subject. It sorta runs with the same concepts you and I both mentioned above. The amazon patent covers something you do at wallmart. You scan your card (login + cookie) and the scan a product (the "one click" part) and give it to you (shipping). The one clicking part is merely a seperation of steps, and the "innovation" is merely in the perception of the process. Same system, slightly different interface.
as to the matter of not knowing if someone is pulling a patent on something, check that something out. It's usually marked "patent pending". Whether this is REQUIRED I do not know.
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Re:Unions Don't Always Suck!
Well, in truth, I have to pick the other side of that statement. I worked in theatre for a nice long time, both in educational settings, and professional environments. While i understand a lot of the frustration that unions can cause, let me turn it around. It guaranteed a minimum safety and intelligence level. When i was hanging upside down out of a truss, trying to focus a light, the last thing i wanted to have to worry about was whether the bonehead next to me knew what a light WAS! The only real experience i have with unions (in case you couldn't guess) is the I.A.T.S.E. (Internat'l Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). It saved my hide i don't know how many times.
In many ways the Theatre Industry is a lot like the computer industry. There are deadlines that have to be met, and tons of clueless people to work around to meet said deadlines. Not to mention people that would be more than willing to run the local help into the ground because they could. Does this sound familiar?
I'll pick an example, where we, the IA workers for the day, showed up to unload a show. It didn't show up for 5 HOURS after the time it was scheduled. While we stood around waiting. Why? Because they'd gotten drunk (and other) the city before and hadn't left on time. They then proceeded to try and work everyone straight through to the out, and complained mightily about food breaks, rest breaks, et al. Turns out they even tried to not pay the union for the 5 hours we were standing around waiting for them. The union paid us for the time we waited, enforced meal breaks and rest breaks, and, consequently,ended up preventing several accidents. People that don't take a break become a danger. Even in computers. At a bare minimum level, they become less effective. Whle in an ideal world, everyone would take a break when they need it, i will not complain if someone enforces it. I also won't complain about a forced fair wage. Yeah, there are times it's inconvenient, and it's another level of beaurocracy, but this one is there to protect us. The worker. The show happened, and the audience had NO IDEA about the truama that went on backstage. That's the way it's supposed to work. In our world as well. As long as the Union is managed intelligently, it can save a lot of truama.
If you are curious about the IA, try going here: History of the 100 years of the Union -
Re:Dolphins, computers, and humans.
It doesn't take AI to detroy the concept of free will. Samuel Clemens has already suggested that we ourselves are, basically, AI. Check this out: What is Man?
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Couldn't you do chording and macros on a std kbd?
The link to the one-handed qwerty 'boards on the Stanford page (forget which one) looked pretty nifty, nifty enough that I decided to play around with xmodmap and see if I couldn't piece together a simulacrum of it. It's still a preliminary version at the moment, there are still lots of bugs to be ironed out, but it's up right now at what will eventually be my homepage once again. I'll work on the right-handed version when I get the left ironed out.