I'm guessing that the biggest reason to not do a CAT scan is the cost. I'm pretty sure there are no risks to the fossil at all. But they're pretty expensive, the paleo lab probably doesn't get a lot of funding, and the dino probably didn't have insurance. Another reason to not get a CAT scan is that it might prove that this is a hodge-podge of fossils, rather than just one creature. Maybe Norell doesn't want to see this happen, at least subconsciously? Norell said it's obvious that it's one specimen, but Reuben said it wasn't. Well if another scientist doesn't think it's a single specimen, then I wouldn't exactly call it "obvious" that it is.
The article said it has large feathers sitcking out of strange places; I think it'd be pretty easy for a feather or two from a freshly killed something else to sink down to the bottom of the lake and land on top of the carcass of a lizard, so they get fossilized together. I don't see how a CAT scan would dis/prove this though.
Not at all. I much prefer ripping CDs from my friends' copies to downloading songs then burning. The "danger" with "rip, mix, burn" is that Apple "implies" that instead of buying 5 CDs with 2 good songs and a bunch of filler, you can borrow your friends CDs and make make one for yourself with 10 good songs on it. Eisner's just being a moron anyway. I'd be suprised if anyone takes him seriously. And hey, if Apple's going to take sides against Disney, there's another reason to like them more!
they'll sell their customer's hard drive space and processor time? Let's say I give CompanyX the right to process gene sequences on my machine. What if they sell that right to other companies? A little freaky, but a good idea though.
Hmm, you're completely right. Consider my mind changed. I suppose I should spend more time looking at things from the corporation's side, and less from the little guy's:)
email, streaming... of course; wasn't thinking. Anyhoo, the spirit (if not the letter) of my original post stands: If a domain name isn't being put to use, it should be up for grabs.
Yes, dammit. It should, at least. Anyone who's spent any time looking for a domain name quickly finds that while almost everything is taken, 99% of those registered names have no sites behind them. People should be given a week or a month to put something meaningful behind it, or lose it to the next customer.
Well, I was going to jokingly suggest they got it by doing something underhanded, but hell, that could get me sued. It feels very wierd, not making a joke out of fear.
I think the real story here is this Viagen/Nora mess. While it seems like Whatley decided not to show up and rightfully lost the case by default, Nora was bullied into apology and silence by Viagen's sleazy lawyer. And it sounds like her statements were complete opinion and stated as such, which of course means they can't be construed as libelous. Hell, I don't understand how a company that makes cancer-curing eggs could not be "crooked." I mean, if you had the cure for cancer, why would you go and put it in an egg? What, do they also import olive oil?
Especially with a work as cinematic as Miyazaki's, I want my eyes to be free to wander the screen and enjoy the animation. With subtitles, half the time I miss important graphical elements because i'm too busy reading the text. Personally, I'm hoping they'll hire unfamous voice-actors and use the money they saved to hire talented translators.
a clear plexiglass case that's a foot or two high by a few feet wide and a few inches thick, that I can hang on my wall. It could go right under a flat screen and I could spend all day "staring at the wall."
Edward Tufte has 3 or 4 books out dealing with the orginization of information, as it pertains to laying it out on a page. A lot of the stuff deals with maps, charts and diagrams and there's not too much about interactivity. But what there is is absolutely brilliant.
The books are kind of expensive, but they're beautifully put together--top quality paper, binding, colors, printing, everything. There are even a few fold-out's and pop-up sort of things.
Also, do some usability testing--where you sit people in front of your site and watch them use it. "Don't Make Me Think" is very helpful in suppling guidelines to do this.
All you need is one guy to connect the analog out of his DVD player to the analog in of his video card, hit play, record, compress and upload, and voila! the movie's on the web being shared by millions of viewers. The most sophisticated copy protection is simply ignored.
MPAA: attack the problem at the root--make DVD's 5 or 10 bucks. I'd rather spend that than sit around waiting for a potentially screwey movie to download. Or make a site where people could download movies themselves that were digitized by the studios and charge a subscription fee to the site. Think, for a minute, will ya?
I can't think of any CD, except compilations of old blues sides, that is just a collection of songs. People don't buy songs, they buy albums, which are organized to generate a 15-75 min. musical experience. There's something satisfying about popping a CD into a player and just hitting play, knowing you're getting the artist's vision exactly as it was intended. With Napster, if I downloaded an album, lots of times the tracks were wierd versions of the ones on the album. I bought Kid A AFTER having downloaded it from Napster and burned it to CD! Why? 3 reasons: a) to make sure I got the "official" music of the CD b) to support the band, and c) to enjoy the packaging.
This "clunky packaging" you talk about has the potential to enhance the musical experience by a lot. The Kid A booklet is this fat thing with some very interesting pictures. The Moby booket includes five or six annoying essays by him and a bunch of narcisisstic pictures of himself, but I enjoyed it anyway. I can remember back in high school listening to the Cure's Disinitegration over and over again, reading along with the lyrics in the booklet. Somehow, when I download a CD, I feel like I'm not getting everything.
Here's to hoping that P2P will encourage labels and artists to spend more time and money developing unique and interesting packaging that complements and enhances the music.
Ever think that you simply don't understand how time works? Einstein proved it's relative; I feel certain it's not even linear. I think you'd make a lot more sense claiming the earth was created yesterday and everything in the past is just memories. When you say the earth was created 6,000 years ago, you're playing by science's rules, which prove the earth to be a lot older than that (but of course can't prove it wasn't created. In fact, I think the Big Bang theory is the most creationist postulaion ever to come from science, because you have to ask: who lit the fuse?).
It seems ironic at first, but he's not opposing copyright, he's just against it being automatically granted for currentTerm + x, x being indefinite future extensions.
What's more, he defines "free" as something that can be copied without permission, or something that requires permission, but the permission is given neutrally. I'd guess this article lies in the latter case.
Yeah, the parent post was insensitive and ill-timed, but the fact remains: if I want to watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon, I have to wait for a network to show it to me. Luckily, here in the US, this is pretty frequent, esp. with Cartoon Network around, but, as another post mentioned, this is not the case in Canada or other foreign countries. Also, shows shown by the networks are usually chopped up for time, and they show the same ones over and over again. I know there's a few that I haven't seen yet, and if they were public domain, I would be able to go to some store and buy a nice cheap DVD with all the cartoons on it or download them from a site or something.
I seriously doubt his kids are getting any royalties (and why should they--let them do their own work), so it's only the studios that would lose while the public and the world gains massively.
So what can be done? How do you go about changing a century-old law that you believe has, over time, goten way out of hand? The studios know how--just use your clout money and powerful lawyers to slowly amend it in your favor. But how do we, the public change the law to best reflect the original intentions of the constitution? How can I make it so in ten years, I can legally show my kids every Bugs Bunny cartoon, with no commercials?
Arrange the primary and secondary colors in a circle. Since you're in the digital realm they would be Red, Green, Blue; and Cyan, Magenta, Yellow. Put Red at the top, then every 60 degrees mark off another color. It should read like this from the top going aroumd clockwise: R, Y, G, C, B, M. These are the hues. Now if you measure the degrees between 2 different hues (the shortest distance), you should have a good indication of their contrast. That is, Red on Cyan is a lot higher contrast than Red on Red-with-a-little-yellow-in-it.
Of course, there're two more variables: Saturation and Value. Imagine in the center of the circle there's a dot of neutral grey, and a gradient from that grey out to the colors. That is, a dot on the edge at 120 deg. would measure as Green at it's highest saturation point, and as you move to the center of the circle, it would get duller and duller until it reached grey. The same for all the other colors. This way you can measure a color's saturation.
Now for the most important aspect: Value. Value is a measure of how light or dark a color is of you took away all the color information (ie, converted it to greyscale). One of the first things you learn in art school is that a difference of Value is higher contrast than a difference of Hue or Saturation. Black on White is the highest contrast you can get, and Red-on-Green and Red-on-Grey fall somewhere in the middle. So you now have to extrude to color model in 3d space so it looks like a cylinder. The top disc should be all white and the bottom disc should be all black. Now you can find out the difference in contrast of two different colors by locating them on the model and measuring their relative distances in 3d space. The tricky part: how tall do you make the model? I'd recommend about twice as high as it is wide. This would mean that White on Black is twice as contrasty as Green on Magenta.
Now here's the really tricky part: the original color wheel you made in the beginning isn't just a flat disc in the center of the cylinder- it's all floppy. The Cyan and Yellow edges should be close to the top, since they're very bright (close to white), and the Red and Blue ends should be nearer to the bottom, since they're darker.
Photoshop does a pretty good job of representing everything except the last paragraph. If you go to the color picker and click on the H toggle button (HSB), you'll see that the rainbow strip represents the circumfrence of the original circle, and the x-axis in the grid represents Saturation while the y-axis represents Value (Brightness). Where it falls short is it says that Cyan at it's highest Saturation is no brighter than Blue (fully saturated)! Of course, it's obvious that Cyan (with a perceptual brightness of (I'd say) around 95, is much brighter than Blue (which I'd guess had a perceptual brightness of 30 or so). But there are good reasons why Adobe chose to do the HSB color measurements this way.
Hope this helps. I don't know how you would program it, but it's good for picturing it in your head.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing that the biggest reason to not do a CAT scan is the cost. I'm pretty sure there are no risks to the fossil at all. But they're pretty expensive, the paleo lab probably doesn't get a lot of funding, and the dino probably didn't have insurance. Another reason to not get a CAT scan is that it might prove that this is a hodge-podge of fossils, rather than just one creature. Maybe Norell doesn't want to see this happen, at least subconsciously? Norell said it's obvious that it's one specimen, but Reuben said it wasn't. Well if another scientist doesn't think it's a single specimen, then I wouldn't exactly call it "obvious" that it is.
The article said it has large feathers sitcking out of strange places; I think it'd be pretty easy for a feather or two from a freshly killed something else to sink down to the bottom of the lake and land on top of the carcass of a lizard, so they get fossilized together. I don't see how a CAT scan would dis/prove this though.
Just wait till they have to start paying back those student loans that they used to buy the software--they'll be warezing their underwear.
title says it all.
Not at all. I much prefer ripping CDs from my friends' copies to downloading songs then burning. The "danger" with "rip, mix, burn" is that Apple "implies" that instead of buying 5 CDs with 2 good songs and a bunch of filler, you can borrow your friends CDs and make make one for yourself with 10 good songs on it. Eisner's just being a moron anyway. I'd be suprised if anyone takes him seriously. And hey, if Apple's going to take sides against Disney, there's another reason to like them more!
---
they'll sell their customer's hard drive space and processor time? Let's say I give CompanyX the right to process gene sequences on my machine. What if they sell that right to other companies? A little freaky, but a good idea though.
Hmm, you're completely right. Consider my mind changed. I suppose I should spend more time looking at things from the corporation's side, and less from the little guy's :)
Hey, thanks! I didn't know I was a dumbass. And you took 2 minutes out of your busy schedule to tell me--I'm touched.
email, streaming... of course; wasn't thinking. Anyhoo, the spirit (if not the letter) of my original post stands: If a domain name isn't being put to use, it should be up for grabs.
Am I being thick-headed here? Besides forwarding to a working doman (ala www.carbon.com), what else can you do? Besides, of course, squat.
Yes, dammit. It should, at least. Anyone who's spent any time looking for a domain name quickly finds that while almost everything is taken, 99% of those registered names have no sites behind them. People should be given a week or a month to put something meaningful behind it, or lose it to the next customer.
Well, I was going to jokingly suggest they got it by doing something underhanded, but hell, that could get me sued. It feels very wierd, not making a joke out of fear.
I think the real story here is this Viagen/Nora mess. While it seems like Whatley decided not to show up and rightfully lost the case by default, Nora was bullied into apology and silence by Viagen's sleazy lawyer. And it sounds like her statements were complete opinion and stated as such, which of course means they can't be construed as libelous. Hell, I don't understand how a company that makes cancer-curing eggs could not be "crooked." I mean, if you had the cure for cancer, why would you go and put it in an egg? What, do they also import olive oil?
Especially with a work as cinematic as Miyazaki's, I want my eyes to be free to wander the screen and enjoy the animation. With subtitles, half the time I miss important graphical elements because i'm too busy reading the text. Personally, I'm hoping they'll hire unfamous voice-actors and use the money they saved to hire talented translators.
...using new software that promises to make things cheaper and easier:
It doesn't.
a clear plexiglass case that's a foot or two high by a few feet wide and a few inches thick, that I can hang on my wall. It could go right under a flat screen and I could spend all day "staring at the wall."
What happens when that athletic young son turn into a slashdot reader?
Edward Tufte has 3 or 4 books out dealing with the orginization of information, as it pertains to laying it out on a page. A lot of the stuff deals with maps, charts and diagrams and there's not too much about interactivity. But what there is is absolutely brilliant.
The books are kind of expensive, but they're beautifully put together--top quality paper, binding, colors, printing, everything. There are even a few fold-out's and pop-up sort of things.
Also, do some usability testing--where you sit people in front of your site and watch them use it. "Don't Make Me Think" is very helpful in suppling guidelines to do this.
All you need is one guy to connect the analog out of his DVD player to the analog in of his video card, hit play, record, compress and upload, and voila! the movie's on the web being shared by millions of viewers. The most sophisticated copy protection is simply ignored.
MPAA: attack the problem at the root--make DVD's 5 or 10 bucks. I'd rather spend that than sit around waiting for a potentially screwey movie to download. Or make a site where people could download movies themselves that were digitized by the studios and charge a subscription fee to the site. Think, for a minute, will ya?
I can't think of any CD, except compilations of old blues sides, that is just a collection of songs. People don't buy songs, they buy albums, which are organized to generate a 15-75 min. musical experience. There's something satisfying about popping a CD into a player and just hitting play, knowing you're getting the artist's vision exactly as it was intended. With Napster, if I downloaded an album, lots of times the tracks were wierd versions of the ones on the album. I bought Kid A AFTER having downloaded it from Napster and burned it to CD! Why? 3 reasons: a) to make sure I got the "official" music of the CD b) to support the band, and c) to enjoy the packaging.
This "clunky packaging" you talk about has the potential to enhance the musical experience by a lot. The Kid A booklet is this fat thing with some very interesting pictures. The Moby booket includes five or six annoying essays by him and a bunch of narcisisstic pictures of himself, but I enjoyed it anyway. I can remember back in high school listening to the Cure's Disinitegration over and over again, reading along with the lyrics in the booklet. Somehow, when I download a CD, I feel like I'm not getting everything.
Here's to hoping that P2P will encourage labels and artists to spend more time and money developing unique and interesting packaging that complements and enhances the music.
...lunchtime doubly so.
Ever think that you simply don't understand how time works? Einstein proved it's relative; I feel certain it's not even linear. I think you'd make a lot more sense claiming the earth was created yesterday and everything in the past is just memories. When you say the earth was created 6,000 years ago, you're playing by science's rules, which prove the earth to be a lot older than that (but of course can't prove it wasn't created. In fact, I think the Big Bang theory is the most creationist postulaion ever to come from science, because you have to ask: who lit the fuse?).
What about those asians?
It seems ironic at first, but he's not opposing copyright, he's just against it being automatically granted for currentTerm + x, x being indefinite future extensions.
What's more, he defines "free" as something that can be copied without permission, or something that requires permission, but the permission is given neutrally. I'd guess this article lies in the latter case.
Yeah, the parent post was insensitive and ill-timed, but the fact remains: if I want to watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon, I have to wait for a network to show it to me. Luckily, here in the US, this is pretty frequent, esp. with Cartoon Network around, but, as another post mentioned, this is not the case in Canada or other foreign countries. Also, shows shown by the networks are usually chopped up for time, and they show the same ones over and over again. I know there's a few that I haven't seen yet, and if they were public domain, I would be able to go to some store and buy a nice cheap DVD with all the cartoons on it or download them from a site or something.
I seriously doubt his kids are getting any royalties (and why should they--let them do their own work), so it's only the studios that would lose while the public and the world gains massively.
So what can be done? How do you go about changing a century-old law that you believe has, over time, goten way out of hand? The studios know how--just use your clout money and powerful lawyers to slowly amend it in your favor. But how do we, the public change the law to best reflect the original intentions of the constitution? How can I make it so in ten years, I can legally show my kids every Bugs Bunny cartoon, with no commercials?
Josh
Arrange the primary and secondary colors in a circle. Since you're in the digital realm they would be Red, Green, Blue; and Cyan, Magenta, Yellow. Put Red at the top, then every 60 degrees mark off another color. It should read like this from the top going aroumd clockwise: R, Y, G, C, B, M. These are the hues. Now if you measure the degrees between 2 different hues (the shortest distance), you should have a good indication of their contrast. That is, Red on Cyan is a lot higher contrast than Red on Red-with-a-little-yellow-in-it.
Of course, there're two more variables: Saturation and Value. Imagine in the center of the circle there's a dot of neutral grey, and a gradient from that grey out to the colors. That is, a dot on the edge at 120 deg. would measure as Green at it's highest saturation point, and as you move to the center of the circle, it would get duller and duller until it reached grey. The same for all the other colors. This way you can measure a color's saturation.
Now for the most important aspect: Value. Value is a measure of how light or dark a color is of you took away all the color information (ie, converted it to greyscale). One of the first things you learn in art school is that a difference of Value is higher contrast than a difference of Hue or Saturation. Black on White is the highest contrast you can get, and Red-on-Green and Red-on-Grey fall somewhere in the middle. So you now have to extrude to color model in 3d space so it looks like a cylinder. The top disc should be all white and the bottom disc should be all black. Now you can find out the difference in contrast of two different colors by locating them on the model and measuring their relative distances in 3d space. The tricky part: how tall do you make the model? I'd recommend about twice as high as it is wide. This would mean that White on Black is twice as contrasty as Green on Magenta.
Now here's the really tricky part: the original color wheel you made in the beginning isn't just a flat disc in the center of the cylinder- it's all floppy. The Cyan and Yellow edges should be close to the top, since they're very bright (close to white), and the Red and Blue ends should be nearer to the bottom, since they're darker.
Photoshop does a pretty good job of representing everything except the last paragraph. If you go to the color picker and click on the H toggle button (HSB), you'll see that the rainbow strip represents the circumfrence of the original circle, and the x-axis in the grid represents Saturation while the y-axis represents Value (Brightness). Where it falls short is it says that Cyan at it's highest Saturation is no brighter than Blue (fully saturated)! Of course, it's obvious that Cyan (with a perceptual brightness of (I'd say) around 95, is much brighter than Blue (which I'd guess had a perceptual brightness of 30 or so). But there are good reasons why Adobe chose to do the HSB color measurements this way.
Hope this helps. I don't know how you would program it, but it's good for picturing it in your head.
Josh