I live in Houston, TX, which was hit by a bad hurricane...5 years ago? Something like that. And gets hit now and again by other hurricanes. I would not want underground lines here. 2 reasons:
1. The soil here is moist. And by moist, I mean that Houston is basically built on old swampland on top of millions of years of sediment. The ground here sinks. Over the 50 years that my house has been in place, some parts (like the front walk) have sunk more than a foot. Basically, the ground is not stable. It moves. And occasionally it breaks water mains, which start spurting into the air. If a power line broke, lord knows what it would do.
2. I don't trust engineers. Sorry. I don't. I was one of the guys pulling patients out of the Texas Medical Center the next day after Allison. The TMC, or the hospitals there, all have things like backup generators, UPS-es, flood walls to keep out the water flowing around them. Well, guess what happened...The flood walls broke or were simply flowed over, the UPS-es and backup generators, believing they were safe, we mounted in the basements (it was cheaper...), and suddenly lots of very, very sick people were left high and dry.
So yeah...no thanks. You'll have to do a lot of proving to me to get me to sign up for underground lines...
They *are* incredibly heavy. But they are soooooo worth it. After I left for college, my father went out and bought a 32" Sony HDTV CRT. And it is the most beautiful screen I've ever seen. I've got a 23" Apple Cinema Display which I watch all my movies and HD video on, and it doesn't even compare to the Sony in terms of picture quality. Not to mention, the Sony tv interface is so well thought out. The little extras, like the scrolling mini-screen on the side (think PIP, but 3 rungs better).
If you want a medium sized HDTV, get a Sony CRT. If you have the space to keep it, you won't regret it at all.
Open Source fast food restaurants with toys that choke young children because, after including the GPL, there's no space left for the "CHOKING HAZARD" warning...
Elephants Dream on Wikipedia (in case you don't know anything about it, considering the main website is down and the original poster didn't say much of anything about the short itself)
Seriously, though, considering how much has been happening with this project, and what a significant milestone it is for those who use OSS and/or CC, I find it almost sad that this is the first story on Slashdot in almost exactly a year. And that it took Slashdot editors well over a day since the first story submissions (some with links directly to the torrents to avoid killing the Elephants Dream homepage immediately) to get this up. Maybe I'm biased (I pre-ordered the DVD 9 months ago), but I just think that stories about people doing amazing things within and beyond the community deserves precedence over the latest reports about what the PS3 might cost. Not to anger anyone, just to toss that up for discussion.
Seriously, though, there are many good reasons for having this. One reply already touched on some, but here are some more.
Some people have to work through lunch. Many jobs with salaries simply say you have to have such and such done by such and such time. If something happens and time is running short, you often have to stay over lunch (or after-hours) to finish it. Having free coke (and a freakin' nice kitchen...) allows (and possibly) encourages employees to stay the extra time and put in the extra work by making it a (as much as possible) pleasant experience. You don't have to run out and grab something, you don't have to order in crap fast-food, you can have something right there. Same with late-nights, where restaurants might even be closed.
Some people need a break every now and then. Sometimes, I can work for 8 hours straight and never move, because I'm "in the zone". Sometimes, I need a break, just like 5 minutes, every now and then. With this, I could take a break from the serious work without getting so far away that I get distracted. And I don't have to pay for that break which, frankly, is necessary for my productivity and really ought to be provided by the company if they want me to perform.
It all depends on what you like, and this allows Google to appeal to a wider range of people (and remember, they want good people, they want people who have to be appealed to, people who are in demand and could go anywhere they want, not just anyone who will come in and work). People can still go your route, leave, eat lunch, etc. But this makes it easier for the geeks around here who deem the outside world as "the big blue room".
This ignores the fact that you still need lines to supply power to move control surfaces. So you still have hydrolic lines and/or electrical power lines that can be cut, rendering your still-intact wireless connection useless.
True, but a lot of time the power comes from a different source. I remember hearing (and thus, this could be completely false, so take it as such) that some planes (i.e. some commercial airliners) use an engine mounted in the rear, under the tail, to provide all the electical needs. Thus, if something happened anywhere forward of the wings, the generator could still be providing power.
Actually, come to think of it, if there were any amount of power generation setup in the engine itself, you could take serious damage to any part of the fuselage and parts of the wings and, assuming the pilots were still alive and the plane was still flyable, you'd still be able to control it. Or, as another possibility, you could release the codes to the FAA (only) and, if the pilots died or were incapacitated, you could actually control the plane from the ground (I know you could do that with fly-by-wire, but in that case, there is still a central point on the plane that could be compromised, here someone would have to physically take over every actuator on the plane).
Just as a quick addendum: I'm pretty sure that at least one of Shakespeare's plays would have been lost had there been copyright.
It was quite common in that time for one theater to send a smart guy with a good memory to the opening night (or 2 or 3) of a rival company's new show, then report back ASAP and write it down so his own company could either begin performing it quick or steal the basics of the plot and put on a cookie-cutter show. I can't remember for sure, but I think one of Shakespeare's plays is only still around because a company did exactly that, and we only have the "pirated" work left...
If nothing else, Shakespeare was quite well known for taking existing/popular storylines, changing some names, putting them together occasionally in fun ways (Romeo and Juliet and that movie that just came out, or 12th Night which is something like 3 or 4 separate plot lines mixed together), and writing them in absolutely amazing language (which is what he's famous for, much like Disney is famous for "Snow White", which is an old story that they rehashed, but in a beautiful new way, and have since focused more on the rehashing than on the beautiful new way part...)
They interviewed this guy on the History Channel ~2 years ago. On a show about "The Da Vinci Code." Precisely because he knew the story behind it much better than the author...cause he wrote it.
And the one thing they asked him not relative to the story was whether he was happy with the Da Vinci Code, to which he replied "No." He was fairly pissed that, even though it basically retold his idea, Dan Brown and the publicity had all made it seem like his own idea, and that he never, ever even mentioned him in anything.
I haven't RTFA, but I'm betting the guy basically told Brown to start being truthful about who came up with the idea, and Brown hasn't, so he's suing, just like we were taught in High School would happen if we copied out of Cliff's Notes or from a scientific paper...
It doesn't really. I was just being anal. I wanted the SATA drives simply because I think they'll outlast the IDE drives (in how long manufacturers keep making them), and I plan on keeping my RAID for quite awhile. But yeah, it'll saturate the connection long before it saturates all the individual drives.
At first, it was just the radio. Nice background noise to do stuff to. Then they made wireless tv sets (like, battery powered...), which was ok. I could take them outside and take a quick break while studying. Then came wireless internet. No longer could I go somewhere and fight the urge to surf simply because I had nothing to surf with, so I began to grow some self-control. But wireless HDTV... Crap. Couldn't they at least wait until I've graduated?
Maybe they'll at least do something nice, like imbed it in some of those sunglasses with the built-in monitor so I can actually enjoy my lecture classes whilst only giving off the appearance of a hangover (which wouldn't be too far out of the norm...)
Just to point out...the XServe RAID uses Ultra ATA drives, *NOT* SATA drives. I spent the last month or two researching RAID arrays, and that was one of the most disappointing things I saw...
Xserve RAID features a breakthrough Apple-designed architecture that combines affordable, high-capacity Ultra ATA drive technology with an industry standard 2Gb Fibre Channel interface for reliable... from Apple.
Just judging by the fact that you give your daughter movies like Kiki's Delivery Service, I'm going to assume that the previous 2 years have been filled with equally highly-intellectual (for the age...you know what I mean) stimulation. I'd say you probably didn't let her sit and watch hours of crap tv when she was too young to be able to do anything, whether or not she could tell the difference. Basically, I'm saying those 2 years have been filled with good parenting.
The problem that the parent is talking about is much worse. Those parents (the ones who didn't even tell their kids to put the trays away at McDonald's) aren't even giving them the basis to deicde what is/isn't crap, right, or whatever. As much as I hate the kids, the parents are what started them to the point they are at now. Of course, there's a good chance that they didn't know any better, either.
The problem is the cycle. Bad parents don't teach their babies well, the bad babies grow up to become bad kids (under more mis-direction from bad parents), the bad kids become bad adults who (often much to quickly) become bad parents, bringing along another generation just like them. Of course, good parents tend to cause the exact opposite cycle (good babies -> good kids -> good adults -> good parents -> good babies), and, of course, people ocasionally escape either cycle into the other. But it is up to people who can tell the chaff from the seeds to pressure the producers to cut the crap. People are going to buy the crap because they don't know any better, so from that point, it will always be there. But if you know what it is, tell people, call people on it, and get rid of as much as you can.
And keep your child safe. I see good things coming from her.
1. If an animation studio is spending resources making the crappy sequel, then it's spending resources making a crappy sequel. If they make a good sequel, whatever, they're making a good movie. But if they're spending *any* resource on making a crappy movie, then that's a resource they don't have to spend on a good movie. Also, especially in the case of animation, it screws up the flow of talent. Normally you have older, experienced animators taking a young animator as an assistant. The older animator does the creative work, the younger one fills in the in-betweens and learns a lot. When you start stretching to make that crappy sequel, you generally start pulling someone who would be an assistant and making them a full animator, short-changing their education and lowering the quality of every movie they produce in the future (and eventually they'll be moved to the high-quality department, which won't be quite so high-quality anymore).
2. Once you put a management into place that sees it as ok to produce the crappy knock-offs as a way to make a little extra dough on the side, you've put a management into place that sees itself as making money first and foremost, rather than making art (or, if not art, then great cinema). "Oh, we made a little extra money by making this crappy made-for-dvd movie. Well, to keep my job, I have to save/make us more money. I know, we can get rid of ______(fill in the blank) that I, as a number-crunching manager, don't see as important." I don't know if you saw it, but there's an exhibit at the MOMA of Pixar production art. It's made up of all the background work that went into making these films. Once you start teaching execs that they can make films without this background work, they start getting rid of it anywhere they can, because they've seen it work without it elsewhere... Truth is, even though Pixar makes computer animated films, less than half the artists (not half the employees, half the ARTISTS) ever actually work on the animation that goes into the final product. To an executive (like, say, Michael Eisner), that's half a company that isn't working on the final product (I mean, the guys doing the animating are artists, they can do what those other guys can...) and could, therefore, be reassigned (like to the paint division...WTF DISNEY?!?! DISNEY WALL PAINT??!?!?!?!?!!? WTF?!?!?!?!)
So yes, there are markets and reasons for the crappy movies, crappy sequels, etc. It's when a company that makes good movies gets forced by executives to start making the crappy movies that I (at least) have a problem, because that's the death-knell for anything truly good from that company. Yes, we should put our best minds on the high-quality stuff, and everyone else on the franchises, but more than that, we should keep those 2 groups so completely separated that they never, ever, ever have to deal with each other (or, more importantly, each other's executives).
Sorry, I just had to rant. I grew up long-after the great days of Disney but right during the peak of Pixar, and, as a movie-goer and as an aspiring animator/filmmaker, I can't bear to see Pixar and it's films turn into what Disney has become, and part of that comes from people who are ok with the mediocrity it currently stands for. Luckily, with John Lasseter as creative head and Steve Jobs as eccentric ass-hole/perfectionist, along with Steve Iger (who seems pretty true to what Disney should be), I think we might be looking at a strengthened Pixar and maybe even a revitalized Disney. Or maybe I'm just delusionally optimistic...
I'm pretty sure we did something in middle school where we put a piece of raw liver in a cup of pepsi and it dissolved pretty quickly. Like I said, it was a long time ago and I have a bad memory, so I could be making that up, but I kinda think we did it and the liver dissolved. Anyway, it's not a fork, but it's closer to being something that coke/pepsi would come into contact with in your body. Actually, I think I'll go try it again, if I can.
As cool as ligers are, I really hope people get over them really quickly, simply because we are low enough on Tigers and Lions as it is.
Check out this article from National Geographic about them. I found the part where the drive-thru safari kept breeding ligers after 3 out of 24 they'd bred for show developed severe neurological problems.
I just have a problem with breeding animals specifically for profit. Often, it turns bad with the animals being abused or malnourished or worse. Please be careful what you wish for...
I don't know if anyone has mentioned this or not (/me is lazy), but if you liked this film, you might wanna also check out Winged Migration, by Jacques Perrin. It's good on details, and incredibly beautiful. If you suffer a bit from add (/me again), you'll like it cause it's split into regions of the world, so you can take it bit by bit, if you don't think you can stand 2 hours straight of birds flying...
Get a laptop with firewire and get something like Cinelerra or FCP, then just plug the camera into the laptop and use the direct capture in the software to record. You'll be able to record for as much disk space as you've got (use usb2 or firewire if you want to add an external drive for more space). That should work fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Houston, TX, which was hit by a bad hurricane...5 years ago? Something like that. And gets hit now and again by other hurricanes. I would not want underground lines here. 2 reasons:
1. The soil here is moist. And by moist, I mean that Houston is basically built on old swampland on top of millions of years of sediment. The ground here sinks. Over the 50 years that my house has been in place, some parts (like the front walk) have sunk more than a foot. Basically, the ground is not stable. It moves. And occasionally it breaks water mains, which start spurting into the air. If a power line broke, lord knows what it would do.
2. I don't trust engineers. Sorry. I don't. I was one of the guys pulling patients out of the Texas Medical Center the next day after Allison. The TMC, or the hospitals there, all have things like backup generators, UPS-es, flood walls to keep out the water flowing around them. Well, guess what happened...The flood walls broke or were simply flowed over, the UPS-es and backup generators, believing they were safe, we mounted in the basements (it was cheaper...), and suddenly lots of very, very sick people were left high and dry.
So yeah...no thanks. You'll have to do a lot of proving to me to get me to sign up for underground lines...
Check out Studio Artist. It works very well for rotoscoping and is pretty automatable and works with wacom pens and tablets and such quite well.
From an earlier post: http://www.pledgebank.com/100laptop
I have a comment about the Sony CRTs.
They *are* incredibly heavy. But they are soooooo worth it. After I left for college, my father went out and bought a 32" Sony HDTV CRT. And it is the most beautiful screen I've ever seen. I've got a 23" Apple Cinema Display which I watch all my movies and HD video on, and it doesn't even compare to the Sony in terms of picture quality. Not to mention, the Sony tv interface is so well thought out. The little extras, like the scrolling mini-screen on the side (think PIP, but 3 rungs better).
If you want a medium sized HDTV, get a Sony CRT. If you have the space to keep it, you won't regret it at all.
This can only lead to one thing:
Open Source fast food restaurants with toys that choke young children because, after including the GPL, there's no space left for the "CHOKING HAZARD" warning...
If you're interested in some more resources for Blender (or info on the movie), try checking these places out:
Blendernation
Blendernation article about Elephants Dream
Blender Artists Forums
Collection of WikiBooks
Elephants Dream on Wikipedia (in case you don't know anything about it, considering the main website is down and the original poster didn't say much of anything about the short itself)
Blender on Wikipedia
Seriously, though, considering how much has been happening with this project, and what a significant milestone it is for those who use OSS and/or CC, I find it almost sad that this is the first story on Slashdot in almost exactly a year. And that it took Slashdot editors well over a day since the first story submissions (some with links directly to the torrents to avoid killing the Elephants Dream homepage immediately) to get this up. Maybe I'm biased (I pre-ordered the DVD 9 months ago), but I just think that stories about people doing amazing things within and beyond the community deserves precedence over the latest reports about what the PS3 might cost. Not to anger anyone, just to toss that up for discussion.
It's been on YouTube since before it was officially released on the web...
You only drink cokes at lunch?
Seriously, though, there are many good reasons for having this. One reply already touched on some, but here are some more.
Some people have to work through lunch. Many jobs with salaries simply say you have to have such and such done by such and such time. If something happens and time is running short, you often have to stay over lunch (or after-hours) to finish it. Having free coke (and a freakin' nice kitchen...) allows (and possibly) encourages employees to stay the extra time and put in the extra work by making it a (as much as possible) pleasant experience. You don't have to run out and grab something, you don't have to order in crap fast-food, you can have something right there. Same with late-nights, where restaurants might even be closed.
Some people need a break every now and then. Sometimes, I can work for 8 hours straight and never move, because I'm "in the zone". Sometimes, I need a break, just like 5 minutes, every now and then. With this, I could take a break from the serious work without getting so far away that I get distracted. And I don't have to pay for that break which, frankly, is necessary for my productivity and really ought to be provided by the company if they want me to perform.
It all depends on what you like, and this allows Google to appeal to a wider range of people (and remember, they want good people, they want people who have to be appealed to, people who are in demand and could go anywhere they want, not just anyone who will come in and work). People can still go your route, leave, eat lunch, etc. But this makes it easier for the geeks around here who deem the outside world as "the big blue room".
True, but a lot of time the power comes from a different source. I remember hearing (and thus, this could be completely false, so take it as such) that some planes (i.e. some commercial airliners) use an engine mounted in the rear, under the tail, to provide all the electical needs. Thus, if something happened anywhere forward of the wings, the generator could still be providing power.
Actually, come to think of it, if there were any amount of power generation setup in the engine itself, you could take serious damage to any part of the fuselage and parts of the wings and, assuming the pilots were still alive and the plane was still flyable, you'd still be able to control it. Or, as another possibility, you could release the codes to the FAA (only) and, if the pilots died or were incapacitated, you could actually control the plane from the ground (I know you could do that with fly-by-wire, but in that case, there is still a central point on the plane that could be compromised, here someone would have to physically take over every actuator on the plane).
It was quite common in that time for one theater to send a smart guy with a good memory to the opening night (or 2 or 3) of a rival company's new show, then report back ASAP and write it down so his own company could either begin performing it quick or steal the basics of the plot and put on a cookie-cutter show. I can't remember for sure, but I think one of Shakespeare's plays is only still around because a company did exactly that, and we only have the "pirated" work left...
If nothing else, Shakespeare was quite well known for taking existing/popular storylines, changing some names, putting them together occasionally in fun ways (Romeo and Juliet and that movie that just came out, or 12th Night which is something like 3 or 4 separate plot lines mixed together), and writing them in absolutely amazing language (which is what he's famous for, much like Disney is famous for "Snow White", which is an old story that they rehashed, but in a beautiful new way, and have since focused more on the rehashing than on the beautiful new way part...)
They interviewed this guy on the History Channel ~2 years ago. On a show about "The Da Vinci Code." Precisely because he knew the story behind it much better than the author...cause he wrote it.
And the one thing they asked him not relative to the story was whether he was happy with the Da Vinci Code, to which he replied "No." He was fairly pissed that, even though it basically retold his idea, Dan Brown and the publicity had all made it seem like his own idea, and that he never, ever even mentioned him in anything.
I haven't RTFA, but I'm betting the guy basically told Brown to start being truthful about who came up with the idea, and Brown hasn't, so he's suing, just like we were taught in High School would happen if we copied out of Cliff's Notes or from a scientific paper...
This one works better for English:
Capitalization is the difference between "I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.." and "I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.."
(And before people start bitching, yes, I did rip it off bash...here.)
http://www.ccc.de/biometrie/fingerabdruck_kopieren .xml?language=en
Can you say "home business"?
You don't. Seriously. We're not all that bad. Black sheep and all that, you know...
It doesn't really. I was just being anal. I wanted the SATA drives simply because I think they'll outlast the IDE drives (in how long manufacturers keep making them), and I plan on keeping my RAID for quite awhile. But yeah, it'll saturate the connection long before it saturates all the individual drives.
At first, it was just the radio. Nice background noise to do stuff to. Then they made wireless tv sets (like, battery powered...), which was ok. I could take them outside and take a quick break while studying. Then came wireless internet. No longer could I go somewhere and fight the urge to surf simply because I had nothing to surf with, so I began to grow some self-control. But wireless HDTV... Crap. Couldn't they at least wait until I've graduated?
Maybe they'll at least do something nice, like imbed it in some of those sunglasses with the built-in monitor so I can actually enjoy my lecture classes whilst only giving off the appearance of a hangover (which wouldn't be too far out of the norm...)
Just to point out...the XServe RAID uses Ultra ATA drives, *NOT* SATA drives. I spent the last month or two researching RAID arrays, and that was one of the most disappointing things I saw...
Xserve RAID features a breakthrough Apple-designed architecture that combines affordable, high-capacity Ultra ATA drive technology with an industry standard 2Gb Fibre Channel interface for reliable... from Apple.
Some kids can...
Just judging by the fact that you give your daughter movies like Kiki's Delivery Service, I'm going to assume that the previous 2 years have been filled with equally highly-intellectual (for the age...you know what I mean) stimulation. I'd say you probably didn't let her sit and watch hours of crap tv when she was too young to be able to do anything, whether or not she could tell the difference. Basically, I'm saying those 2 years have been filled with good parenting.
The problem that the parent is talking about is much worse. Those parents (the ones who didn't even tell their kids to put the trays away at McDonald's) aren't even giving them the basis to deicde what is/isn't crap, right, or whatever. As much as I hate the kids, the parents are what started them to the point they are at now. Of course, there's a good chance that they didn't know any better, either.
The problem is the cycle. Bad parents don't teach their babies well, the bad babies grow up to become bad kids (under more mis-direction from bad parents), the bad kids become bad adults who (often much to quickly) become bad parents, bringing along another generation just like them. Of course, good parents tend to cause the exact opposite cycle (good babies -> good kids -> good adults -> good parents -> good babies), and, of course, people ocasionally escape either cycle into the other. But it is up to people who can tell the chaff from the seeds to pressure the producers to cut the crap. People are going to buy the crap because they don't know any better, so from that point, it will always be there. But if you know what it is, tell people, call people on it, and get rid of as much as you can.
And keep your child safe. I see good things coming from her.
The problem is 2-fold:
1. If an animation studio is spending resources making the crappy sequel, then it's spending resources making a crappy sequel. If they make a good sequel, whatever, they're making a good movie. But if they're spending *any* resource on making a crappy movie, then that's a resource they don't have to spend on a good movie. Also, especially in the case of animation, it screws up the flow of talent. Normally you have older, experienced animators taking a young animator as an assistant. The older animator does the creative work, the younger one fills in the in-betweens and learns a lot. When you start stretching to make that crappy sequel, you generally start pulling someone who would be an assistant and making them a full animator, short-changing their education and lowering the quality of every movie they produce in the future (and eventually they'll be moved to the high-quality department, which won't be quite so high-quality anymore).
2. Once you put a management into place that sees it as ok to produce the crappy knock-offs as a way to make a little extra dough on the side, you've put a management into place that sees itself as making money first and foremost, rather than making art (or, if not art, then great cinema). "Oh, we made a little extra money by making this crappy made-for-dvd movie. Well, to keep my job, I have to save/make us more money. I know, we can get rid of ______(fill in the blank) that I, as a number-crunching manager, don't see as important." I don't know if you saw it, but there's an exhibit at the MOMA of Pixar production art. It's made up of all the background work that went into making these films. Once you start teaching execs that they can make films without this background work, they start getting rid of it anywhere they can, because they've seen it work without it elsewhere... Truth is, even though Pixar makes computer animated films, less than half the artists (not half the employees, half the ARTISTS) ever actually work on the animation that goes into the final product. To an executive (like, say, Michael Eisner), that's half a company that isn't working on the final product (I mean, the guys doing the animating are artists, they can do what those other guys can...) and could, therefore, be reassigned (like to the paint division...WTF DISNEY?!?! DISNEY WALL PAINT??!?!?!?!?!!? WTF?!?!?!?!)
So yes, there are markets and reasons for the crappy movies, crappy sequels, etc. It's when a company that makes good movies gets forced by executives to start making the crappy movies that I (at least) have a problem, because that's the death-knell for anything truly good from that company. Yes, we should put our best minds on the high-quality stuff, and everyone else on the franchises, but more than that, we should keep those 2 groups so completely separated that they never, ever, ever have to deal with each other (or, more importantly, each other's executives). Sorry, I just had to rant. I grew up long-after the great days of Disney but right during the peak of Pixar, and, as a movie-goer and as an aspiring animator/filmmaker, I can't bear to see Pixar and it's films turn into what Disney has become, and part of that comes from people who are ok with the mediocrity it currently stands for. Luckily, with John Lasseter as creative head and Steve Jobs as eccentric ass-hole/perfectionist, along with Steve Iger (who seems pretty true to what Disney should be), I think we might be looking at a strengthened Pixar and maybe even a revitalized Disney. Or maybe I'm just delusionally optimistic...
In case you feel like getting the exact location. You know, to help aim your packets so you get a faster ping time...
Lake High School via google
I'm pretty sure we did something in middle school where we put a piece of raw liver in a cup of pepsi and it dissolved pretty quickly. Like I said, it was a long time ago and I have a bad memory, so I could be making that up, but I kinda think we did it and the liver dissolved. Anyway, it's not a fork, but it's closer to being something that coke/pepsi would come into contact with in your body. Actually, I think I'll go try it again, if I can.
As an added bonus, there's always the possibility that the lion would eat the evidence.
You mean...yourself?
As cool as ligers are, I really hope people get over them really quickly, simply because we are low enough on Tigers and Lions as it is.
Check out this article from National Geographic about them. I found the part where the drive-thru safari kept breeding ligers after 3 out of 24 they'd bred for show developed severe neurological problems.
I just have a problem with breeding animals specifically for profit. Often, it turns bad with the animals being abused or malnourished or worse. Please be careful what you wish for...
I don't know if anyone has mentioned this or not (/me is lazy), but if you liked this film, you might wanna also check out Winged Migration, by Jacques Perrin. It's good on details, and incredibly beautiful. If you suffer a bit from add (/me again), you'll like it cause it's split into regions of the world, so you can take it bit by bit, if you don't think you can stand 2 hours straight of birds flying...
Get a laptop with firewire and get something like Cinelerra or FCP, then just plug the camera into the laptop and use the direct capture in the software to record. You'll be able to record for as much disk space as you've got (use usb2 or firewire if you want to add an external drive for more space). That should work fine.