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User: KhabaLox

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  1. Re:It's tinfoil time! on Fugitive Child Sex Abuser Caught By Face-Recognition Technology · · Score: 2

    Look for it yourself.

    By this, I assume you mean have a human police officer use biological eyes to scan streets and parking lots for a stolen car or it's license plate number. This is a very expensive and inefficient way to solve the problem.

    There are a lot of problems that are best solved by government entities. Like any business, the government should strive to solve these problems as efficiently as possible. The issue is that a lot of the process or technological improvements that we can put in place (like license plate scanners) reduce price so dramatically that the net can be cast much wider. Instead of looking just for cars that are involved in a kidnapping, we can look for cars that are involved in any crime. With this increased productivity comes the real risk of overreach on the part of government.

    Your proposed solution seems to be to not allow government to have access to these cost saving improvements. That's impractical, as well as a bad decision from a financial perspective. Rather, we should, as GPP points out, have rigid oversight mechanisms, checks and balances if you will, to insure that government doesn't overstep it's bounds.

  2. Re:And in other news on Uber Is Now Cheaper Than a New York City Taxi · · Score: 1

    On the flip side, taxi drivers have many more hours behind the wheel. I thinks it's fair to say that there are many factors which contribute to both raise and lower a taxi's risk of getting into an accident.

  3. Re:A firearm that depends on a battery? on "Smart" Gun Seller Gets the Wrong Kind of Online Attention · · Score: 1

    Point was that you should be training/practicing on a regular basis, as well as cleaning it and checking it to make sure it's in working condition.

  4. Re:A firearm that depends on a battery? on "Smart" Gun Seller Gets the Wrong Kind of Online Attention · · Score: 1

    Hmm. It sounded like you were recommending revolvers over automatics because they were more reliable when left unattended for long periods.

    My point was that the question of the battery is not too relevant, as it shouldn't be an issue if you are properly maintaining your gun.

  5. Re:A firearm that depends on a battery? on "Smart" Gun Seller Gets the Wrong Kind of Online Attention · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's why a revolver makes a better home defense gun than one with a clip and a slide and a safety. Those guns jam and misfire much more often when left there untouched for a year or more than the much more simple mechanism in a plain revolver.

    You probably shouldn't be using a gun for home protection if you're going to let it sit untouched for a year or more.

  6. Re:I Pay on Netflix Gets What It Pays For: Comcast Streaming Speeds Skyrocket · · Score: 1

    Is there an online (easy) guide on how to set this up? I notice that video streaming quality goes down during primetime. It's not just Netflix either. HBO Go was so bad that I resorted to downloading GoT via DirecTV VOD service and watching it from my DVR rather than stream through the Roku.

  7. Re:huh? on Netflix Gets What It Pays For: Comcast Streaming Speeds Skyrocket · · Score: 2

    > watch a few hours of commercials every week, and maybe a few hours of actual show.

    If you're ratio of commercial:content on basic cable is anywhere close to 1:1, then you're doing it wrong. Even if you don't use a DVR, the actual ratio on the vast majority of networks is 1:2, or about 18-20 minutes of ads and 40-42 minutes of show every hour.

    > Every single time I surf the menu and see something that looks appealing, and change the channel, it's right to 5 minutes of commercials.

    That's because you surf away from channel A during the commercials, so of course there are going to be commercials on the other channel. The breaks are all coordinated. It's the same with terrestrial radio. Occasionally there is a network that offsets it's programming by 5 minutes (I think TBS did this for a long time), but those usually don't last long, and revert to the standard of starting on the hour with breaks on the 10s.

  8. Re:Netfilx works on Why Netflix Is One of the Most Important Cloud Computing Companies · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's no small feat the transcoding automation they must have built to take the mezzanine files that they get delivered to them and create the packages of multi-bitrate, DRM-wrapped files that the consumer eventually sees. There are only a handful (maybe only 3) of companies that can do this on any type of scale.

  9. Re:Butthurt much? on Why Netflix Is One of the Most Important Cloud Computing Companies · · Score: 1

    > How easily people forget that AWS is Amazon's excess server capacity.

    Is this common knowledge? I've never heard this before. Do you have a source?

  10. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    Those are good points, but I would say that there can be just as much interpretation and "semantic" translation for a book, especially one heavy with dialogue. Outside of dialogue, metaphors and other "imagery" language is not easy to translate, and does not entail a simple word shift.

  11. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    The latter part of ACs comment didn't warrant a response. I took it to be rhetorical and obviously sarcastic.

  12. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    Well, it would be illegal for you to write a novel based closely on a film, yes.

  13. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    Hehe... thanks. They outsource their sub origination and conforming, so it's likely that one of their vendors did this to cut costs. Competition has been fierce in this sector over the last few years with the onset of services like Netflix in non-English territories.

  14. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    a lot,

    That's not a very substantive answer.

  15. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    People can't use the subtitles as a stand alone work:

    When I was in school, I read scripts of plays. Seems analogous to a script of a movie. I agree that there is definitely more value to having a visual performance as well as the script, but the script is not valueless, and I don't see why the creator/owner of that script should not have a copyright claim to it.

  16. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    Just because somebody does something for free doesn't mean it has no (or little) cost.

  17. Re:Really?!? on Orson Scott Card Pleads 'Tolerance' For Ender's Game Movie · · Score: 1

    I agree with your argument that a civil union that is equal under law to marriage is equal in it's application. However, the name does carry weight, and calling something that is equal in every respect by a different name marginalizes it.

    For example, suppose we called immigrants who have gained citizenship "Legal Immigrants," while calling people born in the country "citizens." Under law, we say that a "Legal Immigrant" is exactly the same as a "Citizen," but we just call them something else. This has the effect of stigmatizing the Legal Immigrant, and even if by law they are the same, many people will view them as different, which is a problem.

    Also, the clerical and legal challenges involved in updating the entirety of the legal code at Federal, State and Local levels would not be insignificant.

  18. Re:Derivative work on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    The FCC release new regulations regarding Closed Captioning last year. The rollout schedule is a bit confusing, but the basic gist is that any content that was broadcast over the air or cable/satellite with CCs must also have CCs when it is distributed over IP (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Instant, iTunes). I *think* that after 2015 or 2016, all content distributed over IP must have CCs.

  19. Re:Translation is a copyright owner's exclusive ri on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    Well, it's not "entirely fan-made." The person who made it based their translation on the dialogue of the movie.

  20. Re:Translation is a copyright owner's exclusive ri on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    I can invent a contrived language that maps the dialog of one movie directly into the dialog of another movie (at least if there are only two speakers).

    Perhaps true, but actually preposterous.

  21. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    maybe they got tipped off that netflix in nordic countries got caught from using fansubs

    Source? I would be very interested to learn more about this.

  22. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    Yes, but in many cases it is cheaper to buy an english only version of a movie than one with local subtitles. The MPAA want to preserve this charging of countries other than the US more money for the same crap.

    Are you saying that content owners are charging more per unit in the non-English territories? I'm not aware of that being the case (though I'm on the B2B end of the business, so I'm not intimately familiar with consumer prices), other than cases where there is a supply and demand difference.

    From the cost side, it does cost extra money to prepare content of international release (e.g. standards conversion, censorship editing, subtitling), but in the grand scheme of things, these costs are probably not material (i.e. less than $50k per title). When you start talking about dubbing, things get a lot more expensive.

    The costs can be prohibitive for smaller markets. If you have a language with only a few million speakers, your content has to have a much wider appeal before it makes sense to distribute to that territory. You'll see Avengers translated to Swedish, but you're not likely to see a small budget film like Fun Size, especially if it failed at the US box office.

  23. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 1

    everything they write is purely commentary on the movie, which just happens to be able to sync up with the actual video/audio. The fact that the studios eventually offer a similar product for sale is neither here nor there -- they have no copyright claim over the subtitles.

    How does transcribing dialogue from a movie, translating it, and publishing the result differ from translating a book and publishing the result?

  24. Re:Fuck 'em on Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite · · Score: 2

    contract with the fansubbers, and pay them for their work.

    The post production company I work for contracts with a vendor whose business model is to originate closed captions by crowd sourcing. Basically you get paid per minute of video you transcribe via their web portal.

    In fact, all of our subtitle translation work is done via contracting, so there is opportunity for fansubbers to get paid for their work.

  25. Re:WTF?!?!? on How To Promote Stage Comedy In a Geeky Way? · · Score: 1

    Fourthly,

    released a DVD

    A DVD? Really?