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Comment Re:No soul (Score 2) 351

Peter Jackson ripped the soul out of Lord of the Rings when he neglected to film The Scouring of the Shire.

But he did film it, kinda. He just didn't put it into the story. It shows up a little bit in the Mirror of Galadriel sequence.

One could argue that that was the correct way to play it, too. I know people who claim to have "walked out of the theater after the first ending and skipped all of the other ones," as it is.

Comment Re:It looks like a friggin video game. (Score 1) 351

You can turn that off, I havent seen a tv yet that didnt have interpolation as an option the user could turn off. Sometimes they give it some gimmicky name though

Yeah, on my set there are two settings that combine to create the effect and I have each set to "most of the way off" because that's the way I like it.

Comment Re:Why dashcams? (Score 2) 93

Cams are as much to stop citizen abuse as they are to stop police abuse.
In fact, will be born out after a couple years of vest cam usage.

Also, you may want to rethink your position. When the gunny drives by and peppers your house with automatic weapons fire just because your un-redacted face and voice appeared in a police video you will (too late) realize that you have surrendered the streets to the thugs.

Comment Re:Why dashcams? (Score 2, Informative) 93

Exactly,

The conspiracy theorists have to dial it down a bit.

The redacting is for faces that must be protected by law, such as children, and witnesses.
Hardly make sense for the police to release photos of witnesses so that the thugs homeboys can put a hit on them.

The redaction is Like the redaction on street view, blurring of faces.
There are also places where the police have no right to film, such as in homes.

Comment Re:No problem. (Score 1) 137

The other thing they fail to understand is that causality is patently obvious in the vast majority of cases where there are no confounding factors.

Probably the social sciences are most in need tests like this, as they are always trying to pin some outcome on some input in a bubbling cauldron of alternatives. But of course, the cauldron is full of confounding factors.

Comment Re: ... Everything? (Score 2) 528

Some parts of this can be done even cheaper.

Don't hook up enough external bandwidth such that someone can copy 100 terabytes of data without anyone noticing. Even at gigibit Ethernet speed that takes an incredibly long time to copy that much data.

Sure, they have to move high-def movie clips, maybe even entire movies around between their various sites. But anyone stealing that much data would have to be INSIDE their network with a suitcase full of terabyte drives, or outside their network with a couple months to invest in the project.

Comment Re: DMCA (Defamation) (Score 1) 245

Hey, if I write an email, I own the copyright, correct?

The encryption is a method I use to keep others from reading said copyrited work, correct?

This means that removing the encryption is in effect, circumventing a copywrite protection, and illegal under the DMCA.

No, you misunderstand what is going on here.

StartTLS is something that happens when your email client connects to the mail server with an insecure protocol on a non-ssl port, and then asks the server to switch to a secure connection. Its your clue that you are doing it wrong,

Connect on a secure port over ssl (usually 465) instead of 25. Set your client up right to use a secure port and they can't deny a secure connection. (Unless they don't support security at all, in which case run away from them like your hair is on fire).

WITHOUT doing it right, your email was never secure, never encrypted, so no DMCA violation.

They aren't denying you a secure connection, they are just putting the burden on you to do it properly instead of having their servers to the extra work of switching an insecure connection to a secure one, which usually entails a whole bunch of handshake-security dance.

Set your client up the right way on the right ports.

Comment Re:Pretty cool (Score 1) 267

The Jedi were cool and popular and mysterious. Once you got to see them in council meetings... well, takes a bit of the mystique out of it.

What kid wouldn't dream of being a Jedi once he finds out they use their incredible powers and wisdom to go around the Galaxy sorting out tax disputes?

Comment Re:Jack of all trades (Score 1) 129

Masters of only one (Let Kindle Slide). Online Shopping. I simply do not understand all of these devices that Amazon is trying to pimp.

I think you do. You just don't realize that these are tools for online shopping. Buy a Kindle, get all of your ebooks from Amazon because it doesn't support Epub, which is what all of the other online bookstores are using. Buy a Fire or a Kindle HD, get your apps and your movies and your music from Amazon because even though it's Android, it doesn't come with Google Play. Amazon sells a lot of real-world things, but if people are buying digital things now then Amazon wants to make sure it sells a lot of those, too.

Comment Re:Algorithms Can Be Patented (Score 5, Insightful) 164

If you don't know how it works, it's only because you haven't bothered to look it up.

Not exactly. You only know how PageRank worked at the very beginning, when it was patented. That is far from "the" Google search algorithm these days. It remains one of the most important ones, and possibly one that's fundamental to how Google's whole search engine works, but they have many, many other algorithms that govern search results today. Most of these are not patented, mainly for the reasons mentioned earlier: If Google patented them, it would have to disclose how they work. Instead, they maintain them as trade secrets, like the formula for Coca-Cola.

In Disney's case, I think it's not really interested in competing with Google. It would much rather Google, Bing, etc look at its patent, say "OK, I can do that if it will get Disney off my back" and implement the patent for little-to-no royalty fees.

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