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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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

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

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.

That's not a very substantive answer.

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.