CatBus

Antcufaalb covered this nicely at some point. If you had, say, a diff file that, when applied to the legal retail product, produced the fanedit product, could you distribute the diff file instead of the fanedit?

The answer is no. His example was John Cage’s 4’33", which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of dead silence. If you distribute a track that’s 2 minutes of dead silence, is that copyright infringement? Legally, it depends. If it was 2 minutes of your own silence, you’re good. If it was 2 minutes recorded from John Cage’s 4’33", then you’re not. Exact same files, bit-for-bit identical, but one is clear and one is not. The difference, legally, is that one was derived from copyrighted bits. Back to the original example, since the diff tool was created directly or indirectly from the copyrighted work, it too can be considered covered by the copyright.

My problem with this story is precisely that it was Franken’s decision to make in the first place.

Sexual harassment has been a serious problem within Congress since at least forever. And yet they don’t have any sort of procedure for dealing with it. Every single time it happens, everyone runs around and spends a couple weeks inventing their own “this is what we ought to do” procedures from scratch, and then they are immediately forgotten. The next time it happens (later that day), everyone runs around and spends a couple weeks inventing their own “this is what we ought to do” procedures from scratch. Because every time it happens it’s a one-of-a-kind-nothing-like-this-has-ever-happened-before scenario. Just like what we do every time there’s a massacre where someone who shouldn’t have any guns at all gets access to guns so dangerous that nobody actually needs them.

This is how people react to problems they don’t actually want to solve. Do people invent new legal arguments and distinctions every time someone shoplifts? No. We don’t want shoplifting, that’s why.

Admittedly there’s a difficulty with elected officials not being able to be fired, and the possibility of whatever administrative investigations/sanctions are constitutionally permitted being abused as a political device. But come on. There’s a proper response for the person who says their case is somehow special and unique and not warranting the same legal consequences as everyone else: tell it to the judge.

Frank your Majesty said:

As I understand it, even making the edit is violating the copyright. You cannot create a derivative work without permission of the copyright holder. However, making a fan-edit only for yourself would be considered fair-use. But fair-use only means that a copyright violation isn’t prosecuted, not that the violation is nullified.

So, in essence, creating the edit isn’t entirely legal, but also not really illegal. I could have worded that better.

I think fair use is best described as “a legal copyright violation”.

Frank your Majesty said:

The question was never wether fan-edits were legal. They are not. So any way of distributing fan-edits, no matter if paid or for free, is technically a copyright infringement.

Technicality–making a fan edit is legal, distributing it without a license from the copyright holder is not. Thus, the stipulation at OT.com that you own the fan-edit’s primary source material also kinda-sorta means that if we were all Harmys, we would all be able to simply make our own Despecialized Editions, and they would all look alike because we’re all converging on the same reference point. So there’s no way to prove which is the original and which is the copy, or if they’re all originals and just coincidentally identical. The Spartacus defense 😉

The community came up with a way to at least morally justify what they are doing.

That’s very true. The above point is just helpfully muddies the waters around simply having the fan-edit versus the act of distributing it. But of course making a fan edit involves breaking DRM, so you have to have been at least during this time in a country where that was legal for this purpose, in order to be truly in the clear as a fan-edit creator.

moviefreakedmind said:

Not to mention that a man defending himself against a woman would likely get him arrested.

I know a male victim of domestic violence who was terrified of defending himself and getting arrested. Maybe his was the exception, but when the cops in his case arrived, they were pretty good at reading the scene. His wife was arrested and they never even seemed to consider the possibility that she was the victim.

The downside of course is the lipservice post-arrest support. They handed him a domestic violence pamphlet and were off (not like they were trained to do more, but still). They did helpfully add that wherever the pamphlet said “woman”, he could substitute the word “man” and I’m sure that was a whole heap of help for him in that moment.

So far I seem to disagree with everyone, if that helps matters.

All input is appreciated. I’ll get lots of feedback and run lots of tests before I settle on something final. Just because I’m sold on something today doesn’t mean I’m beyond convincing. Noto has lots of advantages over Arial that I could still get even if I ditch SemiCondensed. I’d also suggest trying to look at the font not side-by-side with Arial, though – while it’s a great way to see all the differences, Arial is a pretty wide font, so it may make a narrow font seem even narrower in contrast. Instead of the little side-by-side images, click through to one of the larger images and let it be the only one you can see, wait a bit, then see if it still seems too condensed when it’s not right next to Arial.

EDIT: There are complicating factors with ditching SemiCondensed, though. I believe the standard-width Noto font has what I’d consider an inconsistency between the capital and lowercase letters – the capitals seem more condensed than the lowercase. It’s not a huge issue but I kinda don’t like it (I’ll also double-check, it may have been some other variant that had this issue, like just the Medium weight or some such thing). More definitely, regular Noto is sometimes even wider than Arial, especially once you start adding weight to it, and I’m fairly set in my opinion that Arial is too wide for the job. SemiCondensed doesn’t have either problem – everything is the same amount of condensed, and it’s narrower than Arial even at a higher weight. So if we’re staying with Noto at all, SemiCondensed has an inherent advantage there. Also the fact that the proportions are very similar to the burnt-in alien subtitles in Star Wars and Jedi gives it a certain stylistic/thematic advantage in my mind. So if I ditch SemiCondensed, it’ll probably be for a different font entirely, and that will take some doing.

Another option is to just stretch the fonts horizontally. However, that will have a distorting effect as at some point in the stretching, the vertical strokes will start to seem thicker than the horizontal strokes. I could also start with a wider font and condense it, which has the opposite problem (and possibly also the inconsistency problem). I don’t like to stretch fonts as a general rule, but small adjustments might be doable if there’s a worthwhile improvement – I actually already do this for very long subtitles lines that go outside the display’s title-safe area (which is an issue for a handful of Greek and Russian subs), but never condense more than around 5%.

Also in 2014, the “Person of the Year” was the people fighting Ebola. In 2005 is was “Good Samaritans” (humanitarian philanthropists). In 2002, whistleblowers. And that’s not including the times when they chose a generic such as “The Protester” (2011) or “The American Soldier” (2003) which was grammatically singular but still referring to multiple people. They have a plural “Person of the Year” pretty often.

Just following the pattern of the previous posts, here are the changes for the other example shots for Empire in the first post, for Spanish and 50% scaled Czech. Top is current, bottom is new.

I’ve asked Harmy to confirm the 50% scaled down subtitles still look right on his personal home theatre setup, because that’s honestly what they’re designed for.

I edited the SDH mockup above with a transparency level I prefer (slightly more opaque).

BobbyDigital said:

Are there Star Wars Despecialized T-shirts? I’d love to have one. Imagine a bunch of people all over the world walking around wearing Despecialized T-shirts, helping to spread the word of the original versions!

Not to toot my own horn, but there are preservation-themed hi-res images (see first post for examples) in Project Threepio designed pretty much with T-shirts in mind. They’re designed as famous album covers/Star Wars mashups. I’ve made a Despecialized T-shirt for myself and my oldest son. It would help if you were a Police fan and understand the Ghost in the Machine reference, though – otherwise it’s a bit abstruse.

NBC is reporting that it’s official: Schneiderman is Mueller’s Plan B for after the Saturday Night Massacre.

Not only will Flynn cooperate with the federal investigators, and testify in federal court if necessary, but he also agreed to cooperate with applicable state and local authorities, as well as testifying in state court cases if necessary.

The federal deals stipulate cooperation with state authorities. Should the federal investigation disappear entirely, the witnesses will need to either cooperate with the state authorities, or else the state authorities will charge the witness with every state charge the feds had threatened them/bargained with in the first place.

So Trump fires Mueller, Flynn is still over a barrel and still cooperates with Schneiderman, who seamlessly picks up where Mueller left off, since many (but not all) of the serious charges exist at a state level (money laundering, kidnapping, conspiracy, obstruction).

The idea being that firing Mueller accomplishes nothing except making Trump look really guilty, and might even pick up an extra obstruction charge in the very unlikely case the House or Senate decide get their own investigations out of neutral. IMO it’s still a matter of when, not if, he’s fired, though. Since when has Trump shied away from doing things that accomplish nothing except making him look really guilty?

That’s good to hear. And see? Three years later or whatever, I do listen 😉

Possessed said:

clashradio said:

JawsTDS said:

I did my scaling in VirtualDub paired with AviSynth, personally. But I’m sure there are other ways to do it.

I keep reading about Harmy’s version that used the 06 GOUT upscaled and was wondering what method? I’d like to upsale to the quality of Harmy and then re-sync the audio with one of my laserdiscs which has the 77 stereo track, then output to BD.

Silly question but why don’t you just use harmys? It should already be synced to whatever track you want to use. Hell it probably already has the track as an option.

Not only that, but Harmy’s versions are increasingly GOUT-free. ROTJ only has part of one scene from GOUT. If you want pure GOUT source, you probably want to look at Team Blu’s upscales – which you should be aware do not look as good as Harmy’s, given the source material.

Also, the 77 stereo Laserdisc track already on Harmy’s latest preservation is definitely better than what you’re trying to use. It’s from the only release of the 1977 stereo track in digital audio on Laserdisc (a Japanese pan & scan release, but the audio was great). It was then synced up to the GOUT and patched over wherever there were dropouts and warbles with the next-best analogue Laserdisc audio by some of our local audio luminaries with access to and experience with ridiculously expensive software. I don’t want to discourage the effort, if you’re just trying to learn how to do things and all, but it’s already been done, and really well.

Well, I’ve been messing with this so long I can’t tell if this is a nice compromise or if I split the proverbial baby. Oh well, here’s a mockup of the new SDH look, current on top, new on bottom:

There’s no doubt I like the new font. In fact, the more I see the new font, the crappier and more amateurish the Arial font looks IMO. Dang.

Something more than the normal contrast seems likely helpful for SDH. If you’re deaf and can’t read every single subtitle quickly and easily, that’s pretty bad, so I want to avoid that. You’ll see that in addition to the semitransparent block, there’s still a thin opaque black border around the text which is useful against very bright backgrounds. I think it’s an improvement. Does it meet high readability standards? Is it overkill? At least I’ve seen subtitles that look like this before, so I know I’m not the only one. I’m inclined to think it’s a little too transparent right now, but that may be only because I’ve been staring at it too long.

DVD downscales will have to use solid black, however, as DVD subtitles have 1-bit transparency.

EDIT: They’re clickable images now so you can see more detail. And yes, the new subtitles are technically dimmer than the originals in terms of RGB values – same as the Arabic example above. That shows how much letter thickness enters into perceived brightness.

Another helpful hint for the day: When one of the terms of the agreement that would bail you out of house arrest is to avoid contacting Russian intelligence agents, don’t run out and immediately make contact with Russian intelligence agents.

Knowing is half the battle.

Hint for the day: Never deny you’ve ever met someone who says you had a relationship with them after you’ve given them material that can be matched to their timeline and includes a handwritten personal message on it, with your signature. Bonus hint: if you do get caught not only preying on teen girls, but also bearing false witness about them, just Jesus yourself up, say something outrageously racist, and run for the Senate in Alabama and you’ll probably do fine.

The groundwork for the upcoming Saturday Night Massacre Reprise is already being laid.

Strangely, it involves Devin Nunes taking back his leadership role on this issue, which he said he was stepping back from about 326 scandals ago. Nunes, Nunes, now where else have I seen that name recently? Oh yeah.

Yeah, no conflicts or suspicious timing there at all.

So far, I haven’t tried Inkscape. Should ImageMagick+Pango hit a limit, I just may.

Another mockup of the plans for the new fonts, a little closer to the final product:

TOP: Current.
BOTTOM: New (in progress)

A couple things to notice here. The new font is definitely your more modern style of Arabic text, Arial had a very calligraphic appearance. Because that traditional font looked harder to read (IMO, but what do I know about reading Arabic?), I also made it bigger. The new subtitles will be more-or-less the same size for all languages, so some languages (particularly Arabic) will see noticeably smaller subs. English will stay about the same height as before, just a little narrower.

Also look at the color. Pure white subtitles can be blinding when letters are thick enough. If you really look at the subtitles in the top frame, they really seem to glow. In the bottom frame, I took the brightness down a touch. It’s still effectively white, just without that intensity of pure 0xFFFFFF. The new subtitles will actually be a little less bright across the board.

SilverWook said:

Live by the tweet, incriminate yourself by the tweet. Is he that dense he doesn’t think all these brain farts aren’t going to be used against him?

It depends. He can (effectively) fire Mueller any time he wants, the Senate and House leadership would do anything to avoid criticizing him, it’s pretty reasonable to think Putin’s got his back in future elections*, and he’s only two justices away from a completely neutered rubber-stamp Supreme Court. Certainly dense is one explanation for his behavior. Impunity is another – maybe he has no reason to feel so confident, but maybe he does.

Mobutu Sese Seko did several illegal things right out in the open for everyone to see, and I don’t believe he cared one bit if they would ever be used against him. In fact, doing them right out in the open was a signal to the public that he could truly do whatever he wanted without repercussions.

* TBH I think this is the weak link in the logic. I think Putin gets a lot more from extended chaos in the US than from owning any particular leaders. Putin wins whether Trump stands or falls, and popcorn costs a lot less than propaganda.

The headlines/media discussions seem to be about the first sentence in the Flynn story:

Flynn said he called a senior transition team official at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for guidance, before asking Kislyak to moderate Russia’s response, which Russia ultimately did.

But the second sentence is pretty intriguing too.

Then, he told the court, he called transition team members to tell them what had transpired.

Who could those transition team members have been? By use of the plural form, more than one of the following:

Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Jeff Sessions, K. T. McFarland, Gov. Mary Fallin, Sen. Tim Scott, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Rep. Tom Reed, Rep. Cynthia Lummis, Steve Bannon, Rep. Lou Barletta, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Rep. Chris Collins, Rep. Tom Marino, Rebekah Mercer, Steven Mnuchin, Rep. Devin Nunes, Reince Priebus, Anthony Scaramucci, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Rep. Sean Duffy, Rep. Trey Gowdy, Rep. Dennis Ross, Pastor Darrell C. Scott, Kiron Skinner

That’s a whole lot of people who might have knowledge of the event, Mr. Mueller. And a lot of people to try to successfully get their stories straight, too.

Warbler said:

CatBus said:

Warbler said:

As far as I know, this guy hasn’t killed anyone or committed any acts of violence. Until he breaks some law, he has as much right to be a nazi someone does to be a member of BLM. That is the way America works.

You can absolutely be fired for your political beliefs in America – that’s how America has worked every day since its inception. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, and whether we should change the way America works so that you can’t do this, is open for discussion.

Again, being a Nazi isn’t equivalent to being a member of BLM, in the same sense that being a cannibal is not equivalent to being a vegetarian.

The way America works is if you can be fired by being a Nazi, you can also be fired for being a member of BLM.

So the Nazi getting fired is a “Yay America!” moment now? I’m fine with that.

Warbler said:

As far as I know, this guy hasn’t killed anyone or committed any acts of violence. Until he breaks some law, he has as much right to be a nazi someone does to be a member of BLM. That is the way America works.

You can absolutely be fired for your political beliefs in America – that’s how America has worked every day since its inception. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, and whether we should change the way America works so that you can’t do this, is open for discussion.

Again, being a Nazi isn’t equivalent to being a member of BLM, in the same sense that being a cannibal is not equivalent to being a vegetarian.

Warbler said:

SilverWook said:

It’s arguable that this is self inflicted as the guy agreed to be interviewed. Being a closet Nazi isn’t a political position or an opinion, it’s being supportive of some of the most horrible crimes committed in human history.

I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of my boss firing me because he doesn’t like my beliefs of whatever group I belong to.

Nazism is just another belief system in the same sense that cannibalism is just another dietary regimen.

I’d fire someone for either. Even if I knew I’d get sued or fined or jailed for doing it. And libertarians and vegetarians would have nothing to fear from some sort of slippery slope analogy. It’s just not comparable.