It occurs to me that modern policing in the west is more focused on the 'criminals' who advertise and document their own presence and activities. This makes it enormously easier for the police to make it look as if they are actually doing something (as opposed to just making work up and inventing entire crimes just for the purpose of theatre).

Any crime thats remotely hard to detect is virtually ignored in favour of the 'big ticket' items like 'hate speech'.

Its funny how western society likes to set itself up as a prime example of a tolerant, caring society and yet they keep trotting out the 'zero tolerance' line for practically everything that someone might find offensive.

Its ridiculous. Either its a tolerant society or it isn't. You can't have 'zero tolerance' for whatever its the latest fad to dislike and still be a tolerant society, it doesn't make sense.

You may as well say 'Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance' as to say 'The West is a caring, tolerant society', they equally confusing uses of the words...

It would be ok if the message said "Manifest file contains correctly formatted checksum - still need to verify."

That might also give you the hint that, if no message about "checksum verified correctly" appears later, probably no verification has been done.

I'm holding out for the 4-movie 16-hour extended-trilogy version of Farmer Giles of Ham and the first part of Leaf by Niggle: An Unwanted Journey.

That, or if I do watch Hobbit 3, I'll need some good pipeweed first.

Not if adjacent rows are being heavily, cyclicly read.

and reports against officers dropped by 87%

While most people on here are focusing on the police portion, the civilian portion is more damning. It shows the amount of crap police have to put up with by people who think they'll file a brutality report so they can not be held responsible for their actions.

I don't have the link, but some on here will remember the video of the woman who was in the back of a police car yelling and screaming for the police to stop hitting her without realizing a camera was recording the whole thing. When she claimed police brutality, the video was shown and the charges were thrown out.

While there is certainly some police abuse going on, there are much more claims by people of police abuse where none exists. Just like dashboard cameras, it works both ways so when people claim they weren't doing anything when they were shot, the camera will show them reaching for their gun (see the most recent shooting in Missouri though we don't have video of the incident).

Where I work (Google), telephone calls are all but dead and voicemail is completely dead. Pretty much everyone lists their personal mobile number as their phone number in the directory (or a Google Voice number that forwards to their mobile), because getting business calls at home or whatever is a non-issue because no one makes phone calls for business. Communication is via e-mail (for formal communications, messages that don't seek quick response, or group distribution), instant message (for short, timely discussions) or face to face/video conference (Google Hangout). Some groups, especially SREs (Site Reliability Engineers -- sysadmins, more or less), also use IRC, mostly because it stays up when other stuff breaks.

Further, the etiquette is that nearly all non-email communication starts with an instant message. This is true even if the other party is sitting right next to you, unless you can tell by looking that they aren't deeply focused on something. There are only two times a phone is used, one rare, the other extraordinarily rare, and in neither case would voicemail even be useful.

The rare case is for a (generally informal) meeting when one party for some reason doesn't have access to Hangouts. The extraordinarily rare case is when something is on fire and someone's attention is needed at 2 AM Sunday morning. The latter has never happened to me, though I have called a couple of colleagues. Even then, a phone call is an unusual step; normally you wake people up via the pager system (whose messages are delivered via various means, sometimes including automated phone calls) and proceed to communicate via IM or VC.

It's not just Google, either. Prior to Google I worked at IBM which where communication similarly revolved primarily around IM and e-mail, though meetings were primarily via teleconference, not video conference.

From what I can see, voice is generally declining, and voicemail is leading the charge.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it does....

It's actually a tragedy and missed opportunity, that Jackson has so little talent as a director, and so little discipline in telling a story.

I was appalled by how little he regarded the audience - and proportionally insulted his actors - in "Desolation". Huge musical cues 'instructing' the audience of the drama or character development that was supposed to be on screen, at all times. This seems to be because he cannot elicit real performances from his actors.

I might muse that this is because to Jackson, they are not actors - but merely the armatures on which he templates his green-screen composited glory... But to assume that this is the root of his deficiency, rather than another symptom of of his artlessness, would be to succumb to curmudgeonly urges.

The lesson to be taken away is that Jackson should be designing games, not ruining popular cinema.

It appears that - despite the contempt it provoked in my teenaged self - Rankin and Bass actually produced the best ever adaptation of Tolkien, with the greatest respect and truth towards the source text in feel and substance. Perhaps, when we have destroyed the concept of copyright as a tool of corporate greed, another - more thoughtful - filmmaker might use this as a point of departure for a loving and well-crafted "Hobbit".

There's too much retcon in Trek to suggest that the canon might be immutable.

Not gonna lie .. had to look up retcon.

Vulcan was destroyed by time traveling angry Romulans. There is no 'ret' to 'con' ... they wiped out the future history of pretty much everything about James T Kirk, Spock, The Federation ,,, the canon was burned so completely they have a lot of room to do anything they want.

Like, for example, the theme song to Enterprise

LOL, I didn't see Enterprise until it was in syndication ... and once you got over 'nipple Vulcan' and up to at least the middle of season two I actually started to like it. But, yeah. It wasn't for everybody, and took a while to find its footing.

They made exciting movies, but I don't want to watch them again, because they had no substance.

Well, I won't argue the point. It was escapism and action since I'm a fan of both. However, the market wants that, and it sells tickets ... because most people have no substance.

But, sooner or later, we can hope that someone will remember they're making a Star Trek, and that Roddenberry had some really great vision, and to try to stick with that.

In the meantime, I will accept a romantic relationship between Spock and Uhura as a placeholder, and some really good action sequences.

Yes, I want Trek to tackle big issues. But, dammit, I want action sequences, and sex with green chicks. And the first two have done that.

The third is now so completely freed from specific expectation that they (hopefully) will make an awesome movie which satisfies a lot of people. If they don't ... well, then Star Trek has pretty much turned into Star Wars, and will be driven into the ground in the same way.

So, I liked the first two of the reboot, and they're still in the process of establishing the "new" Trek universe. But look at where that took Marvel with both the Avengers and X-Men. They have all the room they need to define it and run with it. We have Earth, and we have Klingons in a now very explicitly alternate universe ... and that's a *lot*.

If you put it in the hands of people who are fans, they'll make good movies if you let them. So while I'm afraid Star Trek movies will become simply action/space opera ... I really hope they do something more. But, if the best they do is some action films ... well, I might buy them in the sale bin of DVDs.

I guess I disagree that they are "acting like assholes" by regulating resources on their property to benefit their business.

Except communications spectrum and devices aren't their fucking resources to regulate or control.

And the FCC has long said you can't block someone else's signal, especially just to boost your own business.

In your car analogy ... this isn't Ford's stall. Marriott do not own the airwaves. Marriott has to use it under the same damned terms as the rest of us.

And those terms explicitly don't allow what they're trying to do.

Dude, you're far too wedded to the canon you've built up as something immutable.

As a long time Trek geek ... I like the fact that they basically burned the canon and made it so they can do anything they want to.

Because now they can focus on making (hopefully good) movies without every nerd in the world going apeshit and whining that something isn't consistent with the original series or some bit of fanboi Trek porn they read.

Don't forget Sulo leaning back in his chair as he uses one hand to hit the control buttons.

Wow, if you're gonna be a grammar nazi, you should at least endeavor to fact check your own crap.

Because you're completely wrong.

Until relatively recently, these re-directions would adversely affect a debian/ubuntu linux system update procedure. A cron job would apt-get update and pull in new index files. Since the transport was not encrypted, the index files would not be what the apt system were expecting. It would store the content of the redirected web page instead of the proper index files into a cache and then apt-get update would be forever broken until you manually figured out how to delete the corrupted files someplace in /var/*/apt

ISP's and WiFi Access points that do this redirection are the reason why HTTPS everywhere is a good idea.