Yep, anonymous coward is very appropriate for that comment.

Also, I think you protest too much. Commenting on the attractiveness of his nose is also a big hint on your sexuality.

New Spock is excellent, even better than Nimoy (there I said it).
New Kirk is meh, but who was ever going to fill Shatner's shoes? Cumberbatch and other supporting actors are great.

Plotholes aside, the stories are decent enough and build on the old movies. Dialogue is pretty good too for a scifi.
FX are brilliant of course, if you like lens flare.

So what's wrong with them?

In a word, pacing. Something twist happens and boom you're in another action scene. There's no time to digest the implications or even WTF just happened.

Pacing was so bad that I could barely even remember the plots and had forgotten about the films the next day. Why is this? The plots weren't bad as I've already said. The reason is the same reason we don't remember dreams easily. The transition from one state of mind to the another is so extreme that memories don't carry over and don't get recorded properly.

[BTW, this is what hypnotists use to create amnesia and/or confusion. Talking from 16 years experience here.]

JJ Abrams -- you screwed up the editing. Please let someone else edit Star Wars.

It could even be trying to fit too much in. What happens in Star Trek tOMP? A monster ship approaches Earth, takes over weird chick & makes her weirder and eventually they find out the ship is actually you-know-what [no spoilers here]. But that's all that happens. You don't actually need more of a story than that. If you do, it's because your screenplay or your dialogue sucks.

In addition to Alef's comment

That Guardian article where he teaches everyone, including terrorists, how to avoid the NSA, undoing 10 years of infiltration work:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance

Also, he's been helping anti-surveillance campaigns including NO2ID for years.

You should read it some time. Its only power is to make the Govt pay basic compensation WHILST your head is still being stomped on.

Oh and the Govt can simply pass a new law to ignore it and any rulings under it. Heck, they don't even need to debate it in Parliament thanks to the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act.

Welcome to Police State Britain.

I like the way it's called stealing when Snowden does it but not stealing when the NSA does it.

AC is spot on.

I'd like to hear more opinions on this.

It seems Lavabit didn't even email their own customers to tell them they shut down. This would be an astonishingly bad bit of customer service -- unless of course it was protecting a customer (let's call him Edward).

Is it possible that the FISA warrant was issued against the company and not the owners, and so the only legal way to get out of it was to dissolve the company and destroy the servers?

Good post btw.

Britain is still a lovely, free country but could be a full-blown police state within a couple of years thanks to the decimation of our constitution by Blair & Brown.

With the Liberal Democrats having made very little progress in restoring our rights and checks & balances on govt, I fear for the future.

Also, the UK is almost impossible to migrate to now, unless you're an EU citizen.

I've never seen the Govt do anything this effective before. Have you?

Spot on. Blair deliberately underfunded ICO as it was a bit of an obstacle in his attempted creation of a New World Order.

The current lot came in with a 12pc deficit to narrow and no great desire to be held to account either.

I'd mod you up if I hadn't already contributed to this topic.

You seem to have avoided declaring that GCHQ's interests and British interests are the same thing. Given the 13+ year drive to impose Stasi 2.0, I'd have to agree. Though, it should be pointed it, there is an ongoing internal disagreement in MI5 over this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower

Index-linked bonds, preferably German if they do them.

I think the greater point is that money (and the risk attached to where it is invested) has to be managed.

The UK govt was stupid enough to bail out private investors in Icelandic banks. Likewise, it saved 3 banks who are still too broke to lend any money and GDP is still flat. If it had just let investors take the losses, we'd be a lot better off.

Market booms and crashes are driven by expectations of rapid changes in price. No-one expects major currencies to do that, except on the downside, when they start printing money.

Bitcoin has no such limitations. It's price acts more like a commodity than a currency. Indeed, it has the potential to be more volatile than a commodity.