[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cnwms/mods_removed_th...
[2] http://tunein.com/radio/Boston-Police-Fire-and-EMS-Scanner-s...
EDIT: I find that it is much easier to listen to the police scanner than a news station, because the SNR ratio is much higher. When there is a break in the action, news reporters fill the air time with speculation or repeat the same old information. On the police scanner, when they have no new information, they are silent.
Having said that, I still find it cool to hear an officer ask the dispatcher (on the radio) to tell an overhead helicopter to point a searchlight at a certain location, and moments later see on television a helicopter flying overhead with its searchlight on.
Unfortunately, in some jurisdictions that's hard or impossible to do, as they use digital systems with trunking that made it hard to monitor with a scanner and/or use encryption.
Need I say that I think encrypting this stuff is a bad idea? Even if it may, on rare occasion, benefit a "bad guy" to listen to the police channels, weighed against the need for government transparency, I think the need to keep the comms open for everybody wins out.
But I'd rather try to interpret that myself than get it filtered through the traditional media in quasi-real time (vs. the much more reliable reporting that happens, say, a couple days after everything is over).
Anyone know a working live scanner feed?
UPDATE: "MA State PD and Boston Police have requested via social media to not post search locations for the Boston bombing suspects - the Boston PD feed is temporarily offline due to this request.", http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/mid/13/?rl=rr
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1co395/live_updates_of...
buro9 : This is just a complete conjecture. I do not know Reddit's internal hardware infrastructure. I just know that real-time police radio transcription is the best news source, bar none. And it's getting hammered.
Are those are by-products of the threaded display? As a flat display of a thread would just result in new pages at the end, all of which would be incredibly cacheable.
During the Boston Marathon bombing, there were, if I remember correctly, over a dozen threads that continued the original conversation, simply because each of the previous threads kept getting hammered by people posting comments.
I am mostly wondering whether it's the threaded nature of a thread on Reddit that makes this a difficult problem, or whether this is reflective of some limitation in the underlying datastore or something.
It's easier to cache and serve a fixed piece of content than to constantly insert and re-compress it (which kills cached versions too)
live video feed based on shots outside watertown house http://livewire.wcvb.com/Event/117th_Running_of_Boston_Marat...
ADDED: There's no particularly kind and gentle way to deal with someone throwing explosives at you....
If someone is advancing on you, a known explosives user (during the chase) who's from a region where the use of "suicide vests" is common, and refuses to stop, you without hesitation shoot to stop. And at as far a distance as you can.
The encounter could have been more violent on the part of the deceased, or since he killed a fellow officer it could have been an execution as all too often happens like recently in California. But the event was probably more confused than any of what I'd said here might imply.
All I can say that we know by inference is that the event was confused enough, and/or there were few enough police there, that his brother escaped---actually, I don't think we know that, the brother might have been let off before the stop---and has obviously successfully gone to ground. Likely into an apartment or home, and they're going to have to search house to house, apartment to apartment, could take quite a while assuming he is inside the 25 block? cordoned off area in Watertown. Not too familiar with that suburb, but I lived in Cambridge and surrounding mostly urban suburbs for a dozen years, it's likely a densely populated area. Even with a maximum effort by all it could drag on for more than a day, or he could get flushed out a minute from now.
ADDED: while all current accounts from the media are highly suspect, this: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/04/19/report-boston-marathon... would fit in what else we've heard or can discern:
"According to WBZ-TV’s Joe Shortsleeve, MBTA transit police intercepted the Mercedes in Cambridge and followed it.
"A source told Shortsleeve the brothers lost control of the car and crashed it. A gunfight with police erupted and an MBTA police officer was shot and seriously wounded.
"Miller reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev threw a bomb at police as he approached them and that’s when officers shot and killed him.
"Shortsleeve’s source said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev then jumped back in the Mercedes, drove over his brother’s body, threw bombs at police and crashed again. He ran off, firing a weapon and that sparked the massive manhunt in Watertown."