Oxymoron of the Day: Humble Steve Ballmer
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Bomb twitterer fined
A REBUKED Paul Chambers, the man who tweeted a bomb threat against Robin Hood airport when he thought he might miss a flight to Ireland, has been fined £1,000.
Chambers had pleaded not guilty to sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message over a public telecommunications network, which is odd considering he did threaten to blow the airport 'sky high' over a public communications network.
Many, including commenters on our original story, thought that Chambers' arrest was a bit of a joke, while others thought he was an idiot. The judge, it turns out, thought that his mistake merited a penalty and meted out the aforementioned £1,000.
The twittersphere has taken the decision as a blow against common sense, and many posters are threatening to blow things up in support of Chambers. We are no lawyers but we think that course of action would not be the wisest.
Chambers is still using Twitter, and after the judgement wrote, "I'd like to thank the CPS for their level-best efforts in f**king up the life of an ordinary citizen. I love Britain."
The trainee accountant added, "it's the criminal record. It has jeopardised my career. Punishment not befitting the 'crime'."
Us? We think he got off lightly. µ
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Why isn't this movie pulled from teh shelves, if a twitter can get a person arrested and fined then why can a full-length movie about destroying financial buildings allowed?
Anyone mentioning airport & bomb even in the same sentence is taking a chance at getting arrested...brb, my doorbell just rang and there are flashing lights outside...
I can only say he nicely summarized it in that response twit you quoted, he's completely right and britain (and the rest of the world really) is thoroughly fucked up and insane and hypocritical and riding on religious madness on top of it all, swell planet and wonderful people those politicians, so wonderful that no terrorist ever seems to target them, have you ever noticed that? Bit odd isn't it? Bit odd too how nobody in the media talks about that or the possible reason for that, mum's the word.
The internet isn't a public telecommunication network. They're trying to make it so currently to stop throttling with the lighter laws that such a classification imposes.
5 years ago, back when AOL IM was the king of messengers...
A friend of mine wanted money I owed him, and threatened my 'person' online to get it. I retaliated, and he edited the conversation to include blowing things up.
Then he black mailed me, saying he would take it to the police if I didn't pay. I refused.
Regardless, I was arrested and no one could figure out that an HTML conversation is easily editable. They tried to get me on liability because an online word is the written word. It's not, it's merely pixels that represent a letter ! (and easily editable)..
my fine was $5,000 USD though. A tad more then this guy's fine.
So, only people who were following his tweets read this, his ex-girlfriend told the coppers, they arrested him a WEEK after the tweet because they knew by reading it that it was a joke, and he's called an idiot?
FYI the telephone system is a public telecommunications network too, watch what you say to your mum.
I cant wait for someone to threaten to blow up Twitter.