How does that work? The only thing I can imagine worse than not supporting multitasking is supporting it, and then randomly killing background tasks when you run out of resources. I'm sure it doesn't work quite like that, but I can't find more info about exactly how android supports multitasking.
Maybe some kind of Hibernate system but on an app by app basis? So I've got 10 processes open and I start up and 11th. Memory's running low so the OS checks and sees that process numbers 3, 5, and 7 have been inactive the longest. So it "hibernates" them keeping some kind of low-memory placeholder active so the user can switch back/reactivate the app. Not saying it wouldn't be complicated to do, but it might be doable.
Um, actually, I said that my co-workers were the ones who did the rewiring and stuff. They weren't denigrating each other over it and I definitely wasn't looking down on them for being able to do this stuff. I'm just clueless when it comes to home repairs. I guess how I feel towards home repairs is how many people feel towards computers. I've tried to learn some, but haven't learned anything advanced. In computer user terms (to continue with the analogy): I'm the guy who knows how to boot up his computer and browse the web, but doesn't know how to tweak every setting while my co-workers are expert Linux programmers.
I don't know about that. My co-workers (and I wouldn't call these folks nerds even though they do work in MIS) can do home repairs (including electrical) themselves. They chop down their own trees. My boss even raises chickens and sells the eggs. That's definitely something that requires labor.
Of course, while they're talking about how they added an extension to their home and ran a new heating extension to keep it from freezing during the winter, I'm looking at them with a blank stare. Give me a computer and I can take it apart and put it back together five times, no problem. Give me some tools and a project to complete and I won't be so successful. I've gotten better in the years since my wife and I purchased our house (recently replaced a bad thermocouple in my furnace), but there are still basic things that elude my expertise.
This reminds me of a recent story about a man on a British Airways flight who was asked to move seats. The reason? He was in the aisle seat and his pregnant wife was in the window seat. Between them was a child they weren't related to. British Airways policy assumes that all men are sexual predators, apparently, and thus men can't be seated next to children they aren't related to. No such problem with women. I guess all women are caring motherly types while all men are sex-starved perverts.
Anyway, he objected to moving and was yelled at and threatened by the flight attendant. Eventually, he moved, but he's now suing the airline.
Please don't lump all religions into the same group based on the actions of Scientology (not that I'd call that a religion, mind you). Not everyone who follows a religion is interested in ramming their beliefs down other people's throats. I'm Jewish and honestly don't feel that the world needs to be converted to Judaism or that everyone needs to give up bacon or anything like that. I'm happy practicing my religion in peace and teaching it to my children. If you ask me about my religion, I'd be glad to talk about it, but not only in "I believe this" informational terms, not in "You should do this or you're going to hell" terms.
The idiots who go around trying to convert everyone to their religion, who want public policy to be based completely on (their) religious beliefs or who try to displace science in the classroom for everyone so that their particular religious values aren't impinged give the rest of us (who just want to practice our religion in peace) a bad name.
Should the Sun suddenly become a black hole, we won't get sucked in as most lay people think.
I think "sucked in" is the big problem with how lay people view black holes. They think of them as cosmic vacuum cleaners actively sucking things into them never to be seen again. When they hear "LHC could create a microscopic black hole" they think the microscopic black hole will form, turn it's "vacuum cleaner" on and start sucking up everything on Earth.
They don't understand that they are just "ordinary" cosmic objects, albeit with a point of no return (the event horizon). A microscopic black hole might pull a tiny bit of matter in (through ordinary gravity), but there's a lot of room between particles and particles don't have much mass by themselves. Even if the black hole didn't evaporate (which lay people don't know they can do), it would likely be pulled to the center of the Earth virtually unnoticed. Once there, it wouldn't gobble up the Earth in years, decades or even centuries. It would just sit there with all the other particles, occasionally pulling one in when they collided (or got too close) by chance. I haven't done the calculations, but I'm guessing we'd have more to fear from the Sun going supernova in a few billion years than from a microscopic (non-evaporating) black hole in the Earth's core.
If two cars hit head on, does it matter if they are both doing 30mph or if one is stopped and the other is doing 60mph? Collisions of this nature happen all the time thank to cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere at energies much higher than Large Hadron could ever hope to achieve. The fact that the cosmic ray particle is the one moving super-fast while the atmosphere particle isn't doesn't really matter much.
Actually, I think the comparison is valid. Corporations are people (or at least according to SCOTUS). A corporation's operating costs, the "recurring expenses related to the operation of a business", would be things like electricity, equipment, labor, etc. An individual's operating costs equivalent would be recurring expenses related to the operation of a household. If I don't buy food, pay my mortgage, buy clothing, etc, my "operations" grind to a halt same as if a corporation decided to stop paying their workers, skip out on the electric bill and never order another piece of factory equipment again.
So if the "people" called Corporations are allowed to deduct their operating costs before paying taxes, why aren't the people called Individuals allowed to do the same? Of course the answer is two-fold. First of all, a middle-class individual's taxable income would likely drop by 90%. This would mean a huge loss in tax revenue. For all their talk of cutting taxes, politicians don't *really* want significant tax cuts because they know this would mean spending cuts (which, in turn, would be protested and possibly mean no re-election). Secondly, individuals might contribute to a politician's campaign fund, but most times corporations are the ones who contribute more. If you were a politician facing re-election, would you listen to the person donating $10 to your campaign or the "person" (read: Corporation) donating $10,000?
There are two trump cards. "Think of the Children!" and "Terrorism!" That's why I found the recent debate over airport security scanners being able to generate "naked" images of children so funny. It pitted the "Think of the Children!" group against the "Terrorism!" group.
I seem to recall reading an article a few years back about a pig that scientists believed was in the middle of evolving just those traits. As someone who keeps kosher, I'm looking forward to eating my kosher bacon.... in a few million years.
I think your logic is flawed somewhere. Let's have a small scale bittorrent network with 10 people Alice, Bobby, Carol, Doug, Edward, Frank, Greg, Harry, Isabella and Jason. Alice buys a new CD, rips it to MP3 and shares one song out. Bobby and Carol decide they want it so they download it. That's 2 distributions for Alice. Now Doug decides he wants it too and downloads it. He gets parts of it from Alice, Bobby and Carol. That's 3 for Alice, 1 each for Bobby and Carol. And so on. You can see how Alice's total might add up quickly. Yes, some of those "distributions" would be sections and not the whole file, but the point is still that she would have distributed it.
The point I would make is rather that the number of distributions is unknown. Maybe (due to some network quirk) after the first two downloads, Doug got his chunks from Bobby and Carol and everyone else's bittorrent clients ignored Alice's copy. She would have been on the hook for 2 downloads, not 9. Since the RIAA wouldn't be able to prove exactly how many copies she distributed, Alice (assuming she's found guilty in a court of law) should pay for one distribution at 10x market value of the item. (The 10x is to add a deterrent factor.) Since Alice distributed one song (market value: $0.99), she would be charged $9.90. If John Doe was convicted of sharing out 1,000 songs, he would be charged $9,900. Not spare change, but nothing that would permanently bankrupt him either. Of course, this would go out the window if there was profit-seeking involved. (e.g. if Bobby took those songs, burned then to CD and sold them on the street corner for $2 each.)
In fact, didn't we all criticize Bush for doing this? He'd sign a law into effect but just before signing it, he'd write a note saying that he won't enforce it. (So called "Signing Statements.") In fact, here's a Village Voice article criticizing him for this practice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-08-08/news/bush-s-invisible-ink/
I'm not saying I completely approve of Obama's DOJ supporting the RIAA, but I don't think the situation is as black-and-white as some people make it out to be.
Except then that cop doesn't get his $1 million. A better approach for the cop is to act tough saying he's going to arrest the guy in an attempt to get more lobbying/bribe money out of him. He doesn't have to actually arrest the guy, just make the guy think that the choice is 1) give more money or 2) be arrested.
My point was that copyright holders keep saying they need these long copyrights as incentives to create new works. However, how much incentive does a 50 year old work give you if it brings in only pocket change every year? If a study proved that a vast majority of works don't bring in a significant amount of money after X years, then copyright holders' main argument for long copyrights would evaporate. For that very reason, I don't expect that they would cooperate with such a study.
As a side note, if such a study were performed, I wonder whether Hollywood Accounting would work against the movie studios in the study. How much did Lord of the Rings make? Oh, it operated at a loss (thanks to Hollywood Accounting) and continues to do so with no signs of "profit" on the horizon? Well, then, I guess you won't mind simply writing off the loss and releasing it to the Public Domain?
Ah, but what if he returns from the grave to write another Sherlock Holmes book (and consume some braaaaiiiinnnns)? We need to protect the copyrights of zombie authors!
I'd like to see a study done on books, music, movies, etc that graphs out how much money they make each year after their release. My guess is that 95% (if not more) of the money is made in the first 5 years. After that, money made on most works likely plummets each year until it brings in a bare trickle of funds. Yes, some works (e.g. the original Star Wars movies) continue to make tons of cash decades after they were released, but I'm betting those are few and far between. We definitely shouldn't shape copyright law to protect 2% of works which are still making money thus locking the 98% of works which aren't from going into the public domain.
It's not so much needed a better system of propulsion. It's that, as you approach light speed, your mass increases. This means you need more fuel to push yourself faster. This more fuel increases your mass, which is still increasing exponentially as you get closer and closer to light speed.
The exact formula is:
M = MassAtRest / sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2)
At 0.5c, your mass would be about 1.3 times your rest mass. At 0.9c, you'd be nearing 2.3 times rest mass. At 0.99c, you'd have passed 7 times rest mass. At 0.999c, 22 times rest mass. And so on.
Now what happens if you go faster than light? (Supposing you somehow "skip over" the light speed barrier.) You get into imaginary numbers. For example, at 2c your mass would be MassAtRest / sqrt(-3). What does that imaginary number translate into? There are many theories, but no firm answers. The equations for velocity and time are similar so some theorize that it means going back in time. Others say the imaginary numbers mean it just can't be done. Still others think that this just shows where relativity breaks down and a new set of equations is called for.
Many writers make no money from their books, but many do. Also, unlike with musicians and the recording industry, writers keep the copyrights to their books when they publish. If a writer decides to leave his publisher and move to another one, he doesn't need to leave behind all of his previously published works. His former publishing company doesn't own those (though they may have the rights to complete the current printing run).
As for their price, books are incredibly cheap. You can walk into a bookstore with emerge with a pile of new books to read for not much money. Of course, price depends on what type of book, paperback vs hard cover, etc, but the price of a book is far from prohibitively expensive. Also, books have no real restrictions on them. You can photocopy a page, sell it, loan it to a friend or even read it aloud to a group of people without paying anything extra.
Yes, e-Books might have restrictions and might not be as cheap as their paper-based cousins, but the whole e-Book market is in its infancy. Give it a few more years before passing judgment on it. Remember, when legal online music shops first opened (iTunes in the beginning), they were heavily DRMed. Over time, consumer pressure led to DRM-free downloads. e-Books might follow a similar path. (Or they might not. Too soon to tell at this point.)
I was taught by my father to joke when you're frustrated.
When my parents went on their honeymoon in Jamaica, my mother broke her neck after looking under a small waterfall. After some time in a run down hospital, they cut their honeymoon short and headed home. Unfortunately, they were redirected to Chicago. My father insisted that there had better be medical personnel on the ground. When they landed, the plane didn't approach the airport. Instead, it sat on the runway while police and ambulances surrounded it.
Some uniformed officers came aboard, approached my father and gruffly asked if he was the one who requested medical assistance. As they led them off the plane, all of the frustrations of the previous day (trust me, I've shortened the story) got to be too much and he whispered to my mother "I guess they found the bomb."
When they went to get their luggage later on, they found it stuck to one side all chained up. The police officers there told him that someone had reported there was a bomb on the plane and since their luggage had been unclaimed (since they were in the hospital), it was pulled aside.
He was just lucky he didn't do this today. Instead of his luggage being chained up on the side, it would have been blown up to make sure there was no bomb. Then he would have been arrested and sent to jail on terrorism charges for making bomb threats. Finally, law enforcement would pat themselves on their backs about what a good job they did stopping the "frustrated joker bomber."
I have no problem with bomb threats being illegal. There's a lot of time and expense involved in evacuating people, tracking down if there is a bomb, time lost (for business/school/whatever), etc. My problem comes when the "bomb threat" is a single tweet that a person makes undirected at anyone.
Of course, they needed to investigate it, but all they needed to have done was read the rest of his tweets to see whether or not there was any pattern. Checking his Twitter page ( http://twitter.com/pauljchambers ), I see it is protected. He likely did this after the arrest, but if it was this was before the arrest, they could have come in and had him show them his Twitter page.
"I had to explain Twitter to them in its entirety because they'd never heard of it," he said.
Now, I know some here don't have a high opinion of Twitter, but I think most folks have heard of it and have a general inkling of what it is. If the police department doesn't have anyone that knows what Twitter is, perhaps they need to hire some more Internet-savvy officers to help them in cases like this one. This should have been looked into, quickly determined to have been a joke, and then dropped (with a warning if it'd make the police feel better) for more important cases.
Perhaps a Grand Central/Google Voice setup would be in order then. With Google Voice (previously Grand Central), I can give everyone a phone number and it will ring all of my phones. However, I can also specify some rules. For example, if someone from my work calls me on my Google Voice number, I can have it only ring my work phone and cell phone and not my wife's cell phone or my home phone. If I call the Google Voice number, it will call my wife's cell and our home phone, not my cell or work phone. So you can give your work and personal contacts the same number and what phone(s) it rings would depend on who is calling you.
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Maybe some kind of Hibernate system but on an app by app basis? So I've got 10 processes open and I start up and 11th. Memory's running low so the OS checks and sees that process numbers 3, 5, and 7 have been inactive the longest. So it "hibernates" them keeping some kind of low-memory placeholder active so the user can switch back/reactivate the app. Not saying it wouldn't be complicated to do, but it might be doable.
Um, actually, I said that my co-workers were the ones who did the rewiring and stuff. They weren't denigrating each other over it and I definitely wasn't looking down on them for being able to do this stuff. I'm just clueless when it comes to home repairs. I guess how I feel towards home repairs is how many people feel towards computers. I've tried to learn some, but haven't learned anything advanced. In computer user terms (to continue with the analogy): I'm the guy who knows how to boot up his computer and browse the web, but doesn't know how to tweak every setting while my co-workers are expert Linux programmers.
I don't know about that. My co-workers (and I wouldn't call these folks nerds even though they do work in MIS) can do home repairs (including electrical) themselves. They chop down their own trees. My boss even raises chickens and sells the eggs. That's definitely something that requires labor.
Of course, while they're talking about how they added an extension to their home and ran a new heating extension to keep it from freezing during the winter, I'm looking at them with a blank stare. Give me a computer and I can take it apart and put it back together five times, no problem. Give me some tools and a project to complete and I won't be so successful. I've gotten better in the years since my wife and I purchased our house (recently replaced a bad thermocouple in my furnace), but there are still basic things that elude my expertise.
This reminds me of a recent story about a man on a British Airways flight who was asked to move seats. The reason? He was in the aisle seat and his pregnant wife was in the window seat. Between them was a child they weren't related to. British Airways policy assumes that all men are sexual predators, apparently, and thus men can't be seated next to children they aren't related to. No such problem with women. I guess all women are caring motherly types while all men are sex-starved perverts.
Anyway, he objected to moving and was yelled at and threatened by the flight attendant. Eventually, he moved, but he's now suing the airline.
Please don't lump all religions into the same group based on the actions of Scientology (not that I'd call that a religion, mind you). Not everyone who follows a religion is interested in ramming their beliefs down other people's throats. I'm Jewish and honestly don't feel that the world needs to be converted to Judaism or that everyone needs to give up bacon or anything like that. I'm happy practicing my religion in peace and teaching it to my children. If you ask me about my religion, I'd be glad to talk about it, but not only in "I believe this" informational terms, not in "You should do this or you're going to hell" terms.
The idiots who go around trying to convert everyone to their religion, who want public policy to be based completely on (their) religious beliefs or who try to displace science in the classroom for everyone so that their particular religious values aren't impinged give the rest of us (who just want to practice our religion in peace) a bad name.
From what I've heard of DeBeers, you don't want to cross them. Their business tactics make the RIAA/MPAA look like cute little kittens.
Should the Sun suddenly become a black hole, we won't get sucked in as most lay people think.
I think "sucked in" is the big problem with how lay people view black holes. They think of them as cosmic vacuum cleaners actively sucking things into them never to be seen again. When they hear "LHC could create a microscopic black hole" they think the microscopic black hole will form, turn it's "vacuum cleaner" on and start sucking up everything on Earth.
They don't understand that they are just "ordinary" cosmic objects, albeit with a point of no return (the event horizon). A microscopic black hole might pull a tiny bit of matter in (through ordinary gravity), but there's a lot of room between particles and particles don't have much mass by themselves. Even if the black hole didn't evaporate (which lay people don't know they can do), it would likely be pulled to the center of the Earth virtually unnoticed. Once there, it wouldn't gobble up the Earth in years, decades or even centuries. It would just sit there with all the other particles, occasionally pulling one in when they collided (or got too close) by chance. I haven't done the calculations, but I'm guessing we'd have more to fear from the Sun going supernova in a few billion years than from a microscopic (non-evaporating) black hole in the Earth's core.
If two cars hit head on, does it matter if they are both doing 30mph or if one is stopped and the other is doing 60mph? Collisions of this nature happen all the time thank to cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere at energies much higher than Large Hadron could ever hope to achieve. The fact that the cosmic ray particle is the one moving super-fast while the atmosphere particle isn't doesn't really matter much.
Yes. Luckily, the fist hidden behind his beard can crack it.
Actually, I think the comparison is valid. Corporations are people (or at least according to SCOTUS). A corporation's operating costs, the "recurring expenses related to the operation of a business", would be things like electricity, equipment, labor, etc. An individual's operating costs equivalent would be recurring expenses related to the operation of a household. If I don't buy food, pay my mortgage, buy clothing, etc, my "operations" grind to a halt same as if a corporation decided to stop paying their workers, skip out on the electric bill and never order another piece of factory equipment again.
So if the "people" called Corporations are allowed to deduct their operating costs before paying taxes, why aren't the people called Individuals allowed to do the same? Of course the answer is two-fold. First of all, a middle-class individual's taxable income would likely drop by 90%. This would mean a huge loss in tax revenue. For all their talk of cutting taxes, politicians don't *really* want significant tax cuts because they know this would mean spending cuts (which, in turn, would be protested and possibly mean no re-election). Secondly, individuals might contribute to a politician's campaign fund, but most times corporations are the ones who contribute more. If you were a politician facing re-election, would you listen to the person donating $10 to your campaign or the "person" (read: Corporation) donating $10,000?
There are two trump cards. "Think of the Children!" and "Terrorism!" That's why I found the recent debate over airport security scanners being able to generate "naked" images of children so funny. It pitted the "Think of the Children!" group against the "Terrorism!" group.
I seem to recall reading an article a few years back about a pig that scientists believed was in the middle of evolving just those traits. As someone who keeps kosher, I'm looking forward to eating my kosher bacon.... in a few million years.
I think your logic is flawed somewhere. Let's have a small scale bittorrent network with 10 people Alice, Bobby, Carol, Doug, Edward, Frank, Greg, Harry, Isabella and Jason. Alice buys a new CD, rips it to MP3 and shares one song out. Bobby and Carol decide they want it so they download it. That's 2 distributions for Alice. Now Doug decides he wants it too and downloads it. He gets parts of it from Alice, Bobby and Carol. That's 3 for Alice, 1 each for Bobby and Carol. And so on. You can see how Alice's total might add up quickly. Yes, some of those "distributions" would be sections and not the whole file, but the point is still that she would have distributed it.
The point I would make is rather that the number of distributions is unknown. Maybe (due to some network quirk) after the first two downloads, Doug got his chunks from Bobby and Carol and everyone else's bittorrent clients ignored Alice's copy. She would have been on the hook for 2 downloads, not 9. Since the RIAA wouldn't be able to prove exactly how many copies she distributed, Alice (assuming she's found guilty in a court of law) should pay for one distribution at 10x market value of the item. (The 10x is to add a deterrent factor.) Since Alice distributed one song (market value: $0.99), she would be charged $9.90. If John Doe was convicted of sharing out 1,000 songs, he would be charged $9,900. Not spare change, but nothing that would permanently bankrupt him either. Of course, this would go out the window if there was profit-seeking involved. (e.g. if Bobby took those songs, burned then to CD and sold them on the street corner for $2 each.)
In fact, didn't we all criticize Bush for doing this? He'd sign a law into effect but just before signing it, he'd write a note saying that he won't enforce it. (So called "Signing Statements.") In fact, here's a Village Voice article criticizing him for this practice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-08-08/news/bush-s-invisible-ink/
I'm not saying I completely approve of Obama's DOJ supporting the RIAA, but I don't think the situation is as black-and-white as some people make it out to be.
Except then that cop doesn't get his $1 million. A better approach for the cop is to act tough saying he's going to arrest the guy in an attempt to get more lobbying/bribe money out of him. He doesn't have to actually arrest the guy, just make the guy think that the choice is 1) give more money or 2) be arrested.
They'd better have some good system for targeting that sound or the first person to fire the weapon will kill himself as well as his target!
My point was that copyright holders keep saying they need these long copyrights as incentives to create new works. However, how much incentive does a 50 year old work give you if it brings in only pocket change every year? If a study proved that a vast majority of works don't bring in a significant amount of money after X years, then copyright holders' main argument for long copyrights would evaporate. For that very reason, I don't expect that they would cooperate with such a study.
As a side note, if such a study were performed, I wonder whether Hollywood Accounting would work against the movie studios in the study. How much did Lord of the Rings make? Oh, it operated at a loss (thanks to Hollywood Accounting) and continues to do so with no signs of "profit" on the horizon? Well, then, I guess you won't mind simply writing off the loss and releasing it to the Public Domain?
Ah, but what if he returns from the grave to write another Sherlock Holmes book (and consume some braaaaiiiinnnns)? We need to protect the copyrights of zombie authors!
I'd like to see a study done on books, music, movies, etc that graphs out how much money they make each year after their release. My guess is that 95% (if not more) of the money is made in the first 5 years. After that, money made on most works likely plummets each year until it brings in a bare trickle of funds. Yes, some works (e.g. the original Star Wars movies) continue to make tons of cash decades after they were released, but I'm betting those are few and far between. We definitely shouldn't shape copyright law to protect 2% of works which are still making money thus locking the 98% of works which aren't from going into the public domain.
It's not so much needed a better system of propulsion. It's that, as you approach light speed, your mass increases. This means you need more fuel to push yourself faster. This more fuel increases your mass, which is still increasing exponentially as you get closer and closer to light speed.
The exact formula is:
M = MassAtRest / sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2)
At 0.5c, your mass would be about 1.3 times your rest mass. At 0.9c, you'd be nearing 2.3 times rest mass. At 0.99c, you'd have passed 7 times rest mass. At 0.999c, 22 times rest mass. And so on.
Now what happens if you go faster than light? (Supposing you somehow "skip over" the light speed barrier.) You get into imaginary numbers. For example, at 2c your mass would be MassAtRest / sqrt(-3). What does that imaginary number translate into? There are many theories, but no firm answers. The equations for velocity and time are similar so some theorize that it means going back in time. Others say the imaginary numbers mean it just can't be done. Still others think that this just shows where relativity breaks down and a new set of equations is called for.
Many writers make no money from their books, but many do. Also, unlike with musicians and the recording industry, writers keep the copyrights to their books when they publish. If a writer decides to leave his publisher and move to another one, he doesn't need to leave behind all of his previously published works. His former publishing company doesn't own those (though they may have the rights to complete the current printing run).
As for their price, books are incredibly cheap. You can walk into a bookstore with emerge with a pile of new books to read for not much money. Of course, price depends on what type of book, paperback vs hard cover, etc, but the price of a book is far from prohibitively expensive. Also, books have no real restrictions on them. You can photocopy a page, sell it, loan it to a friend or even read it aloud to a group of people without paying anything extra.
Yes, e-Books might have restrictions and might not be as cheap as their paper-based cousins, but the whole e-Book market is in its infancy. Give it a few more years before passing judgment on it. Remember, when legal online music shops first opened (iTunes in the beginning), they were heavily DRMed. Over time, consumer pressure led to DRM-free downloads. e-Books might follow a similar path. (Or they might not. Too soon to tell at this point.)
I was taught by my father to joke when you're frustrated.
When my parents went on their honeymoon in Jamaica, my mother broke her neck after looking under a small waterfall. After some time in a run down hospital, they cut their honeymoon short and headed home. Unfortunately, they were redirected to Chicago. My father insisted that there had better be medical personnel on the ground. When they landed, the plane didn't approach the airport. Instead, it sat on the runway while police and ambulances surrounded it.
Some uniformed officers came aboard, approached my father and gruffly asked if he was the one who requested medical assistance. As they led them off the plane, all of the frustrations of the previous day (trust me, I've shortened the story) got to be too much and he whispered to my mother "I guess they found the bomb."
When they went to get their luggage later on, they found it stuck to one side all chained up. The police officers there told him that someone had reported there was a bomb on the plane and since their luggage had been unclaimed (since they were in the hospital), it was pulled aside.
He was just lucky he didn't do this today. Instead of his luggage being chained up on the side, it would have been blown up to make sure there was no bomb. Then he would have been arrested and sent to jail on terrorism charges for making bomb threats. Finally, law enforcement would pat themselves on their backs about what a good job they did stopping the "frustrated joker bomber."
I have no problem with bomb threats being illegal. There's a lot of time and expense involved in evacuating people, tracking down if there is a bomb, time lost (for business/school/whatever), etc. My problem comes when the "bomb threat" is a single tweet that a person makes undirected at anyone.
Of course, they needed to investigate it, but all they needed to have done was read the rest of his tweets to see whether or not there was any pattern. Checking his Twitter page ( http://twitter.com/pauljchambers ), I see it is protected. He likely did this after the arrest, but if it was this was before the arrest, they could have come in and had him show them his Twitter page.
Unfortunately, they didn't seem to know anything about Twitter. From http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-joke-led-to-terror-act-arrest-and-airport-life-ban-1870913.html:
Now, I know some here don't have a high opinion of Twitter, but I think most folks have heard of it and have a general inkling of what it is. If the police department doesn't have anyone that knows what Twitter is, perhaps they need to hire some more Internet-savvy officers to help them in cases like this one. This should have been looked into, quickly determined to have been a joke, and then dropped (with a warning if it'd make the police feel better) for more important cases.
Perhaps a Grand Central/Google Voice setup would be in order then. With Google Voice (previously Grand Central), I can give everyone a phone number and it will ring all of my phones. However, I can also specify some rules. For example, if someone from my work calls me on my Google Voice number, I can have it only ring my work phone and cell phone and not my wife's cell phone or my home phone. If I call the Google Voice number, it will call my wife's cell and our home phone, not my cell or work phone. So you can give your work and personal contacts the same number and what phone(s) it rings would depend on who is calling you.
Ah, another Pibgorn fan! Tom Torquemada!!!