Oh, so you think he left it lying around ? A valuable device that was "found" and "returned" to a gadgets blog after a bidding war ? Right. Highly likely.
I think in most countries you do not legally own stuff you "find", at least until the owner has had a chance to claim it. Gizmodo can rationalise it all they like, they paid money to hold on to something that wasn't theirs and then offer it back to someone who they are confident actually owns it. The original guy sold something he didn't own.
Another issue, if the guy was told to take it out and field test it then it's no problem, **** happens, it could have been stolen or dropped or something. As long as he tried to be careful about it. If on the other hand it was a top secret prototype that he took out without permission then he probably deserves to be canned. Gizmodo outing the guy is pretty low and uncalled for.
1. The record companies make the content cost more (to compensate for "lost" sales) and more difficult to use (DRM) 2. People listen to less music 3. People buy less music 4. "Sales are down - must be due to piracy" 5. Goto 1.
If you think I am exaggerating, look back to what happened when CDs launched
I haven't clearly explained myself. Both Total Recall and Blade Runner are based on PKD short stories, as you know. You used this term "PKD movie" but such a thing doesn't exist.
What I meant was that Blade Runner attempted to follow the story of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep with only slight modifications to existing characters and storyline, most noticeably Luba Luft the opera singer became Zhora the stripper and J.R. Isidore the chickenhead became J.F. Sebastian the genetic designer. The screenwriters then proceeded to cut out huge chunks of context that would have had the viewer questioning whether the androids were more humans than the actual humans - a very important aspect of the story. The concept of empathy as the characteristic that most clearly defines humanity was erased, as was humans trying to connect to it through Mercerism or owning an animal. Despite Rutger Hauer's excellent monologue at the end there is nothing to compensate for these deficiencies, you are just left wondering about the weird questions in the VK test and the bizarre need for synthetic animals.
In the case of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, a very short and funny story bears little resemblance to the movie.
There were a lot more mistakes than the few I highlighted. The biggest mistake was cutting out all the material to do with humans feeling empathy for one another, for animals and for androids because that is a major constituent of the story and calls into question why humans are different to androids. Details such as the weird questions in the VK test, the synthetic snake and owl don't make sense without it.
> The book is long and dense with subject matter. There's only so much you can cram into 117 minutes.
It's quite a short book (210 pages) and not dense: it's no "Dune". Would it have taken a lot of time to have Deckard visit a pet store ? Or to have J.F. Sebastian fuse with an empathy box ?
> But are you serious about Total Recall? That represents pretty much everything I don't want to see in a PKD movie.
Total Recall was not a "PKD movie", Total Recall doesn't pretend to be the same story as the PKD novel; Blade Runner does.
> Even Firefox, one of the best cross-platform programs on OS X, has many problems that would unlikely exist if it had been written specifically for OS X
Exactly, if you take the Gruber/Jobs point of view then Firefox would not be available for Mac.
> but I think it makes sense for Apple to do it
You would deny an app the chance to exist because it isn't aesthetically pleasing enough for you ? Because apps on a mobile platform must look more beautiful ?
Why can't the user decide ? Is it that difficult to remove confusing or unusable apps ?
>... took major liberties with the plot but was still a pretty good flick that remained true to the spirit of the story.
I know my karma will be minus infinite after saying this, but here goes: Blade Runner was an enjoyable but awful movie made from a bad screenplay written about a fantastic novel.
BR has umpteen mistakes in it, from the number of escaped androids right at the start to the photo analysing machine that totally ignores Deckard's instructions. For example, "I don't get it, what do they risk coming back to Earth for, that's unusual" - why the hell are there Blade Runner units if it's "unusual" ?
It's a badly made movie. Everything to do with empathy for living beings and questioning what it means to be human is reduced to a fake snake, a drunken look at some photos on a piano and Roy's monologue.
If the screenplay writers had understood the novel they would have realised that owning an animal was a lot more than a status symbol. Likewise they would have realised the importance of the mood organ, the empathy box/Mercerism and the way that the "chickenheads" were treated. Instead of that we got one lousy unicorn sequence.
> Impostor was pretty accurate, although somewhat lackluster.
I think Impostor was the most accurate PKD film made yet. Minority Report and Total Recall have been the best movies based on PKD stories; Paycheck and Next were not too bad, just not great. A Scanner Darkly was a great novel but ruined as a movie.
> And what about when the OS changes? Will your non-native apps need to be updated?
When the OS changes then native apps are just as likely to need updating as non-native apps.
However, I am talking about this from the perspective of using something like QT (because that's what Gruber talked about in TFA), I'm not talking about Flash.
> As for the whole OK or Cancel thing, that just shows that you're one of these lazy programmers.
My point was that it's not that difficult to get it right. Having Cancel/OK instead of OK/Cancel is trivial and shouldn't be taken as a reason to blanket swipe 3rd party programming tools and libraries.
The Mac Kindle app doesn't look good. So what ? I can show you native apps that don't look good too.
> the developer is developing for something they aren't even familiar with, and Apple doesn't want those issues.
IMO it's quite arrogant to say that only native apps will ever give a high quality experience and that your multiplatform app is not allowed to have a consistent user experience because it must be customised to individual platforms. That's like websites that have banners saying "This page must be viewed at 1024x768 in Netscape Navigator 2.0+"
> Well, "OK" and "Cancel" are discouraged because they can be confusing to the user: > "Would you like to cancel your download?" > OK Cancel.
I would discourage anyone from creating a dialog like this. This is not a problem caused by 3rd party programming tools but rather an ambiguously worded dialog.
If you absolutely need to ask this kind of question it would be less ambiguous to have
"Would you like cancel your download ?" "Continue Download" "Cancel Download"
I have used OK/Cancel on dialogs for changing parameters, it may be a less optimal solution. However, in this case I think users pay more attention to this kind of dialog than to all the other dialogs that they perceive need to be batted away like whack-a-mole.
The Gruber blog highlights the Mac Kindle app built with the QT toolkit as an example of problems of cross platform libraries causing bad user experiences. He seems quite rankled by the OK button being not quite the right size and text ever so slightly clipped. This would appear to be the fault of a lazy programmer rather than "evil QT".
I don't remember having looked closely at the OSX style guidelines but my few QT applications have the approved order of "OK" and "Cancel" and all of my elements are properly aligned and not clipped. I would hazard a guess that the native design tools do not make it impossible to make a badly designed or non-conformant GUI.
I think Jobs has erred in highlighting 3rd party programming tools as the source of problems based on Gruber's pedanticism. The only great apps that are native have been written by the big companies that can afford to spend the extra effort on a single platform.
We all know that in the future Adobe will give in, Flash will be "enhanced" especially for Apple products and it will immediately become absolutely vital for web browsing according to the Job's reality distortion field.
I've got no love for Google, they are merely the next hegemony as far as I am concerned. I think it's excessive to say that "Google lost in China". They entered the market late against entrenched local competition. They will always be seen as the face of USA Inc. rather than an independent or local company: they can't play the friendly local card, they will always be the big bad foreigners.
Google wants to be the international search engine, but there is a lot more effort to filter out "inappropriate content". I don't know what form the instructions for censorship take but presumably they have some list of vague words or contexts plus possibly numerous requests for "suspicious results" to be removed. All that work must eat into profits.
Furthermore they believe they are in a hostile climate what with numerous hacking attempts. I can understand why they are thinking to get out. They seem to be doing alright in the rest of the world. Why do you say they have to stay ? Surely they can go off and focus their efforts on something else and come back later ?
Why ? Mod points are not for enforcing your opinion.
Nothing like being handed a steaming plate of spaghetti and hearing about how much of a "genius" its creator was.
I can agree with you here, without mod points.
Unless code is high level and ergo inefficient, the programmer will have to do something "clever". Clever is usually difficult to understand and difficult to explain. No one likes to write documentation especially if it's difficult documentation. And then you have bad programmers who write clever rubbish or rubbish that they think is clever and so on.
know that they're even using version 6 of IE or in fact are even aware that what they use to look at the internet is called a browser,
You're so wrong.
Joe and Jane Wintard may not have a clue how to use their PC or know what their browser is called, but their 11 year old nephew Davey does. Whenever their "webs" stop working they ask him to call around and fix it for them. And any superdumb home user eventually wants to install some "cool" software they found because they saw it was free. One way or another they are heading to Windows Update and it won't be long before they get IE8 pushed at them. Such brain dead users aren't going to go to your competitor's website because they found yours already and, how do they find that there is a competitive service ? That is beyond them, they will stick to what they know.
The absolute majority of IE6 users are organisations where the IT or management has decreed updates too dangerous. They know IE6 sucks because even the dumbest user called up IT services to ask them to fix their unreadable webs. You are pandering to people who already know their browser sucks but their bosses are too cheap to fix it.
People very rarely choose the best product; they choose the product they are told to believe is best.
Are you joking ? People make the best decision they can. Not everyone is sucking up infomercials and believing every word they hear.
Does your product only work well on a clean Swahilian Vista Home Server install too?
If your website is designed for independent, interoperable standards then there is a far better chance of it working on any configuration in any locale. However, seeing as you spend all your time trying to conform to very specific products I doubt your site is viewable in any browser outside your supported range.
You just continue supporting the exact W3C specifications regardless of whether any browser actually supports and and I'll just continue selling products that actually work.
Exactly, you should be supporting the standards and not the browsers, that's why we have standards. No, I will continue working on writing universal HTML while you are writing hacky functions so that known broken legacy browsers will show all that useless chrome and hoopla on your website.
You've very conveniently woven your argument so that your requirements have become "Must support IE6". It sounds to me very much like you're preferring style over content; believe me anyone can write a web page that will be supported in all browsers, validates and doesn't have to have potentially overlapping text
Content, as opposed to malcontent?
I prefer to use a real dictionary when I don't understand words.
They are going to be support nightmares because they are locked into ancient systems that haven't been updated. They may even be very tech savvy but they are not allowed to do what needs to be done. This will result in endless email requests to change things to try to work around their needlessly poor set up.
If your product is truly awesome then people are not going to be put off by using their crappy IE6 that they know full well is rubbish.
And you'll tell your visitors to browse your site with the W3C Validator?
I browse my site with the validator. If there are no errors then I know that it will be rendered for visitors as I see it. I don't care for "pixel perfect" rendering, HTML wasn't designed to do that. If you want pixel perfect then there is another, more suitable format: PNG.
Adding a redirect is like saying "Sorry, your real world browser is too dumb for viewing my site" when the majority of authors want to say "Please come and view my interesting content".
NASA have learnt pretty much all that is possible to learn from this event or all that they want to learn, anyhow. Do you really think that NASA needs this for archiving purposes ? Is that what they are now, a museum ?
What you say makes no sense. I'm against police states and Big Brother as much as the next/.'er, but once a threat, any type of threat, has been made in connection with an airport, government building or anything else of importance, it *must* be investigated.
Even a 10 year old child would take less than 10 seconds to look at this and realise it was not a serious threat. There is no suggestion that it was serious or had anything to back it up. It would be different if his tweet history showed radical religious leanings and pronouncements, but I'm pretty certain it didn't having RTFA.
When you say it *must* be investigated then you start down a dangerous path to loss of privacy, strip searching, etc etc and basically letting the real terrorists win by default. Even they don't have to make real threats anymore because they just wait for the next batch of bad service by RyanAir and the whole tower of cards comes crumbling down.
I think the real lessons we should have learned from the crotch bomber was that security doesn't work (he boarded the flight) and simple vigilance by security personnel should have spotted him in the first place (his father reported him to the CIA). Cracking down on aggrieved customers and using body scanners is not going to improve your safety.
I can't remember ever having heard a funny threat.
I think for his tweet to be classified a "threat" there must be some sense of seriousness to it. Threats do not normally start Crap! and finish with 2 exclamation marks. Also, they do not normally get published on social networking sites.
What we have here is a rant, plain and simple. If I was arrested every time I had a rant online I would never be released!!
How very, very sad. How can anyone think for one second that his tweet was serious ? What a bunch of idiots. Not only the authorities but also the person who reported him.
It seems we're slowly moving to a state where only correct thinking is allowed. No joking, no sense of humour, irony or annoyance.
I am not just speaking for myself. I am speaking for the Western world.
Did you ask permission ? Seriously, how can you speak for the "Western" world ?
None the less, our "culture" has been around and is based upon a philosophical foundation that has been acknowledged for approximately 2000 years. Of course it didn't emerge in a vacuum, and it was built upon previous thoughts going back to the Greeks et al.
So you acknowledge that "our culture" goes back to the ancient Greeks, yet anything before 2000 years ago doesn't count ? Why not ? Coincidentally, the ancient Greeks were recorded to be around ~2000 years BC, giving "us" just as much history as the Chinese.
If you're going to discount history that's not influenced by Christianity (itself a modern notion) then surely you have to compare like for like with a "common philosophy" held by the Chinese for the last 4000 years - which is what exactly ? Buddhism is only 500 years older than Christianity and Taoism not much more than that. It has to be some common core that is still relevant, it can't be 4000 years of people scratching their butts.
Google is claiming that they've suffered an intellectual property loss due to a server compromise.
No, their point is "It's one thing to get hacked but when it's the local government doing it while we're playing nice, I don't think so".
The Chinese are smart. Our year 2010 is the Chinese year 4707. They have an ANCIENT culture.
Speak for yourself. Just because you arbitrarily decided to reset the clock 2009 years ago doesn't mean that the rest of us didn't count history before then. In fact, even non-atheists recognise that time did indeed exist before 1 AD.
You mean the people of Singapore have a different opinion ?
Because you can't seriously be saying that Singapore has a different balance: I know that Singpore is a capitalist country with lots of totalitarianism. They may be in self-denial about it, but that's how totalitarianism works.
Singaporeans think they are free to talk about anything they like, as long as it is in private. They don't expect complete freedom, all the time, for the sake of harmony. And they are told what to think; it comes via PSAs and other media outlets.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so you think he left it lying around ? A valuable device that was "found" and "returned" to a gadgets blog after a bidding war ? Right. Highly likely.
I think in most countries you do not legally own stuff you "find", at least until the owner has had a chance to claim it. Gizmodo can rationalise it all they like, they paid money to hold on to something that wasn't theirs and then offer it back to someone who they are confident actually owns it. The original guy sold something he didn't own.
Another issue, if the guy was told to take it out and field test it then it's no problem, **** happens, it could have been stolen or dropped or something. As long as he tried to be careful about it. If on the other hand it was a top secret prototype that he took out without permission then he probably deserves to be canned. Gizmodo outing the guy is pretty low and uncalled for.
I think it's obvious.
1. The record companies make the content cost more (to compensate for "lost" sales) and more difficult to use (DRM)
2. People listen to less music
3. People buy less music
4. "Sales are down - must be due to piracy"
5. Goto 1.
If you think I am exaggerating, look back to what happened when CDs launched
I haven't clearly explained myself. Both Total Recall and Blade Runner are based on PKD short stories, as you know. You used this term "PKD movie" but such a thing doesn't exist.
What I meant was that Blade Runner attempted to follow the story of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep with only slight modifications to existing characters and storyline, most noticeably Luba Luft the opera singer became Zhora the stripper and J.R. Isidore the chickenhead became J.F. Sebastian the genetic designer. The screenwriters then proceeded to cut out huge chunks of context that would have had the viewer questioning whether the androids were more humans than the actual humans - a very important aspect of the story. The concept of empathy as the characteristic that most clearly defines humanity was erased, as was humans trying to connect to it through Mercerism or owning an animal. Despite Rutger Hauer's excellent monologue at the end there is nothing to compensate for these deficiencies, you are just left wondering about the weird questions in the VK test and the bizarre need for synthetic animals.
In the case of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, a very short and funny story bears little resemblance to the movie.
There were a lot more mistakes than the few I highlighted. The biggest mistake was cutting out all the material to do with humans feeling empathy for one another, for animals and for androids because that is a major constituent of the story and calls into question why humans are different to androids. Details such as the weird questions in the VK test, the synthetic snake and owl don't make sense without it.
> The book is long and dense with subject matter. There's only so much you can cram into 117 minutes.
It's quite a short book (210 pages) and not dense: it's no "Dune". Would it have taken a lot of time to have Deckard visit a pet store ? Or to have J.F. Sebastian fuse with an empathy box ?
> But are you serious about Total Recall? That represents pretty much everything I don't want to see in a PKD movie.
Total Recall was not a "PKD movie", Total Recall doesn't pretend to be the same story as the PKD novel; Blade Runner does.
> Even Firefox, one of the best cross-platform programs on OS X, has many problems that would unlikely exist if it had been written specifically for OS X
Exactly, if you take the Gruber/Jobs point of view then Firefox would not be available for Mac.
> but I think it makes sense for Apple to do it
You would deny an app the chance to exist because it isn't aesthetically pleasing enough for you ? Because apps on a mobile platform must look more beautiful ?
Why can't the user decide ? Is it that difficult to remove confusing or unusable apps ?
> ... took major liberties with the plot but was still a pretty good flick that remained true to the spirit of the story.
I know my karma will be minus infinite after saying this, but here goes: Blade Runner was an enjoyable but awful movie made from a bad screenplay written about a fantastic novel.
BR has umpteen mistakes in it, from the number of escaped androids right at the start to the photo analysing machine that totally ignores Deckard's instructions. For example, "I don't get it, what do they risk coming back to Earth for, that's unusual" - why the hell are there Blade Runner units if it's "unusual" ?
It's a badly made movie. Everything to do with empathy for living beings and questioning what it means to be human is reduced to a fake snake, a drunken look at some photos on a piano and Roy's monologue.
If the screenplay writers had understood the novel they would have realised that owning an animal was a lot more than a status symbol. Likewise they would have realised the importance of the mood organ, the empathy box/Mercerism and the way that the "chickenheads" were treated. Instead of that we got one lousy unicorn sequence.
> Impostor was pretty accurate, although somewhat lackluster.
I think Impostor was the most accurate PKD film made yet. Minority Report and Total Recall have been the best movies based on PKD stories; Paycheck and Next were not too bad, just not great. A Scanner Darkly was a great novel but ruined as a movie.
> And what about when the OS changes? Will your non-native apps need to be updated?
When the OS changes then native apps are just as likely to need updating as non-native apps.
However, I am talking about this from the perspective of using something like QT (because that's what Gruber talked about in TFA), I'm not talking about Flash.
> As for the whole OK or Cancel thing, that just shows that you're one of these lazy programmers.
My point was that it's not that difficult to get it right. Having Cancel/OK instead of OK/Cancel is trivial and shouldn't be taken as a reason to blanket swipe 3rd party programming tools and libraries.
The Mac Kindle app doesn't look good. So what ? I can show you native apps that don't look good too.
> the developer is developing for something they aren't even familiar with, and Apple doesn't want those issues.
IMO it's quite arrogant to say that only native apps will ever give a high quality experience and that your multiplatform app is not allowed to have a consistent user experience because it must be customised to individual platforms. That's like websites that have banners saying "This page must be viewed at 1024x768 in Netscape Navigator 2.0+"
> Well, "OK" and "Cancel" are discouraged because they can be confusing to the user:
> "Would you like to cancel your download?"
> OK Cancel.
I would discourage anyone from creating a dialog like this. This is not a problem caused by 3rd party programming tools but rather an ambiguously worded dialog.
If you absolutely need to ask this kind of question it would be less ambiguous to have
"Would you like cancel your download ?"
"Continue Download" "Cancel Download"
I have used OK/Cancel on dialogs for changing parameters, it may be a less optimal solution. However, in this case I think users pay more attention to this kind of dialog than to all the other dialogs that they perceive need to be batted away like whack-a-mole.
The Gruber blog highlights the Mac Kindle app built with the QT toolkit as an example of problems of cross platform libraries causing bad user experiences. He seems quite rankled by the OK button being not quite the right size and text ever so slightly clipped. This would appear to be the fault of a lazy programmer rather than "evil QT".
I don't remember having looked closely at the OSX style guidelines but my few QT applications have the approved order of "OK" and "Cancel" and all of my elements are properly aligned and not clipped. I would hazard a guess that the native design tools do not make it impossible to make a badly designed or non-conformant GUI.
I think Jobs has erred in highlighting 3rd party programming tools as the source of problems based on Gruber's pedanticism. The only great apps that are native have been written by the big companies that can afford to spend the extra effort on a single platform.
We all know that in the future Adobe will give in, Flash will be "enhanced" especially for Apple products and it will immediately become absolutely vital for web browsing according to the Job's reality distortion field.
I've got no love for Google, they are merely the next hegemony as far as I am concerned. I think it's excessive to say that "Google lost in China". They entered the market late against entrenched local competition. They will always be seen as the face of USA Inc. rather than an independent or local company: they can't play the friendly local card, they will always be the big bad foreigners.
Google wants to be the international search engine, but there is a lot more effort to filter out "inappropriate content". I don't know what form the instructions for censorship take but presumably they have some list of vague words or contexts plus possibly numerous requests for "suspicious results" to be removed. All that work must eat into profits.
Furthermore they believe they are in a hostile climate what with numerous hacking attempts. I can understand why they are thinking to get out. They seem to be doing alright in the rest of the world. Why do you say they have to stay ? Surely they can go off and focus their efforts on something else and come back later ?
Can it be said Mozilla is undermining H.264 ? They are not planning to support it.
Or maybe IE6 is going to undermine HTML5 ?
Why ? Mod points are not for enforcing your opinion.
I can agree with you here, without mod points.
Unless code is high level and ergo inefficient, the programmer will have to do something "clever". Clever is usually difficult to understand and difficult to explain. No one likes to write documentation especially if it's difficult documentation. And then you have bad programmers who write clever rubbish or rubbish that they think is clever and so on.
You're so wrong.
Joe and Jane Wintard may not have a clue how to use their PC or know what their browser is called, but their 11 year old nephew Davey does. Whenever their "webs" stop working they ask him to call around and fix it for them. And any superdumb home user eventually wants to install some "cool" software they found because they saw it was free. One way or another they are heading to Windows Update and it won't be long before they get IE8 pushed at them. Such brain dead users aren't going to go to your competitor's website because they found yours already and, how do they find that there is a competitive service ? That is beyond them, they will stick to what they know.
The absolute majority of IE6 users are organisations where the IT or management has decreed updates too dangerous. They know IE6 sucks because even the dumbest user called up IT services to ask them to fix their unreadable webs. You are pandering to people who already know their browser sucks but their bosses are too cheap to fix it.
Are you joking ? People make the best decision they can. Not everyone is sucking up infomercials and believing every word they hear.
If your website is designed for independent, interoperable standards then there is a far better chance of it working on any configuration in any locale. However, seeing as you spend all your time trying to conform to very specific products I doubt your site is viewable in any browser outside your supported range.
Exactly, you should be supporting the standards and not the browsers, that's why we have standards. No, I will continue working on writing universal HTML while you are writing hacky functions so that known broken legacy browsers will show all that useless chrome and hoopla on your website.
You've very conveniently woven your argument so that your requirements have become "Must support IE6". It sounds to me very much like you're preferring style over content; believe me anyone can write a web page that will be supported in all browsers, validates and doesn't have to have potentially overlapping text
I prefer to use a real dictionary when I don't understand words.
They are going to be support nightmares because they are locked into ancient systems that haven't been updated. They may even be very tech savvy but they are not allowed to do what needs to be done. This will result in endless email requests to change things to try to work around their needlessly poor set up.
If your product is truly awesome then people are not going to be put off by using their crappy IE6 that they know full well is rubbish.
I browse my site with the validator. If there are no errors then I know that it will be rendered for visitors as I see it. I don't care for "pixel perfect" rendering, HTML wasn't designed to do that. If you want pixel perfect then there is another, more suitable format: PNG.
Adding a redirect is like saying "Sorry, your real world browser is too dumb for viewing my site" when the majority of authors want to say "Please come and view my interesting content".
NASA have learnt pretty much all that is possible to learn from this event or all that they want to learn, anyhow. Do you really think that NASA needs this for archiving purposes ? Is that what they are now, a museum ?
You can run Skype on your PSP. It's not a new feature. PSP-1000 and PSP-2000 need a microphone though.
Even a 10 year old child would take less than 10 seconds to look at this and realise it was not a serious threat. There is no suggestion that it was serious or had anything to back it up. It would be different if his tweet history showed radical religious leanings and pronouncements, but I'm pretty certain it didn't having RTFA.
When you say it *must* be investigated then you start down a dangerous path to loss of privacy, strip searching, etc etc and basically letting the real terrorists win by default. Even they don't have to make real threats anymore because they just wait for the next batch of bad service by RyanAir and the whole tower of cards comes crumbling down.
I think the real lessons we should have learned from the crotch bomber was that security doesn't work (he boarded the flight) and simple vigilance by security personnel should have spotted him in the first place (his father reported him to the CIA). Cracking down on aggrieved customers and using body scanners is not going to improve your safety.
I think for his tweet to be classified a "threat" there must be some sense of seriousness to it. Threats do not normally start Crap! and finish with 2 exclamation marks. Also, they do not normally get published on social networking sites.
What we have here is a rant, plain and simple. If I was arrested every time I had a rant online I would never be released!!
How very, very sad. How can anyone think for one second that his tweet was serious ? What a bunch of idiots. Not only the authorities but also the person who reported him.
It seems we're slowly moving to a state where only correct thinking is allowed. No joking, no sense of humour, irony or annoyance.
Did you ask permission ? Seriously, how can you speak for the "Western" world ?
So you acknowledge that "our culture" goes back to the ancient Greeks, yet anything before 2000 years ago doesn't count ? Why not ? Coincidentally, the ancient Greeks were recorded to be around ~2000 years BC, giving "us" just as much history as the Chinese.
If you're going to discount history that's not influenced by Christianity (itself a modern notion) then surely you have to compare like for like with a "common philosophy" held by the Chinese for the last 4000 years - which is what exactly ? Buddhism is only 500 years older than Christianity and Taoism not much more than that. It has to be some common core that is still relevant, it can't be 4000 years of people scratching their butts.
No, their point is "It's one thing to get hacked but when it's the local government doing it while we're playing nice, I don't think so".
Speak for yourself. Just because you arbitrarily decided to reset the clock 2009 years ago doesn't mean that the rest of us didn't count history before then. In fact, even non-atheists recognise that time did indeed exist before 1 AD.
Mine too. Does yours have a reflection in the mirror ? Loathing of garlic ? Adversity to holy crosses ?
You mean the people of Singapore have a different opinion ?
Because you can't seriously be saying that Singapore has a different balance: I know that Singpore is a capitalist country with lots of totalitarianism. They may be in self-denial about it, but that's how totalitarianism works.
Singaporeans think they are free to talk about anything they like, as long as it is in private. They don't expect complete freedom, all the time, for the sake of harmony. And they are told what to think; it comes via PSAs and other media outlets.