A potential threat is not actually a threat, and it is not a crime to be a potential threat.
However, a potential threat might be a threat, and that threat may or may not be imminent. So there is lots of room for legitimate investigation there. As long as they establish that there is an imminent threat before making an arrest, then they're doing it right by investigating.
If they wait until they're sure to start an investigation... there would never have been a single investigation. All crimes would be unsolved, because everybody is presumed innocent and you can't be sure otherwise until they're convicted. You can't be convicted before you're investigated, after all.
Well, one of those cases is a government employee who was fired, the other is a person who was arrested.
In both those cases, the Court decisions still allows the government employer, or police, to investigate if the person made a threat or not. Those cases are about the facts that would have to be believed in order to take punitive action against the person; they don't in any way scale back the ability of the police to investigate in those same exact situations.
It isn't a clear statement of intent, but it also isn't clearly worded. So if it describes intent, or a philosophical take on cause and effect, well that just isn't clear.
Also, investigation is not prosecution or accusation. If we're going to get persnickety over the grammatical details, lets stay consistent. The difference between the statement and a threat is no greater than the difference between the statement and a more clearly worded statement. So the commenter gave them a "gimme" to harass techdirt; and themselves, presumably.
The bar to conduct an investigation is pretty low.
The comment is not itself an illegal act, but that doesn't stop it from creating reasonable suspicion that a real threat might have been made that warrants investigation.
I totally support the right of assholes to say lame shit, but I also do want the police to investigate threats of violence. The trope is that real [imaginary-real] criminals don't make threats first, but when I read the news about real shootings, a significant number of the people were in fact saying threatening things on a routine basis beforehand. In my own experience with people committing more minor violence, the ones who do it are often the same ones who threaten it. And psychologically, repeating it increases belief in the solution. An investigation might very well remind them of potential consequences.
Don't give these pigs such an easy time to legally inconvenience you by investigating potential threats.
If you want to keep the pork on the fire, keep the fire up to code so the fire department doesn't interfere.
Yeah, hyperbole saying he'll burn in hell or something is one thing, but threats of violence are not automatically hyberbole. Simply [secretly] not planning to do it, and just saying you will, is not an attempt to communicate exaggeration.
Hyperbole is an exaggerated comment not meant to be taken literally. If you straight out say something threatening, without any clear exaggeration, then it isn't obviously hyperbole. I'm not sure what the source of the "hyperbole" claim even is. Techdirt, I guess? The comment may or may not have been a poorly executed attempt at hyperbole; or it might have been a threat. My advice, if you're making comments that involve the police, and violence, make a clear exaggeration. Don't just deadpan a threat and rely on people trusting that you're a good person and so it just must have been exaggeration.
Threatening to send Voldemort or a Klingon Bird of Prey to wipe them out, that is clear hyperbole. A "bullet to their... skull" is just not obviously hyperbole, especially in the context where firearms are commonly possessed, and in fact a constitutional right. If somebody said that about me, I'd have to start carrying inflatable ninjas in my pocket for protection.
And if you run a website that has comments, expect to get some subpoenas, especially if you don't delete, redact, or otherwise squelch comments describing violence in the context of real humans.
Absolutely! There is no way I'm going to subscribe to anything. Then they know who I am, and that I spent money. It is worse than clicking "unsubscribe" instead of "spam."
I kept buying magazines right up until they stopped selling them (the ones I used to buy) in brick-and-mortar stores. The available magazines seem to mostly be full of fluff and advertising. Presumably most of the subscribers don't actually read them, they just like having some recent stuff on the coffee table, ideally with a few pictures.
No, the idea was that the advertisers paid for the content hoping that you would look at the ads. It isn't actually a difficult concept. It was never the viewer paying. There was never any expectation for an individual viewer to pay attention to ads.
Those are lies that were just invented in a past few years, seeking to change how you view history. Why do you buy in to whatever narrative you're fed? Beh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh come on sheepy, do better.
You can see the insanity, you want to do better. That is clear.
I didn't claim to "refute" your argument. I contradicted it. I stand by what I said; it isn't the sort of disagreement that is susceptible to refutation because there is too much of a subjective element.
You're just as wrong after denying "refutation" as before. David Attenborough remains more well-known than McBoatface ever was, and the difference in their popularity will increase drastically even just in the next month as people forget about Boaty and his relatively small contribution to British culture.
You didn't make any sort of argument that involves the ship being more well-known if it was named Boaty. It will not be well known, regardless of the name. After the fad has faded, a ship with a silly name would just become a ship with a silly meaningless name to most people. Since so many more people know who Sir David Attenborough is than will ever know the name of any science ship, there is significantly greater chance that people will remember that particular ship because of his name. So if you were to attempt such an argument, it would probably fail. But you didn't.
Furthermore, who cares about the popularity of the ship? The point was to choose who to honor with the name plate. The popularity issue that is relevant is only which cultural icon has more public demand to be honored. That there are more people who are interested in comedy than honoring cultural icons is neither a surprise, nor relevant to those making decisions about who to honor. If the goofy people had actually intended to honor comedy, they'd have voted for the name to be Rowan Atkinson, or at least the RRS Bean.
In any case, they did actually name one of the submarines Boaty McBoatface.
Even in google, David Attenborough: About 3,090,000 results Boaty McBoatface: About 761,000 results
Nobody is going to actually know anything about the ship except the people who work on it. That's the reality of working on a science ship. The whole point was to decide who or what to honor. There is no TV or movie deal to hype.
You, because you didn't understand him or me. He said more than one thing. My statement includes the resolution to your supposed problem; you simply failed to correctly parse my intended communication. But that isn't my problem. If one person out there understands what I said, and everybody else thinks it is gibberish, that is greater success than internet content usually achieves.
Or Microsoft just happens to be more accident prone than the Ford Pinto?
The Ford Pinto was never more accident-prone. It merely had an unintended failure state. But that failure state could only be reached after there was already an accident.
Indeed, that is a bigger benefit than he imagines.
There are a minority of people who still believe that linux users are unable to do work on their computers. I find it baffling, but the answer of course is that most of these people have no idea what software is even used to do work on a computer. If they had any idea of the number of choices available for every task, they'd be embarrassed at the absurdity of the idea.
They just can't make the jump from, "gosh all the software by boss chose runs on windows, which is the OS my boss chose" to "if my boss chose a different OS, I'd be using different software." Instead they somehow end up at, "gosh, my job couldn't exist if microsoft hadn't made computers possible!"
Kids are into the ship or not based on only 2 factors: Did you spend the time and money to give them a tour? If so, they're interested in ocean science. Or, did you create a popular cartoon about a science ship? If so, they're interested in ocean science.
Simply naming a ship a cartoon name isn't good enough. Kids know the difference between fun, and a ship they didn't ever get to play on.
Well, it would be pretty awesome if he picks up the nickname Sir Boaty.
If somebody wants to see a McBoatface in the future, they should probably agitate to create the title Lord Boatface. That's the only way they're going to manage the process.
They didn't. That's why it is named after Attenborough. The poll was to give them feedback, so they could select which of the names that met the (published) naming criteria was most popular.
The brilliancy of the whole thing is specifically in letting them have their fun, and then ignoring them, instead of filtering the names at the proposal stage.
Landing craft are much more numerous than submarines, so it is disingenuous to claim that boat means submarine. Almost every ship includes a bunch of boats. And most small craft are boats, even when not assigned to a ship. Tugs are boats, and outnumber submarines even without the help of life boats.
In the age of sail, anything with less than three masts was a boat. Using that as a standard, all but the largest modern yachts are boats, not ships. Potentially including this class of science vessel. Even when it comes to commercial craft, there are many more fishing boats than factory fishing ships.
Even police boats outnumber submarines.
Sorry land-lubber, you didn't really know that one.
While there are certainly lots of naming honors intended solely for dead people, there are lots of others that are suitable for living people. The naming of watercraft traditionally does not require a person to be dead; historically there were many examples named after the person who paid for the ship, or somebody dear to them. There are other examples; buildings are named after dead people if the name is purely honorary, but often after living people if they were involved in the funding; or if their work inspired the building, and they're retired. Or if they're not retired, and will be hired to run the facility.
Most of the Sea Shepherd ships are named after the (living) donors funding them.
There is nothing "holy" about taking a poll for an advisory purpose, as was the case here. That you didn't understand, didn't check, and presumed something "holy" was violated says a lot about you, and nothing at all about the intended, published system they were using to name the ship.
David Attenborough remains vastly more well-known than McBoatface ever was. The entire educated English-speaking world knows who he is! A few people on the internet, news junkies, and locals in the UK know about Boatface.
The benefit isn't open-ended; most of the benefit of the PR is in the people who actually give a shit. If the people who don't give a shit look and point, that is harmless fun but perhaps not actually useful to their mission.
Slashdot Mirror
A potential threat is not actually a threat, and it is not a crime to be a potential threat.
However, a potential threat might be a threat, and that threat may or may not be imminent. So there is lots of room for legitimate investigation there. As long as they establish that there is an imminent threat before making an arrest, then they're doing it right by investigating.
If they wait until they're sure to start an investigation... there would never have been a single investigation. All crimes would be unsolved, because everybody is presumed innocent and you can't be sure otherwise until they're convicted. You can't be convicted before you're investigated, after all.
Why should we be proud of rule by lawyers?
History.
Well, one of those cases is a government employee who was fired, the other is a person who was arrested.
In both those cases, the Court decisions still allows the government employer, or police, to investigate if the person made a threat or not. Those cases are about the facts that would have to be believed in order to take punitive action against the person; they don't in any way scale back the ability of the police to investigate in those same exact situations.
It isn't a clear statement of intent, but it also isn't clearly worded. So if it describes intent, or a philosophical take on cause and effect, well that just isn't clear.
Also, investigation is not prosecution or accusation. If we're going to get persnickety over the grammatical details, lets stay consistent. The difference between the statement and a threat is no greater than the difference between the statement and a more clearly worded statement. So the commenter gave them a "gimme" to harass techdirt; and themselves, presumably.
The bar to conduct an investigation is pretty low.
The comment is not itself an illegal act, but that doesn't stop it from creating reasonable suspicion that a real threat might have been made that warrants investigation.
I totally support the right of assholes to say lame shit, but I also do want the police to investigate threats of violence. The trope is that real [imaginary-real] criminals don't make threats first, but when I read the news about real shootings, a significant number of the people were in fact saying threatening things on a routine basis beforehand. In my own experience with people committing more minor violence, the ones who do it are often the same ones who threaten it. And psychologically, repeating it increases belief in the solution. An investigation might very well remind them of potential consequences.
Don't give these pigs such an easy time to legally inconvenience you by investigating potential threats.
If you want to keep the pork on the fire, keep the fire up to code so the fire department doesn't interfere.
Yeah, hyperbole saying he'll burn in hell or something is one thing, but threats of violence are not automatically hyberbole. Simply [secretly] not planning to do it, and just saying you will, is not an attempt to communicate exaggeration.
Hyperbole is an exaggerated comment not meant to be taken literally. If you straight out say something threatening, without any clear exaggeration, then it isn't obviously hyperbole. I'm not sure what the source of the "hyperbole" claim even is. Techdirt, I guess? The comment may or may not have been a poorly executed attempt at hyperbole; or it might have been a threat. My advice, if you're making comments that involve the police, and violence, make a clear exaggeration. Don't just deadpan a threat and rely on people trusting that you're a good person and so it just must have been exaggeration.
Threatening to send Voldemort or a Klingon Bird of Prey to wipe them out, that is clear hyperbole. A "bullet to their... skull" is just not obviously hyperbole, especially in the context where firearms are commonly possessed, and in fact a constitutional right. If somebody said that about me, I'd have to start carrying inflatable ninjas in my pocket for protection.
And if you run a website that has comments, expect to get some subpoenas, especially if you don't delete, redact, or otherwise squelch comments describing violence in the context of real humans.
Absolutely! There is no way I'm going to subscribe to anything. Then they know who I am, and that I spent money. It is worse than clicking "unsubscribe" instead of "spam."
I kept buying magazines right up until they stopped selling them (the ones I used to buy) in brick-and-mortar stores. The available magazines seem to mostly be full of fluff and advertising. Presumably most of the subscribers don't actually read them, they just like having some recent stuff on the coffee table, ideally with a few pictures.
No, the idea was that the advertisers paid for the content hoping that you would look at the ads. It isn't actually a difficult concept. It was never the viewer paying. There was never any expectation for an individual viewer to pay attention to ads.
Those are lies that were just invented in a past few years, seeking to change how you view history. Why do you buy in to whatever narrative you're fed? Beh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh come on sheepy, do better.
You can see the insanity, you want to do better. That is clear.
I didn't claim to "refute" your argument. I contradicted it. I stand by what I said; it isn't the sort of disagreement that is susceptible to refutation because there is too much of a subjective element.
You're just as wrong after denying "refutation" as before. David Attenborough remains more well-known than McBoatface ever was, and the difference in their popularity will increase drastically even just in the next month as people forget about Boaty and his relatively small contribution to British culture.
You didn't make any sort of argument that involves the ship being more well-known if it was named Boaty. It will not be well known, regardless of the name. After the fad has faded, a ship with a silly name would just become a ship with a silly meaningless name to most people. Since so many more people know who Sir David Attenborough is than will ever know the name of any science ship, there is significantly greater chance that people will remember that particular ship because of his name. So if you were to attempt such an argument, it would probably fail. But you didn't.
Furthermore, who cares about the popularity of the ship? The point was to choose who to honor with the name plate. The popularity issue that is relevant is only which cultural icon has more public demand to be honored. That there are more people who are interested in comedy than honoring cultural icons is neither a surprise, nor relevant to those making decisions about who to honor. If the goofy people had actually intended to honor comedy, they'd have voted for the name to be Rowan Atkinson, or at least the RRS Bean.
In any case, they did actually name one of the submarines Boaty McBoatface.
Absolutely, I only discussed information, not personal experience.
Even in google,
David Attenborough: About 3,090,000 results
Boaty McBoatface: About 761,000 results
Nobody is going to actually know anything about the ship except the people who work on it. That's the reality of working on a science ship. The whole point was to decide who or what to honor. There is no TV or movie deal to hype.
You, because you didn't understand him or me. He said more than one thing. My statement includes the resolution to your supposed problem; you simply failed to correctly parse my intended communication. But that isn't my problem. If one person out there understands what I said, and everybody else thinks it is gibberish, that is greater success than internet content usually achieves.
Well, it is Friday, but it has been over 15 years since I implemented a Microsoft Free Fridays apache module.
I'm glad somebody is still holding down the fort.
Or Microsoft just happens to be more accident prone than the Ford Pinto?
The Ford Pinto was never more accident-prone. It merely had an unintended failure state. But that failure state could only be reached after there was already an accident.
Indeed, that is a bigger benefit than he imagines.
There are a minority of people who still believe that linux users are unable to do work on their computers. I find it baffling, but the answer of course is that most of these people have no idea what software is even used to do work on a computer. If they had any idea of the number of choices available for every task, they'd be embarrassed at the absurdity of the idea.
They just can't make the jump from, "gosh all the software by boss chose runs on windows, which is the OS my boss chose" to "if my boss chose a different OS, I'd be using different software." Instead they somehow end up at, "gosh, my job couldn't exist if microsoft hadn't made computers possible!"
It's not my favorite *nix, but it would clearly solve this problem.
I'm thankful that was removed early enough, or it would have ended up being named after Lord Nelson.
Kids are into the ship or not based on only 2 factors: Did you spend the time and money to give them a tour? If so, they're interested in ocean science. Or, did you create a popular cartoon about a science ship? If so, they're interested in ocean science.
Simply naming a ship a cartoon name isn't good enough. Kids know the difference between fun, and a ship they didn't ever get to play on.
Well, it would be pretty awesome if he picks up the nickname Sir Boaty.
If somebody wants to see a McBoatface in the future, they should probably agitate to create the title Lord Boatface. That's the only way they're going to manage the process.
They didn't. That's why it is named after Attenborough. The poll was to give them feedback, so they could select which of the names that met the (published) naming criteria was most popular.
The brilliancy of the whole thing is specifically in letting them have their fun, and then ignoring them, instead of filtering the names at the proposal stage.
Landing craft are much more numerous than submarines, so it is disingenuous to claim that boat means submarine. Almost every ship includes a bunch of boats. And most small craft are boats, even when not assigned to a ship. Tugs are boats, and outnumber submarines even without the help of life boats.
In the age of sail, anything with less than three masts was a boat. Using that as a standard, all but the largest modern yachts are boats, not ships. Potentially including this class of science vessel. Even when it comes to commercial craft, there are many more fishing boats than factory fishing ships.
Even police boats outnumber submarines.
Sorry land-lubber, you didn't really know that one.
While there are certainly lots of naming honors intended solely for dead people, there are lots of others that are suitable for living people. The naming of watercraft traditionally does not require a person to be dead; historically there were many examples named after the person who paid for the ship, or somebody dear to them. There are other examples; buildings are named after dead people if the name is purely honorary, but often after living people if they were involved in the funding; or if their work inspired the building, and they're retired. Or if they're not retired, and will be hired to run the facility.
Most of the Sea Shepherd ships are named after the (living) donors funding them.
There is nothing "holy" about taking a poll for an advisory purpose, as was the case here. That you didn't understand, didn't check, and presumed something "holy" was violated says a lot about you, and nothing at all about the intended, published system they were using to name the ship.
David Attenborough remains vastly more well-known than McBoatface ever was. The entire educated English-speaking world knows who he is! A few people on the internet, news junkies, and locals in the UK know about Boatface.
The benefit isn't open-ended; most of the benefit of the PR is in the people who actually give a shit. If the people who don't give a shit look and point, that is harmless fun but perhaps not actually useful to their mission.