In May, UK citizen Paul Chambers was convicted of sending a ‘menacing’ tweet via Twitter, with the British Court fining him £2500 and slapping him with a criminal record.
In early January, the airport in South Yorkshire was closed due to excessive snow and Chambers was so mad that he wrote: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”
Airport security officials saw the tweet and then passed on the complaint to the local authorities.
Chambers lost his job after being arrested, and was the first person to ever be convicted of a crime just for tweeting.
This week, a judge has refused to overturn the conviction, effectively ending Chamber’s appeal.
The judge then yelled at the courtroom as a number of those sitting in the crowd were tweeting updates as the case progressed.
Thousands of Chamber’s supporters took to Twitter after the decision, using the “trending topic” #IAmSpartacus to post menacing messages, with some threatening to blow up the White House, Downing Street, “everyone” and all other types of nouns.
Result for: Son
Intel has slashed the prices on their range of SSDs today, as well as adding a new, larger 120GB version to the line.
The line of X25-M maninstream drives will each see a solid discount as the holiday season approaches.
Starting with the 160GB model, the MSRP will drop to $415, the 80GB model will drop to $200 and the small 40GB will drop to $100.
The new 120GB model will sell for $250. The new version will offer the best per/GB value of the entire line.
For now the new prices seem effective only in the U.S., but expect it to be extended to the U.K., as well.
Result for: Son
A claim made that an Apple iPhone exploded in France is the first such report involving an iPhone, after several have been made about the company’s iPod since it was released. Marie-Dominique Kolega says her 18 year old son was struck in the eye after his girlfriend’s iPhone started hissing, and shattered. She has threatened to file a complaint against Apple over the incident.
“My son was frightened but he did not lose an eye,” Kolega, of Aix-en-Provence in southern France, told AFP. US television station KIRO recently did a report on a number of cases of exploding iPods that have led to injuries or property damage. The station claimed that Apple’s lawyers had tried to prevent it from getting access to 800 pages of documents from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in California.
In the pages were information about 15 burn and fire-related incidents that have been blamed on Apple’s iPods. The documents put the blame on overheating lithium-ion batteries, and stated that reports dropped off when Apple changed the batteries in use.
Electronics do bad things on occasion, but if you compare the number of reported iPod exploding cases, which would appear to be a low number, against the millions that have been sold, the chances of becoming victim to an exploding iPod - or iPhone - are probably extremely low, it just makes for good TV for a station like KIRO.
