If this is all there is to it, then the company screwed up big time. They could have ignored the tweet. They could have apologised and said they were going to look into it. Instead, somehow between receiving the tweet, and going through the various layers, someone decided that threatening to call the police was a good idea. While this may have been a decision made by the PR person, that seems unlikely.

Of course the other possibility is that there's something that wasn't mentioned that changes things a lot.

PR departments follow their company twitter feed. If your feed is mentioned (i.e. someone types @SWA) it triggers an email or a notification depending on your settings.

Companies do follow their twitter feed, for mentions of their company and direct tags. I once got retweeted by Schipol airport because I mentioned how awesome it was that they had a library. A friend tweeted that she was being intimidated at a store car park and the store responded directly.

The problem is the amount of power it gives censors

It doesn't. It's voluntary and privately run. The government has no control over it. Cleanfeed is a much bigger concern, but nobody actually seems to care about that.

Also social pressure gets applied so that anybody who does not wish to be told what they may or may not view by the government is considered "deviant"

This clearly isn't happening.

I still think there's a strong possibility that this was intended to satisfy the vocal minority who wanted some sort of ISP level filtering, under the pretence of being a means to satisfy the vocal minority that wanted some sort of ISP level filtering. Anything else increasingly seems like tin-foil hat stuff.

4% of Virgin's customers is a pretty hefty number of people. We must be talking 10's or hundreds of thousands.

So those who want filters have filters. Those who don't want filters don't have filters.

I seriously don't see a problem here. Far too many slashdotters are so scared of any form of filtering that they object even to entirely voluntary filters, that are demonstrably nowhere near as hard to switch off as they originally claimed.

Being sued in Britain is less of a worry than the US though. They would have to actually prove damages rather than just prove infringement. Unless they somehow manage to argue that a person is responsible for any and all copies and descendents of the original, this will be a fairly modest amount.

If someone ended up having to pay £200 or so for illegally distributing a £10 movie to 20 people I'm not going to have a lot of sympathy for them.

You're right. There's absolutely no need for humans at the baggage drop, except perhaps one person offering assistance if people have problems.

Flew from Gatwick to Tromsà with Norweigian in December. It was fantastic! Self check-in machine printed off a sticker for my luggage. Placed it in an automated bag drop, and the only queueing I had to do was at the security theatre.

KLM has something similar. BA at Heathrow still has manned desks but the kiosks print out the sticker so it is just a case of dropping the bags/

For most websites, I really don't care. Here I use a dictionary word. If someone logs into my /. account the limit to the damage they can do is to pretend to be me. Hell, with this one they don't even get a valid email address.

My bank accounts and email address each have their own password based on out of date information that inexplicably stays in my memory.

I actually use a different password for facebook, nit because I'm particularly concerned about someone haking into that. More because I don't trust facebook with the password Iuse for everything else.

I think it's more common for it to be for shows that are nominated for awards. A full time movie reviewer is able to fit going to a cinema and watching a movie into his schedule, but the judges for the awards tend to have other jobs.

Well, you do suffer from a disproportionate part of your population wnting the Bible to be a science book. Sorry. It's kinda hard to remember that a lot of you guys are perfeectly reasonable when your national idiots make so much damn noise.

Last time I remember the public being involved in a name, we ended up calling a whale Mr. Splashy Pants.

So, perhaps we'll end up with a name like Gassyball of Frolics or something, but I'm sure the combined might of B3ta and 4chan will manage better.

It will be mostly for suborbital flights and non-equatorial orbits though, so the earth's spin is of limited use.

I bet department stores and gas stations do much more than that portion of their business by plastic. I bet sweetshops and toyshops deal with a lot of cash, because a large chunk of their customer base doesn't have plastic. Also greeting card shops, newspaper kiosks, and other institutions that deal with a lot of small transactions, because cash is more convenient for small purchases.

What does an Islington estate agent have to do with this?

Yes you're right. I didn't read that properly.

Although I think the summary oversimplifies things a lot. Skimming the actual paper, it looks like the Lovelace test is not a test in itself but a means to critique tests for AI. It could apply to a chatbot or a story writer or anything else.

So if I ask a chatbot "How many legs does a horse have", it would fail if it just looks up the answer in a database that contains "legs", "horse" and knows to give the answer "4" (because can trivially explain that), but if it has learned from earlier conversation what a horse is and what a leg is and comes up with a correct answer, it would pass, because I have no way of knowing the exact inputs it used. Something like that anyway.