Matt Bradley’s great open letter to Judge Jacqueline Davies, who yesterday ensured Paul Chambers’s life would continue to be ruined for no good reason.

Standout part:

Paul Chambers knew his audience, and they knew him. To suggest that he should restrict his language on the basis that somebody else might accidentally see it, is to restrict the communications and language of every free individual in this country, for fear that they might be criminalised by the state. On a day when we wore poppies to remember those who fought and died, and continue to fight and die to protect our basic freedom, the court’s judgement made a mockery of their efforts.

Website road.cc reports:

A Queen’s Counsel who is also a keen cyclist is fighting a frustrating battle to have the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Metropolitan Police take action against a driver who threatened to kill him, despite having video footage of the incident.

The CPS says “there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction”. This is the same CPS who are fucking up the life of Paul Chambers for making a joke on Twitter (Telegraph) and that may take action against a Conservative councillor (Guardian) for a more ill-advised ‘joke’ on Twitter, where he suggested a columnist should be stoned to death.

As Adam Banks wryly noted on Twitter, the first of these things is menacing, but the CPS seemingly doesn’t care, because it’s not on Twitter. (Given his Twitter-based criticism of the CPS, I wish Adam well after he’s arrested and thrown into a dungeon.) Still, with IamSpartacus rapidly trending alongside messages (i.e. CLEAR AND OBVIOUS JOKES) regarding bombings and destruction, the CPS will soon have its work cut out. Precedent suggests it will have to arrest everyone making such tweets, unless it finally admits Chambers (and even Tory boy Gareth Compton) ultimately didn’t do anything untoward.

So there we have it: the CPS are a bunch of fucking idiots, out-of-touch judges don’t seem to understand that people can tell jokes on the internet, and 27-year-old Paul Chambers is fucked. As various sources report, Judge Jacqueline Davies bafflingly claimed:

The words in the message speak for themselves and they were sent at a time when the security threat to this country was substantial

The original tweet she’s referring to, which has subsequently cost Chambers his job and got him a conviction and hefty (now heftier) fine:

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

Only a complete fucking idiot would have taken that seriously in context, and I reckon Heresy Corner is right in saying Chambers has essentially been prosecuted for having an English sense of humour. The ruling itself is depressing and worrying in equal measure. Anyone who doesn’t think this verdict has far-reaching consequences in a country whose laws are based on precedent is deluded. This might not be so much mere CPS incompetence as drawing a line and saying—in the UK at least—you can NOT say these kinds of things online.

Until such time that sanity prevails, you can donate to the Paul Chambers fund. Here’s hoping he has more luck if he takes the case to the European courts.

In the UK, student fees are about to shoot up, making it significantly harder for anyone to go to university unless they have rich parents. Yesterday, coachloads of students went to London to march and protest, in what, according to those who was there, was a largely peaceful affair, punctuated with the odd bit of stupidity and violence.

At the time, people wondered why all of the news outlets were focussing on the violence rather than, say, the issues, or the fact the vast majority of students were peacefully protesting. (Anyone remember that great photo from, I think, a G20 protest, where a guy about to chuck something through a window is surrounded by dozens of photo-journalists? Ah, here we go—one of many) Today, though, all becomes clear, as the BBC reports Prime Tory David Cameron has used the violence to cunningly distract from the reasons behind the protests.

I think we’ve also got to ask ourselves some questions. This level of violence was largely unexpected and what lessons can we learn for the future.

I imagine that could go one of two ways. It either gives the Tories and their Lib-Dem chums a chance to clamp down on protests, under the guise of public order and safety, or the lesson could be to essentially ensure some unrest in future protests. After all, that is all any news outlets are talking about this morning, rather than tuition fees rising to ‘up to’ £9,000 per year.

Android fans keep arguing that seven inches is all you need, and Apple’s ten-inch iPad is overkill, ignoring the very obvious fact that Apple must have created hundreds of prototypes before deciding on the iPad’s form factor. (Clearly, the fact even Google admits Android’s not suited for ten-inch screens is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT.)

Gizmodo just reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Aside from the box-quote strap—“A Pocketable Train Wreck”—Matt Buchanan nails what the problems are with all these seven-inch iPad wannabes:

If you take iPhone apps and simply scale them up for the iPad, most of them don’t feel right. If you take Android apps and scale them up for the Tab, the majority of them—Twitter, Facebook, Angry Birds—work perfectly. That’s because the Galaxy Tab is small enough that apps simply blown up a little bit still fundamentally work. Which means, conversely, that there’s almost no added benefit to using the Tab over a phone.

And while the iPad’s keyboard—especially in landscape—enables seasoned users to type at speed, things change dramatically as you move from a 4:3 ten-inch display to a widescreen seven-inch display:

In portrait, it’s like tapping on a massive, nerdy phone. In landscape, it’s just dumb. You still have to thumb type, only you’re stretching out further, and text entry swallows up the entire screen. […] In other words, you get the worst of a phone’s input problems—amplified.

Along with calling some of the default apps “Chinatown knockoffs of Cupertino software”, Buchanan suggests the Tab is:

[…] like a compromise’s evil twin, merging the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone. It has all of the input problems of a tablet, with almost none of the consumption benefits.

On first seeing the slew of seven-inch tablets, I wondered if this would be the case, and, unsurprisingly, it is. Sadly for the hardware guys, this isn’t easily fixable either—most of the issues are simply down to the form factor being wrong for most use-scenarios and input types.

Here’s hoping someone sees the light and starts challenging Apple next year with a full-size tablet, because only that will drive Apple to improving the iPad with any urgency.