Judge Struggles to Grasp Newfangled Idea Called “The Internet.”
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
It’s a story worthy of The Onion — the scary part is that apparently, it’s for real. From MSNBC:
LONDON – A British judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like “Web site” in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet. Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.
“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws. Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”
I’ll bet he doesn’t read Concurring Opinions, either.
May 16, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Posted in: Weird
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Responses (1)
Jason - May 16, 2007 at 10:06 pm
You know, I’m not sure this is so “scary.” There are a lot of terms that people throw around without necessarily thinking about it, even if they use them. Particularly people of a certain age, such as this judge, might use the web without ever considering the distinction between a “web site” and a “web page” and whatever else kids are calling them these days.
Even assuming the judge uses the Internet for anything, there’s a good chance that 99% of his usage is email – in which case, why on earth would he know what a “forum” is?
Hell, I was thinking about BBS the other day, and then my reminisces took me to the early days of Usenet and the great discussions we had on alt.math. It makes me rue the downfall of such places in favor of xoxohth and other sites using awful code like Slash and BBCode. You know, I could probably whip up a quick Perl CGI script, or maybe a PHP app using MySQL on the backend, to make a better discussion forum than you generally see out there these days. I’d let people subscribe to specific threads using Atom feeds, and I’d make sure the entire thing was XML-compliant and also passed W3C HTML standards.
Everyone follow me?
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