No loss to have Google shut out. A week ago I noticed Google planting a tracking cookie on my machine while I searched for books on the local library site.
The King doesn't run the government or make laws. He's roughly in the same position as the Queen of England, a figurehead. She doesn't sit up nights searching the internet for nasty comments either... You can get into the same kind of trouble in Thailand by showing disrespect to any statue of the Buddha, (quite a few foreigners have landed in prison that way). You don't like a society built on respect? stay home.
Incidentally, the King was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making him technically a US citizen. He got his degree in Political Science at the Lausanne University of Switzerland.
Different cultures find different things important. Apparently it's legal in the US to burn the US flag, but anyone doing so would take a serious risk of being shot dead. And... the Thai King himself would never see or care about insulting comments. When you insult the King you insult the Thai people as a whole. If you did it on the street in Bangkok you'd be lucky to be arrested before a mob formed.
There's a huge cultural divide here. Thai people are Buddhist and one of Buddhism's basic tenets concerns Right Speech. You very rarely hear Thai people slanging others and they consider doing so extremely boorish. It's a culture of respect and the most respected man in the country is the King. Politicians exploit this when they can to accuse opponents of disrespect for the King, and it's no doubt being exploited here to justify internal spying that will be used to monitor political opponents. But Thai attitudes concerning disrespect are not "ridiculous".
The victim in the assault is his wife, but the penalties imposed by his team seriously damage her financially as much as they do him. Of the coverage I've seen, few sources have the slightest interest in her point of view, and those that do dismiss her statements as evidence of an "abused woman", a status which magically renders her opinion worthless. In the rush to give Rice a kicking she is getting trampled.
Misleading comparison. The world was wildly different in the 1800s, and only the wealthy had hours to spend playing anything. Frittering one's time away playing games would lead to disaster, and perhaps criminality.
To older people in our times, video games seem an embarrassingly onanistic addiction. Laboratory rats will ignore food and keep pressing the lever that gives their brains a shot of endorphins until they starve to death.
All memories are reconstructions, so the accuracy of any memory other than immediate is impossible to verify. What you see at any time is a construction, as your brain knits info from saccades together with the vague impressions the blurry areas outside saccade targets present. Memories are tagged with values, and those that are tagged as unimportant are deleted. When you're young everything is fascinating and important. As you get older less and less seems worthy of attention.
Millions of people around the world pound away at keyboards, hitting all the right notes without ever producing any music. Those who hear only notes and suppose that to be music are to be pitied.
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On the post: Thai Gov't Accused Of Instituting Mass Internet Surveillance... To See If You're Reading Anything The King Doesn't Like
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Incidentally, the King was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making him technically a US citizen. He got his degree in Political Science at the Lausanne University of Switzerland.
On the post: Thai Gov't Accused Of Instituting Mass Internet Surveillance... To See If You're Reading Anything The King Doesn't Like
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On the post: Thai Gov't Accused Of Instituting Mass Internet Surveillance... To See If You're Reading Anything The King Doesn't Like
On the post: Baltimore Ravens Meet Streisand Effect After Trying To Play 'Hide The Tweet'
On the post: That Time When People Thought Playing Chess Would Make You Violent
Video Games
To older people in our times, video games seem an embarrassingly onanistic addiction. Laboratory rats will ignore food and keep pressing the lever that gives their brains a shot of endorphins until they starve to death.
On the post: DailyDirt: Growing Brains
Memories
On the post: DailyDirt: Making Robot Musicians
Music
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