Judicial Ruling - Personal Humour, Not OK

From the BBC.

A man who posted a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport is facing a £3,000 bill after losing an appeal against his conviction.

£3,000?  What did he tweet?

The message Chambers sent to his 600 followers in the early hours of 6 January said: "Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

Three grand for that?

At his trial in May, Chambers was fined £385 and ordered to pay a £15 victim surcharge by a district judge.

 On Thursday he was also ordered to pay prosecution costs of £2,600.

Fear not.

After the hearing, actor and Twitter fan Stephen Fry tweeted that he would pay Chambers' fine.

He tweeted: "My offer still stands. Whatever they fine you, I'll pay."

I'd threaten to blow them up for you Mr Chambers, but I can't afford the legal bill.  Besides, "Side bar please your honour!"

Ermm, Your honour if for example the law for Common Assault requires

"Both in the common law and under statute, the actus reus of a common assault is committed when one person causes another to apprehend or fear that force is about to be used to cause some degree of personal contact and possible injury. There must be some quality of reasonableness to the apprehension on the part of the victim. If the physical contact is everyday social behaviour such as a handshake or friendly pat on the back, this is acceptable even though the victim may have a phobia although, if the defendant is aware of the psychological difficulty, this may be converted into an assault if the intention is to exploit the condition and embarrass the victim."

So, M'lud could you confirm for us please; I can spit a threatening promise to maybe kick someone in the nuts next week, but I can't make an obvious joke on twitter?...  Actually don't answer that M'lud, I rather stupidly forgot for a moment we were living in the UK.

Why People Hate Politicians - Part 2

Liar!

As per my earlier post, Iain Dale snatched a screenshot, and caught him redhanded.  When a few right-leaning and especially Tory bloggers have now taken issue, this particular MP has shown what he is made of, and has resorted to lying. 

This will backfire - you can't lie on the internet and get away with it forever.  It will turn up in the cache, or on another live-feed somewhere and when it does the reputation of our MPs will have been dragged even further into the gutter.  It's bad enough that an MP would equate Torys as "Scum-Scuking Pigs" but if you are going to do so, have the balls to own up to it.

Update 1: Tim Montgomorie has caught David Wright MP using a similar term before on Twitter - #Toryscum.  It seems he has form for this sort of thing!

Update 2: Iain Dale says Jonathan Sheppard has picked him up on tonights message, having retweeted the unsensored original.  The speed of honesty in the Internet age eh!

Why People Hate Politicians - The Mini Series

Pic Lifted from Iain Dale.

People are dying in Afghanistan, people are living in poverty here in this wealthy nation of ours, millions are out of work, millions of more no longer wish to work, those that do work are ignored by politicians yet exhorted by the tax office.  People have lost faith in politics and politicians with the exposure of the greedy and corrupt the nation's newest and most active past time, but David Wright MP thinks that his opponents are "scum-sucking pigs" and clearly in yet another Parliamentary recess he has nothing better to do than piss his time away and set for himself the loftiest of examples on Twitter.

David, I don't know who you are or what you have done in your political career but you are clearly one of the 646 that does not get 'it' and you are EXACTLY why people hate and distrust politicians.  I hope you lose your seat in the most humiliating and miserable fashion possible at the upcoming election and that BBC Election night run this twitter message across the screen as the results are announced.

Serious Twitterholic

My jaw dropped.  No new words needed, here's an extract of what I just read on the Telegraph:

As paramedics attempted to revive her son Bryson after he was found floating face down in a swimming pool, Shellie Ross sent out a message on Twitter , asking her followers: "Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool."

Five hours later, when her son was pronounced dead, she again took to the Twitter site to update her 5,000 followers.

"Remembering my million dollar baby," she wrote.

Moments later, she posted a photo of her son on the site.

Her use of Twitter as her son lay dying provoked outrage among the blogging community in the US.

Police in Florida said they were aware of the "tweets" and would be looking into them as part of their investigation into the drowning....

You can follow this detached technophobe on Twitter.

Too Much Info!

Google On Twitter: "You Suck"

Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google today told an assembly at Morgan Stanley that "Twitter is a poor man's email." I think this is unfair and a pretty unimaginative put down.

However, there does seem to be two separate schools of thought on Twitter, those who see the value and those who do not. A lot of Bloggers like Twitter as it par for the course and also because it is a good way to let people know of updates. I had 32 visits via Twitter in February, my seventh biggest referral site, so as a newbie and relatively small Blogger I can appreciate and measure it's value.

However, it just will never be that big a deal to people who don't to be kept that up-to-date. And those people will just be fed up hearing about it. Because of it's name it does not require too many braincells to quickly put it, and its users down.

My gut says that Twitter has not peaked yet, but probably will later in 2009 or early in 2010 when the phrase "it's this years Facebook" will probably start to drive us nuts. There could be more that could be gotten out of Twitter, as written about here. As and when we have Twitter firsts, such as first Twitter marriage proposals and people being fired by Twitter it will make the news more and more.

Of course, a few years from now, Twitter will be as popular and talked about as, well, Friends Reunited, or Netscape and we can all pretend that it was a fad that passed us by and we had not interest in. In the meantime though, you can follow me on Twitter by clicking here.

Twitter Feed

I have decided to take down the Twitter feed.

I am staying on twitter, but, having given it a go am finding that most of my updates are about the blog you are already reading. Thus, it's doesn't make too much sense (to me) to have updates about my blog appear in a Twitter feed at the top of my blog.

Sorry Twitternuts, I was never one for continuing a fad past my own short interests.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, feel free. Look me up as Danny1979.

I'm Twittering Too

I am not really one for jumping on the bandwagon when a new trend emerges. None the less, if it still counts as new, I am now on Twitter. I couldn't get daniel1979 as this was gone, so for Twittering purposes you can follow me there as danny1979.

You may have already noticed, but there is an automatic feed to the top of this blog.