Meeja!

In the latest O'Reilly catalogue, I was rather amused to find an entry for The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein, which weighs in at 240 pages. A system set up to use 140 character messages that needs a 240-page book to explain it seems rather funny to me. But perhaps I am an old cynic?

Buy your own copy here if you feel the need.

The radio news is full of MPs bleating about how unfair it is that the rules on reasonable expenses have been changed after the fact. It's called retrospective legislation chaps - just like the rules that have been introduced by this government that put us ordinary mortals at a disadvantage. Tax laws are replete with retrospective changes to close loopholes introduced by the poor drafting of legislation in the first place - for example, the infamous (if you are a contractor) Section 58.

Funnily enough, this page makes almost the same the point I was going to:

"One former contractor ... commented 'How would some Cabinet Ministers feel if the rules on MPs expenses were changed retrospectively and they were forced to pay back all the money they had claimed for so called second homes? Apparently, it is OK for them to use loopholes in the rules but it is not OK for the rest of us.' "

I assume this item isn't a wind -up - it seems to suggest that none of us needs to pick up a camera again, since this clever product can trawl the web for sunsets, kittens in baskets, naked ladies and all the other elements of an appealing picture, and combine them before your very eyes! If this is for real and it takes off, it will unleash a whole lot more breast-beating in the photographic community about veracity and integrity - not to mention the wails of those whose copyrighted images have been sliced and diced!