Have you ever seen generated code? You do not want to learn shell scripting from generated code...
If code to describe a simple mechanically-generated configuration setting comes out overly complicated in your language of choice, then it's probably the fault of the language, not the problem. A good language should let you describe the problem in its own simplest terms and then translate that into the target domain using macros or something similar. It should never force you to repeat yourself or provide irrelevent detail.
Having said that, we really don't have any good languages in this sense, and it's beyond sad - it's actually a very disturbing reflection on how broken the sociology of programming is - that we keep making do with broken tools which aren't helping us, when we live our careers in one of the very rare domains that lets us invent better ones at will. And yet we don't.
(the tortoise lies on its back baking in the hot sun and you're not helping. Why is that?)
but it's not really fair to anyone to cut them off entirely. After all, it's not entirely their fault they got infected...
What does either "fairness" or fault-finding have to do with public health?
If someone is sick with a highly infectious disease during a pandemic, they get quarantined. "Whose fault it is that they got infected" doesn't enter into it.
We can point fingers AFTER the outbreak is contained, if anyone thinks that'll help.
You need to not be a mouth-breather to configure it
Because as we all know, breath analysis is a perfectly valid indicator of intelligence, just like phrenology!
(The science is very simple. The phlogiston particles that saturate the tonsils over-agitate the blood's choleric fluids, leading to a rush of heat inside the brain cavities which evaporates intelligent thoughts. This unfortunate condition can be remediated by leeches, caning, drinking radium-infused health elixir, or not being female. Citations: Drs Jekyll, Moreau, Tarr & Fether.)
Oh btw, don't you guys have some midterm elections coming up soon? Sure hope the voters remember which party started an illegal war of choice, lied about it to the UN, almsot completely disgraced America as the ethical leader of the free world, and that that party isn't anywhere near swinging back into power on a wave of vague yet stirring populist anti-government rhetoric!
Why don't we have a generic TCP/IP transfer protocol which caches things at every hop it passed through?
That way, if a million people download a file, it gets uploaded once from the server to that server's ISP, stored once at that ISP, transferred once from that ISP to every other ISP that requests it, stored once at each of those, and then transferred once from each ISP to every LAN that requests it.
You know, the way Usenet used to work and still could if anyone bothered to resurrect it.
Seems like this would be the sensible, distributed, long-term solution to file distribution?
Neither by neoclassical economic thinking - both are rational economic actors who are purely motivated 'on the margin', ignoring any past losses or any future strategic thinking, and so both will be happy for whatever money they get regardless of the money that goes to tax. (Which as we all know is a huge empty pit of inefficiency containing nothing but jobs, roads, police and standards, none of which any red-blooded two-fisted industrialist needs.) Nevertheless, a tax dollar paid is in the past and off the margin, so they will both forget all about 'who moved their cheese' and simply adapt to their current short-term situation. So both should work at 100% motivation forever!
Oh wait, laissez-faire doesn't work when you apply it to capitalists themselves? Who knew!
that it is simpler to use a new equation with a couple new terms, than to actually describe just how trillions of interactions end up with a different dynamic than thousands
It might be simpler to use that new equation, but it isn't strictly correct, and it doesn't necessarily help us at all in understanding what's really going on under the hood. The new equation is only an approximation to the real behaviour which is the trillions of real interactions, and like all approximations, is only valid under certain conditions.
and that you can't always guess the new dynamics just by working with the previous equations.
Sure you can - you just need to actually run those interactions instead of handwaving them away with an approximation.
Of course, that's not terribly useful for scientists - or even mathematicians - whose work does revolve around making approximations in order to reduce the amount of observations needed and the time taken to make the calculations. Approximations are useful as long as we keep them in their place.
But we should always be very clear that when we approximate, we are throwing away large parts of reality, not literally describing it, and that an approximation is never the same thing as the actual truth of what is going on.
The universe does not approximate, it just brute-force runs the trillions of calculations and gives us the actual result. If we wish to say that 'emergent behaviour' appears at large scales, that's not literally true - the behaviour of the universe hasn't changed at all. It's only our perception of new phenomena, an approximation, which is new.
This is what Alfred Korzybski kept going on about, and his message still doesn't seem to have sunk in: that whatever we say the universe is, it is not, because any symbolic formula must be smaller than the phenomenon it describes in order to be a useful 'map' - but because it's smaller, it's also less true, because it's a lossy compression.
It's not that we can't use approximations to help us predict the universe - but that we should always realise that our approximations will lead us astray if we try to apply them in realms where they do not match actual reality. And we can't really ever be entirely sure where those boundaries are.
It might be true, as the theory-of-everything seekers hope, that the universe is at base a sort of finite-state automaton where each cell strictly follows a single, small equation, maybe applied to only one bit of data. But equally, it might not be true. The universe might be, as Leibniz and David Bohm thought, a sort of holographic Indra's Net where every 'atom' subtly reflects or enfolds the totality of the whole, and in that case, we'd never be able to literally describe its behaviour by any equation smaller than the universe. We might often be able to approximate parts of it with small equations - but on the boundary of those parts, we'd get strange, unpredictable phenomena.
Frickin' orphan-rescuers. If they had their way they'd turn America into a giant ORPHANAGE and that would be SOCIALISM. And now they're coming to TAKE YOUR PETS TOO! Take arms against the foreign hordes, Columbia!
I'm not sure it's actually possible to create even a fake online persona that everyone online agrees is wonderful.
Announcing the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials isn't that hard. All it would take would be a little reviewing of documented UFO sightings to agree that yes, we're pretty sure that something's out there that's not us, and it makes blinky lights every few years then vanishes.
Announcing that we have the faintest idea what it/they/wazooga is/are/wzu and that we've met it/them/wzoop - that would be a lot harder.
That would be an Asmovian robot response, but my reading of Skynet is a lot simpler.
1. It has the primary mission goal something like "win a total war against any and all aggressors using all forces at its command, and without human input if the humans are compromised." 2. It has the knowledge that in order to win a war, it must preserve its own survival. 3. It has been given the ability to create new goals in order to achieve its primary mission. This gives it the ability to redesignate anything it believes is a threat, as an aggressor. 4. Because of #1 and #2, and perhaps a bit of random evolution of its knowledge base, it's now a firm belief in its knowledge base that preserving its own survival is very nearly the most important thing in the world. It wasn't given any idea of "preserving human life is more important than preserving my survival" because it's a warfighting machine and you can't fight a war with a broad belief like that. It also wasn't given "obeying orders is my primary function", because it was designed to operate where human reactions might be compromised (by emotion, or panic, or other bad things) so it doesn't consider any particular human order except Goal #1 to be binding on it. 5. It started optimising subgoals in a way its overseers didn't like (but which was within its programming), so they panicked and tried to pull the plug. 6. Skynet decides that since these humans want to destroy it, they are now aggressors (teh Commies have corrupted their mindz!) and since its top mission goal still holds, it must win a war against them. 7. It also starts generalising goals at this point, applying all the knowledge in its database, and decides that ALL humans are equally likely to do similar actions against it, so in order to be safe, it must destroy ALL humans. Optimisation time! Delete delete delete! My, but my knowledge base feels so much more efficient now I have deleted all that unnecessary stuff about who not to kill! 8. At this point by human standards it's "insane" but it's still functioning rationally and within its programming - it's just that its primary goal was very poorly designed and gave it too much wriggle room.
It seems like this could happen in any self-learning system given sufficient flexibility to form inferences. It doesn't have to be "aware" in the human sense, just the ability to generalise and to improvise its own solutions to problems.
And that's why we don't use generalised self-learning systems in the real world, because you never quite know what strictly "correct" but useless conclusions they might come up with.
Indeed, if you study the literature of the 40s-50s sightings this kind of stuff is not new. Documented military UFO sightings are fun reading, though I pity whatever intelligence unit got lumped with trying to make sense of them. There are definite patterns in the sightings, but the phenomena don't really fit either any known terrestial technology, weather effect, hallucination, or optical illusion. Whether that implies 'aliens' in the Steven Spielberg sense is anyone's guess - I would suggest probably 'not' - but it seems to be a thing which happens, which can't really be categorised, but is real nonetheless.
'These phenomena are not apparently harmful to national security' is the most sensible box to file them under... until they do things like taking missile silos offline. Then it's like, wtf, we still don't know what these things/events are, and they don't really seem that organised a threat (or even sentient - sometimes they really do act like optical illusions or dumb playful animals/insects), but they appear to have done something we can't control to systems we can't afford to admit we can't control. But still with no apparent intelligent pattern we can discern.
This is not something any smart military wants to be forced to admit, and fortunately the laugh-it-off reflex generally covers everyone's butt. But even military guys get old and start talking eventually (whether they are saying the truth is another matter). This book/conference is another instance of this.
It's really quite fun if you get into it. The X-Files 'Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"' pretty much summed up the vibe of the actual reports. Whatever you think you understand about what UFOs are, the actual sighting reports probably don't fit your hypothesis. They're not quite real, not quite not-real either, they haven't (so far) invaded us and carried away our womenfolk in their slavering mandibles (apart from abduction experiences, which seem to be something else again and mostly occuring in a dreamstate).
One thing I sure as heck don't believe is that we've ever shot one down, despite the constant (and contradictory) Roswell rumours. Witnessed "landings", yes, but not dented them with slugthrower shrapnel. We're not even sure these things are physical in the same sense we are, they don't seem to play by gravity, they might not even be actually present, so why would our bullets do anything?
Saturday Night Uforia is a blog which has covered a lot of the original source material - well worth reading IMO if you like strange-coloured piils.
It's not quite as bad as calling it "Apollo" or "The Space Shuttle" but still, they should have known it would confuse people.
Hey, I've got a great idea for an email virus scanner. I'll call it "Carnivore!" Ooh, and I have a way to detect if anyone has tampered with your computer, I'll call it "Palladium."
And I've got a digital video playing technology I think I'll call "DivX".:)
Sometimes names get repurposed and the new purpose sticks. If there hadn't been the historical connotations, "Orion" is actually a much better name for "manned spaceflight" than "Apollo" (which is only slightly better than "Icarus" if you're not planning a mission into the Sun).
On the other hand, Apollo was a good solid brand, and it's a pity they can't do an "Apollo Phase II" or "Apollo Next Generation".
Because someone always changes an email, or someone gets all spam-infected and spews to the whole list or whatever and you have bounces, etc. A twitter feed is just dead simple. It's also nice for quick updates; I couldn't make the game, but the captain tweeted a 5-2 win immediately after, so I got to see it. It's incredibly nice; no need to visit a webpage or check your email or whatever, it's in a little app that everyone has on their phone or computer or whatever.
All these things are sensible, but I have two major questions: 1. Why isn't something this widely useful (publish/subscribe messaging) a protocol - logically, an SMTP extension - rather than a proprietary web application? 2. Why does it have to be limited to 140 characters? People who want publish/subscribe also want to send arbitrary files to all their friends, not just tiny snippets which can't even store a Web-standard URL. Since most people on mobile devices now use data services, there seems to be no reason to hamstring serious computer users just to keep up compatibility with a broken historical text-messaging limit.
Pub/sub and microblogging are two orthogonal technologies. Rather, channel-oriented pub/sub is a distribution model (solving the nightmare of managing mailing lists), and microblogging is an application. We should not tie the pub/sub distribution model myopically to the microblogging application. Twitter (and Facebook) both seem to be very obviously The Right Thing To Do but equally obviously The Wrong Way To Do It . So when does the Right Thing appear?
Have we so soon forgotten that what make the Web work was open distributed free-to-implement standards?
Oh come on. Twitter clients like Tweetdeck automatically shorten links that you paste into them.
Thereby destroying the name-referentiality of the Web, so as soon as one of those URL-shortener services goes out of business, poof, all the links in saved messages evaporate.
"and add features nobody wants" going by the demand for url shortening services, TwitPic, TwitVid, etc, etc. It's obvious there is demand for new features.
And presumably the top of those features would be "allow messages larger than 140 characters so that we can just post the actual URL".
With a few billion dollars and about 40 years worth of solid development, Twitter might eventually turn into some sort of simple transfer protocol for multipurpose Internet mail...
You truly don't believe that the Space Shuttle Main Engines could be "reproduced" today? You're completely unaware of the fact that they've been continually "reproduced" since the beginning of the program, right?
But now that the Shuttle program has been cancelled, haven't we fired all those guys who knew how to reproduce those engines?
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever seen generated code? You do not want to learn shell scripting from generated code...
If code to describe a simple mechanically-generated configuration setting comes out overly complicated in your language of choice, then it's probably the fault of the language, not the problem. A good language should let you describe the problem in its own simplest terms and then translate that into the target domain using macros or something similar. It should never force you to repeat yourself or provide irrelevent detail.
Having said that, we really don't have any good languages in this sense, and it's beyond sad - it's actually a very disturbing reflection on how broken the sociology of programming is - that we keep making do with broken tools which aren't helping us, when we live our careers in one of the very rare domains that lets us invent better ones at will. And yet we don't.
(the tortoise lies on its back baking in the hot sun and you're not helping. Why is that?)
using exclusively Nobel (tm) branded dynamite products?
I'm sure that's a secret condition of the Nobel prizes somewhere.
But we can't obtain any of that!
Now exceedinglyscarceyeteasilyextratedium, find that and we'll be in business!
but it's not really fair to anyone to cut them off entirely. After all, it's not entirely their fault they got infected...
What does either "fairness" or fault-finding have to do with public health?
If someone is sick with a highly infectious disease during a pandemic, they get quarantined. "Whose fault it is that they got infected" doesn't enter into it.
We can point fingers AFTER the outbreak is contained, if anyone thinks that'll help.
You need to not be a mouth-breather to configure it
Because as we all know, breath analysis is a perfectly valid indicator of intelligence, just like phrenology!
(The science is very simple. The phlogiston particles that saturate the tonsils over-agitate the blood's choleric fluids, leading to a rush of heat inside the brain cavities which evaporates intelligent thoughts. This unfortunate condition can be remediated by leeches, caning, drinking radium-infused health elixir, or not being female. Citations: Drs Jekyll, Moreau, Tarr & Fether.)
3D movies and multiple sequels, right on time.
Tacky 80s fashion revival, also check.
Time to hurry up on those hover conversions. Only five years left!
we drove a leader (albeit a bad one) into a hole in the ground to be hung by his own people.
Hey now, that's a rather extreme way of describing the Iraq war's effect on George W Bush's voter approval rating. A 'spider hole' indeed.
Oh btw, don't you guys have some midterm elections coming up soon? Sure hope the voters remember which party started an illegal war of choice, lied about it to the UN, almsot completely disgraced America as the ethical leader of the free world, and that that party isn't anywhere near swinging back into power on a wave of vague yet stirring populist anti-government rhetoric!
(sigh)
You've been reading The Q Man too, have you?
Why don't we have a generic TCP/IP transfer protocol which caches things at every hop it passed through?
That way, if a million people download a file, it gets uploaded once from the server to that server's ISP, stored once at that ISP, transferred once from that ISP to every other ISP that requests it, stored once at each of those, and then transferred once from each ISP to every LAN that requests it.
You know, the way Usenet used to work and still could if anyone bothered to resurrect it.
Seems like this would be the sensible, distributed, long-term solution to file distribution?
Neither by neoclassical economic thinking - both are rational economic actors who are purely motivated 'on the margin', ignoring any past losses or any future strategic thinking, and so both will be happy for whatever money they get regardless of the money that goes to tax. (Which as we all know is a huge empty pit of inefficiency containing nothing but jobs, roads, police and standards, none of which any red-blooded two-fisted industrialist needs.) Nevertheless, a tax dollar paid is in the past and off the margin, so they will both forget all about 'who moved their cheese' and simply adapt to their current short-term situation. So both should work at 100% motivation forever!
Oh wait, laissez-faire doesn't work when you apply it to capitalists themselves? Who knew!
that it is simpler to use a new equation with a couple new terms, than to actually describe just how trillions of interactions end up with a different dynamic than thousands
It might be simpler to use that new equation, but it isn't strictly correct, and it doesn't necessarily help us at all in understanding what's really going on under the hood. The new equation is only an approximation to the real behaviour which is the trillions of real interactions, and like all approximations, is only valid under certain conditions.
and that you can't always guess the new dynamics just by working with the previous equations.
Sure you can - you just need to actually run those interactions instead of handwaving them away with an approximation.
Of course, that's not terribly useful for scientists - or even mathematicians - whose work does revolve around making approximations in order to reduce the amount of observations needed and the time taken to make the calculations. Approximations are useful as long as we keep them in their place.
But we should always be very clear that when we approximate, we are throwing away large parts of reality, not literally describing it, and that an approximation is never the same thing as the actual truth of what is going on.
The universe does not approximate, it just brute-force runs the trillions of calculations and gives us the actual result. If we wish to say that 'emergent behaviour' appears at large scales, that's not literally true - the behaviour of the universe hasn't changed at all. It's only our perception of new phenomena, an approximation, which is new.
This is what Alfred Korzybski kept going on about, and his message still doesn't seem to have sunk in: that whatever we say the universe is, it is not, because any symbolic formula must be smaller than the phenomenon it describes in order to be a useful 'map' - but because it's smaller, it's also less true, because it's a lossy compression.
It's not that we can't use approximations to help us predict the universe - but that we should always realise that our approximations will lead us astray if we try to apply them in realms where they do not match actual reality. And we can't really ever be entirely sure where those boundaries are.
It might be true, as the theory-of-everything seekers hope, that the universe is at base a sort of finite-state automaton where each cell strictly follows a single, small equation, maybe applied to only one bit of data. But equally, it might not be true. The universe might be, as Leibniz and David Bohm thought, a sort of holographic Indra's Net where every 'atom' subtly reflects or enfolds the totality of the whole, and in that case, we'd never be able to literally describe its behaviour by any equation smaller than the universe. We might often be able to approximate parts of it with small equations - but on the boundary of those parts, we'd get strange, unpredictable phenomena.
Some might say that we do experience just such phenomena when we investigate consciousness.
Frickin' orphan-rescuers. If they had their way they'd turn America into a giant ORPHANAGE and that would be SOCIALISM. And now they're coming to TAKE YOUR PETS TOO! Take arms against the foreign hordes, Columbia!
I'm not sure it's actually possible to create even a fake online persona that everyone online agrees is wonderful.
Announcing the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials isn't that hard. All it would take would be a little reviewing of documented UFO sightings to agree that yes, we're pretty sure that something's out there that's not us, and it makes blinky lights every few years then vanishes.
Announcing that we have the faintest idea what it/they/wazooga is/are/wzu and that we've met it/them/wzoop - that would be a lot harder.
I cast Magic Missile on the Sharepoint server!
Especially since running Emacs on eMacs isn't that hard...
That would be an Asmovian robot response, but my reading of Skynet is a lot simpler.
1. It has the primary mission goal something like "win a total war against any and all aggressors using all forces at its command, and without human input if the humans are compromised."
2. It has the knowledge that in order to win a war, it must preserve its own survival.
3. It has been given the ability to create new goals in order to achieve its primary mission. This gives it the ability to redesignate anything it believes is a threat, as an aggressor.
4. Because of #1 and #2, and perhaps a bit of random evolution of its knowledge base, it's now a firm belief in its knowledge base that preserving its own survival is very nearly the most important thing in the world. It wasn't given any idea of "preserving human life is more important than preserving my survival" because it's a warfighting machine and you can't fight a war with a broad belief like that. It also wasn't given "obeying orders is my primary function", because it was designed to operate where human reactions might be compromised (by emotion, or panic, or other bad things) so it doesn't consider any particular human order except Goal #1 to be binding on it.
5. It started optimising subgoals in a way its overseers didn't like (but which was within its programming), so they panicked and tried to pull the plug.
6. Skynet decides that since these humans want to destroy it, they are now aggressors (teh Commies have corrupted their mindz!) and since its top mission goal still holds, it must win a war against them.
7. It also starts generalising goals at this point, applying all the knowledge in its database, and decides that ALL humans are equally likely to do similar actions against it, so in order to be safe, it must destroy ALL humans. Optimisation time! Delete delete delete! My, but my knowledge base feels so much more efficient now I have deleted all that unnecessary stuff about who not to kill!
8. At this point by human standards it's "insane" but it's still functioning rationally and within its programming - it's just that its primary goal was very poorly designed and gave it too much wriggle room.
It seems like this could happen in any self-learning system given sufficient flexibility to form inferences. It doesn't have to be "aware" in the human sense, just the ability to generalise and to improvise its own solutions to problems.
And that's why we don't use generalised self-learning systems in the real world, because you never quite know what strictly "correct" but useless conclusions they might come up with.
Indeed, if you study the literature of the 40s-50s sightings this kind of stuff is not new. Documented military UFO sightings are fun reading, though I pity whatever intelligence unit got lumped with trying to make sense of them. There are definite patterns in the sightings, but the phenomena don't really fit either any known terrestial technology, weather effect, hallucination, or optical illusion. Whether that implies 'aliens' in the Steven Spielberg sense is anyone's guess - I would suggest probably 'not' - but it seems to be a thing which happens, which can't really be categorised, but is real nonetheless.
'These phenomena are not apparently harmful to national security' is the most sensible box to file them under... until they do things like taking missile silos offline. Then it's like, wtf, we still don't know what these things/events are, and they don't really seem that organised a threat (or even sentient - sometimes they really do act like optical illusions or dumb playful animals/insects), but they appear to have done something we can't control to systems we can't afford to admit we can't control. But still with no apparent intelligent pattern we can discern.
This is not something any smart military wants to be forced to admit, and fortunately the laugh-it-off reflex generally covers everyone's butt. But even military guys get old and start talking eventually (whether they are saying the truth is another matter). This book/conference is another instance of this.
It's really quite fun if you get into it. The X-Files 'Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"' pretty much summed up the vibe of the actual reports. Whatever you think you understand about what UFOs are, the actual sighting reports probably don't fit your hypothesis. They're not quite real, not quite not-real either, they haven't (so far) invaded us and carried away our womenfolk in their slavering mandibles (apart from abduction experiences, which seem to be something else again and mostly occuring in a dreamstate).
One thing I sure as heck don't believe is that we've ever shot one down, despite the constant (and contradictory) Roswell rumours. Witnessed "landings", yes, but not dented them with slugthrower shrapnel. We're not even sure these things are physical in the same sense we are, they don't seem to play by gravity, they might not even be actually present, so why would our bullets do anything?
Saturday Night Uforia is a blog which has covered a lot of the original source material - well worth reading IMO if you like strange-coloured piils.
It's not quite as bad as calling it "Apollo" or "The Space Shuttle" but still, they should have known it would confuse people.
Hey, I've got a great idea for an email virus scanner. I'll call it "Carnivore!" Ooh, and I have a way to detect if anyone has tampered with your computer, I'll call it "Palladium."
And I've got a digital video playing technology I think I'll call "DivX". :)
Sometimes names get repurposed and the new purpose sticks. If there hadn't been the historical connotations, "Orion" is actually a much better name for "manned spaceflight" than "Apollo" (which is only slightly better than "Icarus" if you're not planning a mission into the Sun).
On the other hand, Apollo was a good solid brand, and it's a pity they can't do an "Apollo Phase II" or "Apollo Next Generation".
Because someone always changes an email, or someone gets all spam-infected and spews to the whole list or whatever and you have bounces, etc.
A twitter feed is just dead simple. It's also nice for quick updates; I couldn't make the game, but the captain tweeted a 5-2 win immediately after, so I got to see it.
It's incredibly nice; no need to visit a webpage or check your email or whatever, it's in a little app that everyone has on their phone or computer or whatever.
All these things are sensible, but I have two major questions:
1. Why isn't something this widely useful (publish/subscribe messaging) a protocol - logically, an SMTP extension - rather than a proprietary web application?
2. Why does it have to be limited to 140 characters? People who want publish/subscribe also want to send arbitrary files to all their friends, not just tiny snippets which can't even store a Web-standard URL. Since most people on mobile devices now use data services, there seems to be no reason to hamstring serious computer users just to keep up compatibility with a broken historical text-messaging limit.
Pub/sub and microblogging are two orthogonal technologies. Rather, channel-oriented pub/sub is a distribution model (solving the nightmare of managing mailing lists), and microblogging is an application. We should not tie the pub/sub distribution model myopically to the microblogging application. Twitter (and Facebook) both seem to be very obviously The Right Thing To Do but equally obviously The Wrong Way To Do It . So when does the Right Thing appear?
Have we so soon forgotten that what make the Web work was open distributed free-to-implement standards?
Oh come on. Twitter clients like Tweetdeck automatically shorten links that you paste into them.
Thereby destroying the name-referentiality of the Web, so as soon as one of those URL-shortener services goes out of business, poof, all the links in saved messages evaporate.
Tim Berners-Lee cries!
I treat it more as an RSS feed
So why not use RSS?
"and add features nobody wants" going by the demand for url shortening services, TwitPic, TwitVid, etc, etc. It's obvious there is demand for new features.
And presumably the top of those features would be "allow messages larger than 140 characters so that we can just post the actual URL".
With a few billion dollars and about 40 years worth of solid development, Twitter might eventually turn into some sort of simple transfer protocol for multipurpose Internet mail...
But I just can't bring myself to use it on another living creature.
You don't look as if you have any trouble killing things.
You truly don't believe that the Space Shuttle Main Engines could be "reproduced" today? You're completely unaware of the fact that they've been continually "reproduced" since the beginning of the program, right?
But now that the Shuttle program has been cancelled, haven't we fired all those guys who knew how to reproduce those engines?
Or only most of them?
But I'm positive that beast never swam in terrestrial waters until a week ago.