Like the siblings pointed out, you see to be under the illusion that legalization would make it easier to obtain pot. That is not the case. There are huge distribution networks, which are often intermingled as well. (People who usually buy may start to grow, selling their excess hemp to their friends and/or dealers; there is also a lot of information exchange about where to get the best stuff for the best price etc.) It's very easy to get in touch with them. I'm a non-smoker but I could obtain some pot within a few hours.
The only thing legal cannabis changes is where the money goes. Currently much of it goes to organized crime because hey, the market is there and they have the means to serve it. Oh, and legalization would improve the quality of the hemp available because quality controls can be put into place now. And then there are the side effects like reduced spending on drug persecution, reduced spending on jails, fewer inmates who dont't even have the option of contributing to society...
Drugs can be nasty and cannabis with significant THC content certainly should be regulated. But outright banning it did absolutely nothing to curb its use and legalization will not make its use skyrocket. Of course since the whole campaign against hemp was probably an underhanded way of protecting the lumber and synthetic fiber industries, reduction of recreational use never was the intention anyway.
More plausible (in the context of a legalization wave) would be the legalization of drugs that have relatively benigh side effects, then the limited legalization of drugs known to have heavy side effects and/or to be strongly addictive. For instance, I'd expect MDMA to be available sooner and easier than morphine. Crack would probably always stay illegal, although not per se but because I expect it to be illegal to cut restricted drugs in unhealthy ways (just like you can't put any random stuff in your alcoholic beverage if you want to be able to sell it).
Anyone who isn't a desktop Windows user? Flash for OS X and Linux may be behind the Windows version with respect to performance but they're fully feature-compatible and as far as I know Adobe is working on hardware acceleration for *nixes. Silverlight, on the other hand, is simply not supported on non-Windows platforms; Moonlight is an independent project that Microsoft just happens to like.
If Silverlight were to replace Flash we'd see at best a half-assed Mono-based runtime on non-Windows systems. Of course that would probably kill the market for it as there are more compatible cross-platform video solutions and without Flash video a lot of people might decide to simply not bother installing the runtime.
(Of course this also means that Microsoft probably wouldn't be stupid enough to replace Flash with anything Windows-centric.)
thankfully, despite the relation, modern English mostly escapes this terrible behavior, compound words usually being limited to a combination of two separate words.
Unlike German, where we always use the pathological case.
Besides the fact that one can apparently stream together an arbitrary number adjectives and nouns (the order of which often seems to be immaterial), German has the grammatical gender of Latin based languages, but without the normally sensible, almost always predictable rules for applying gender; however, unlike most modernized Latin based languages, German retains three genders, again complicating issues.
German isn't a Romance language and neither is English. Both are Germanic languages, although English has undergone extensive crossbreeding with French, which has lead to a mix of Germanic and Romance elements. Germanic and Romance are completely different branches of the Indo-European language family.
Then, you have writers who have the unfortunate habit of including far too much information into a single sentence. Similar to poor English writers who have a tendency to include entire descriptive paragraphs into (parentheses), except those helpful punctuation, like the hyphen, are also omitted.
Overly long sentences are not language-specific and indeed the case can be made (and easily defended) that one can write impossibly long, but entirely correct - in both syntax and semantics -, sentences in any given language that doesn't heavily restrict the way sentences work, which most languages, such as English, don't.
As for punctuation being removed: I find the opposite to be true, with English being short on both hyphens (compound words are often just a string of separate words connected only by context) and commas (German tends to use commas to separate clauses; English only does so in certain cases).
It's invariably at the end of the sentence, on yonder page.
Invariably are English sentences constructed like this one. Grating it is, but since only one specific word ordering is ever allowed by all languages, nothing can ever be done about it. Or not. German does allow sentences á la "Er geht in den Wald" ("He walks into the forest") and they occur all the time.
All of this is indicative of a language designed to be spoken, and not written--which makes sense, because so precious few were literate whilst it was being created.
Unlike English, which was developed when the University of Oxford Linguistics Faculty decided to crossbreed German and French in the 1960s. No, wait, it evolved (and in some cases skipped evolution that happened to German) over centuries and much of the evolution happened in the Middle Ages when literacy was an optional skill for most.
Of course DTP software might use macros to do it even more elegantly (like LaTeX \hyphenation{}) but that basically amounts to a global search-and-replace that replaces all occurrences of the un-soft-hyphenated word with a soft-hyphenated version. And it realy doesn't work without a macro-capable markup language.
Flash for Linux and OS X will be replaced with twenty megabytes worth of infinite loops. Linux and Mac magazines will remark how the new Flash is more stable while offering the same level of performance as before.
Let's look at Germany. Germany is much less warlike than the USA because you beat that nonsense out of us. We won't need guns to invade another country because we won't invade another country*. A defensive army gets less of the ultra-cool high tech stuff so our equipment tends to be more on the...rustic side. So we're a bit less enamored with army equipment.
Let's look at day to day gun ownership. What are the two main reasons for owning guns in the United States? Self defense and the ability to overthrow the government if neccessary. Self defense is actually something where guns are a self-fulfilling prophecy: If everyone has guns then everyone has guns. In a country where gun laws have always been strict (such as Germany) most criminals won't carry them because a) getting them legally means getting the police's attention, b) getting them illegally is expensive and/or difficult and c) if the cops notice you have a gun you can be sure of their full attention; if they notice you do so illegally you're screwed.
So yes, strong gun laws from the beginning do create a society where non-gun defense methods aren't automatically outclassed. Plus, people aren't as likely to shoot you if they don't assume that you're going to shoot them. I lose the ability to deal as much damage (unless I get a permit and even then it's heavily restricted) but so does everyone else. Yes, organized crime does have guns but they're dangerous primarily because they're organized crime, not because of the guns.
As for overthrowing the government: One of the things the allies have taught us when they built modern Germany is that overthrowing the government is evil. If you intend to do so you're evil. Well, and we are fully aware that any insurrection not involving most or all citizens will probably be squashed anyway as modern armies have equipment modern civilians can't even dream of owning, gun laws or not. It's unlikely that a sympathizing billionaire would just happen to have a hundred air superiority fighters or state-of-the-art surface-to-air missiles in his bike shed.
Plus, what can you use guns for besides killing (or at least maiming)? Not much. I mean, a knife can double as a useful tool but if you use a gun as a tool you fully deserve the accident that will likely happen to you. Oh yeah, and hunting, which is just killing again. Since "KILLING IS BAD" is deeply ingrained in our minds we're not too keen on doing it. We do play violent video games but that's comparing a shooting range to running amok.
I guess the answer in a nutshell is that we place a very high value on human life. Taking it is something you do when you have absolutely no other option**. Thus devices with the primary purpose of killing people are something that doesn't belong in the hands of anyone but trained professionals (= soldiers, the police and permit holders; you don't get a permit easily over here).
Of course that also means that any gun not inside secure storage is presumed to be out of storage because the wielder intends to use it. Outside of a shooting club or a forest that pretty much means that the wielder is ready to kill someone. Since we're generally not ready to kill someone we tend to get nervous around someone who is.
Note that I don't see the situation through rose-tinted glasses. Strict gun control isn't automatically good. I was present when a burglar shot my brother in the leg and the strict gun laws worked against us - the gun looked kinda fake and it was much more likely to be a blank pistol***, thus we assumed it wasn't a threat and tossed the guy out the front door. Had we handled that guy differently my brother wouldn't have a metal plate in his leg today.
Then again, the burglar ran away after we tossed him out and he only shot when my brother took up pursuit; had he assumed we were a threat, he might have shot sooner. Such as when his gun was pointed at me. I'm really glad he found me non-threatening.
A classic case of a global economy confronting local norms and attitudes. Who is right and who is wrong?
In cases such as this (concerning the global use of local resources when equivalent resources can easily be obtained elsewhere) I'd say that the local norms and attitudes have precedence. You want what they have. They get to call the shots.
Things would be different if Libya was the sole provider of domain names, in which case an argument can be made that they should provide unregulated domain names for the benefit of mankind but they aren't so it can't.
Oh, we just mandate VTOL for all airplanes. Boeing and Airbus might object that it's difficult to build a VTOL plane with usable passenger and/or cargo space but that's a technological hurdle they'll have to take on our eternal quest for safety from terrorism.
Easily fixed. Everything within five miles of an airport is declared a restricted area with access without permission being a felony. The area is surrounded by high walls and the roads leading to the airport run inside tunnels so it's not easy to enter the area. If any (parts of) cities happen to lie within the area then people will have to relocate and pay for the costs of their houses being demolished. Tearing down a few cities is a small price to pay for a marginal increase in safety.
This is the first sentence where I decry how I'm going to lose karma through this post, which will not actually happen.
Once we clear your elementary faux pas, we can move on.
This is the paragraph following the out-of-context quote. Usually, this will be a semantic discussion of what you said which does not actually adress any of your points but tries to make it look that way.
In the next paragraph I will segue into my own opinion on a topic which may or may not have any connection to the matter at hand. Usually this will lead into a diatribe exceeding the article in length, all crammed into one to five paragraphs. Actual facts to back up my claims are entirely optional.
This is the obligatory Sentence, which is written in awkward, slightly incorrect english to remind everyone that english is not my first Language.
An equally obligatory paragraph is used to remind everyone that I'm from Europe/the USA/somewhere else, which means that my opinion is automatically more important than that of most users here. This paragraph may contain lame comparisons between the subject at hand and differences in handling guns/alcohol/freedom of speech in Europe/the USA/somewhere else.
This optional paragraph is used to complain about Slashdot's lack of support for Unicode/LaTeX/a markup language of my choice in contents.
All of the aforementioned content may be skipped if I fill the comment field with a link to a potentially related xkcd comic, optionally preceeded by a single sentence about how Randall Munroe said it best: http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/
But what would be the chances of that happening? I think that storing millions of unlock codes for years when only a fraction of them will ever be used sounds like it's unneccessarily expensive. And if Intel can't recreate an unlock key I'd expect them to get sued when someone tries to unlock their ten year old CPU only to get told that Intel doesn't have the unlock code anymore.
However, if Intel can create new unlock codes that means the unlock codes are most likely the output of an algorithm which takes the serial number (plus pehaps other distinguishing features) as its input. Which means that reverse-engineering the algorithm should be possible.
Plus, what's to stop you from brute-forcing the unlock procedure? Will the CPU permanently disable itself after a few tries? Is the key space so large the a modern CPU can't be expected to get through it withing reasonable time? (This seems fairly unsafe as a partially reverse-engineered algorithm could drastically reduce it.) Will Intel require you to boot their special live-CD with encryption and trusted computing up the wazoo so the no one can look at their tool, which uses a proprietary but secure cypher to communicate with Intel?
Again, it's not people doing annoying things on Twitter, it's people using Twitter as a poor substitute for other technologies. It doesn't happen very often and it's far from the most annoying thing on the net; it's more an example of how for any given technology someone will have a bad idea on how to use it. For the one site where I do miss an RSS feed I just wrote a scraper that builds one for me. Problem solved.
The pointless use of URL shorteners is a bit more annoying but it doesn't happen often enough to be a real issue.
That's my point. Twitter is useful to some people. I personally don't use it but I know they do. However, some developers have this weird idée fixe that Twitter and its mannerisms supersede all other forms of online communication. Thus you see autotweeting devices and programs, programs that exchange data via Twitter and websites that assume that just because they can announce site updates through tweets they should do so.
It's not Twitter itself that annoys me, it's how some people abuse it.
It does appear to have its uses but what troubles me most is that some people feel the pressing need to use it to implement bad copies of existing technologies. I've seen Twitter as an IPC platform (after all, nobody ever said that tweets must be human-readable!) and, most annyoingly, as an RSS replacement. Because 140 characters of unformatted text are apparently superior to well-structured arbitrarily rich markup that has space for a description.
Of course there's the companion gripe of some developers using shortened URLs everywhere. These may be useful in the context of Twitter but they have absolutely no right to exist on a website not constrained in such a fashion. (This gripe does not apply to user-generated content. There are really websites where every single external link has been run through a shortener.)
Oh yes, I've heard the argument that Twitter as an RSS replacement effectively turns the Twitter network into a special-purpose CDN. But seriously now, if you can't afford to keep around an RSS feed but you can comfortably afford your site without one you have to be something wrong. If you're constantly near your limit without RSS then even moderate additional interest in your site would push you over anyway so an upgrade would be the wiser path.
Avatar is a spectacle movie. That means that things like a decent plot or intelligent dialogue is secondary next to dramatic camera sweeps through breathtaking scenery. The genre kind of died out ages ago - the concept of seeing exotic locations on the big screen just lost its novelty.
What Cameron did was to take this old genre and mix it with cutting-edge animation technology (which has recently become good enough to look almost photorealistic if you toss a few filters at the rest of the movie) and with competently-used 3D, which is the next big thing for some reason. 3D, that is, not competently used special effects.
To be honest, if he ever makes a second Avatar I expect it to bomb. 3D will lose its novelty soon and I doubt that the spectacle film genre will hold up without that novelty.
As for me, I haven't seen it either and don't feel particularly compelled to do so. A year ago it probably was pretty fun but, well, it's all about novelty and the novelty has worn off.
Note that the railgn in this design is not supposed to impart significant velocity to the craft. It's just supposed to et the craft to a speed where scramjets can become operational. The scramjet-powered "first stage" then takes the craft to "the upper reaches of the atmosphere" where a more conventional rocket stage takes over.
Now, I'm not an expert but to me it seems like they're trying to create a more easily reusable first stage, using the railgun as little more than an ignition helper.
The question is: When does it become safe to say things again? When terrorists no longer target the United States? That could be a very long time indeed and at that point people may be accustomed to a government that operates on a "need to know" policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the siblings pointed out, you see to be under the illusion that legalization would make it easier to obtain pot. That is not the case. There are huge distribution networks, which are often intermingled as well. (People who usually buy may start to grow, selling their excess hemp to their friends and/or dealers; there is also a lot of information exchange about where to get the best stuff for the best price etc.) It's very easy to get in touch with them. I'm a non-smoker but I could obtain some pot within a few hours.
The only thing legal cannabis changes is where the money goes. Currently much of it goes to organized crime because hey, the market is there and they have the means to serve it. Oh, and legalization would improve the quality of the hemp available because quality controls can be put into place now. And then there are the side effects like reduced spending on drug persecution, reduced spending on jails, fewer inmates who dont't even have the option of contributing to society...
Drugs can be nasty and cannabis with significant THC content certainly should be regulated. But outright banning it did absolutely nothing to curb its use and legalization will not make its use skyrocket. Of course since the whole campaign against hemp was probably an underhanded way of protecting the lumber and synthetic fiber industries, reduction of recreational use never was the intention anyway.
More plausible (in the context of a legalization wave) would be the legalization of drugs that have relatively benigh side effects, then the limited legalization of drugs known to have heavy side effects and/or to be strongly addictive. For instance, I'd expect MDMA to be available sooner and easier than morphine. Crack would probably always stay illegal, although not per se but because I expect it to be illegal to cut restricted drugs in unhealthy ways (just like you can't put any random stuff in your alcoholic beverage if you want to be able to sell it).
Who cares?
Anyone who isn't a desktop Windows user? Flash for OS X and Linux may be behind the Windows version with respect to performance but they're fully feature-compatible and as far as I know Adobe is working on hardware acceleration for *nixes. Silverlight, on the other hand, is simply not supported on non-Windows platforms; Moonlight is an independent project that Microsoft just happens to like.
If Silverlight were to replace Flash we'd see at best a half-assed Mono-based runtime on non-Windows systems. Of course that would probably kill the market for it as there are more compatible cross-platform video solutions and without Flash video a lot of people might decide to simply not bother installing the runtime.
(Of course this also means that Microsoft probably wouldn't be stupid enough to replace Flash with anything Windows-centric.)
thankfully, despite the relation, modern English mostly escapes this terrible behavior, compound words usually being limited to a combination of two separate words.
Unlike German, where we always use the pathological case.
Besides the fact that one can apparently stream together an arbitrary number adjectives and nouns (the order of which often seems to be immaterial), German has the grammatical gender of Latin based languages, but without the normally sensible, almost always predictable rules for applying gender; however, unlike most modernized Latin based languages, German retains three genders, again complicating issues.
German isn't a Romance language and neither is English. Both are Germanic languages, although English has undergone extensive crossbreeding with French, which has lead to a mix of Germanic and Romance elements. Germanic and Romance are completely different branches of the Indo-European language family.
Then, you have writers who have the unfortunate habit of including far too much information into a single sentence. Similar to poor English writers who have a tendency to include entire descriptive paragraphs into (parentheses), except those helpful punctuation, like the hyphen, are also omitted.
Overly long sentences are not language-specific and indeed the case can be made (and easily defended) that one can write impossibly long, but entirely correct - in both syntax and semantics -, sentences in any given language that doesn't heavily restrict the way sentences work, which most languages, such as English, don't.
As for punctuation being removed: I find the opposite to be true, with English being short on both hyphens (compound words are often just a string of separate words connected only by context) and commas (German tends to use commas to separate clauses; English only does so in certain cases).
It's invariably at the end of the sentence, on yonder page.
Invariably are English sentences constructed like this one. Grating it is, but since only one specific word ordering is ever allowed by all languages, nothing can ever be done about it. Or not. German does allow sentences á la "Er geht in den Wald" ("He walks into the forest") and they occur all the time.
Unlike English, which was developed when the University of Oxford Linguistics Faculty decided to crossbreed German and French in the 1960s. No, wait, it evolved (and in some cases skipped evolution that happened to German) over centuries and much of the evolution happened in the Middle Ages when literacy was an optional skill for most.
Of course DTP software might use macros to do it even more elegantly (like LaTeX \hyphenation{}) but that basically amounts to a global search-and-replace that replaces all occurrences of the un-soft-hyphenated word with a soft-hyphenated version. And it realy doesn't work without a macro-capable markup language.
Flash for Linux and OS X will be replaced with twenty megabytes worth of infinite loops. Linux and Mac magazines will remark how the new Flash is more stable while offering the same level of performance as before.
Plus maybe then we can implement future Flash versions on top of Silverlight and phase out PDF in favor of XPS.
FTFY
Let's look at Germany. Germany is much less warlike than the USA because you beat that nonsense out of us. We won't need guns to invade another country because we won't invade another country*. A defensive army gets less of the ultra-cool high tech stuff so our equipment tends to be more on the ...rustic side. So we're a bit less enamored with army equipment.
Let's look at day to day gun ownership. What are the two main reasons for owning guns in the United States? Self defense and the ability to overthrow the government if neccessary. Self defense is actually something where guns are a self-fulfilling prophecy: If everyone has guns then everyone has guns. In a country where gun laws have always been strict (such as Germany) most criminals won't carry them because a) getting them legally means getting the police's attention, b) getting them illegally is expensive and/or difficult and c) if the cops notice you have a gun you can be sure of their full attention; if they notice you do so illegally you're screwed.
So yes, strong gun laws from the beginning do create a society where non-gun defense methods aren't automatically outclassed. Plus, people aren't as likely to shoot you if they don't assume that you're going to shoot them. I lose the ability to deal as much damage (unless I get a permit and even then it's heavily restricted) but so does everyone else. Yes, organized crime does have guns but they're dangerous primarily because they're organized crime, not because of the guns.
As for overthrowing the government: One of the things the allies have taught us when they built modern Germany is that overthrowing the government is evil. If you intend to do so you're evil. Well, and we are fully aware that any insurrection not involving most or all citizens will probably be squashed anyway as modern armies have equipment modern civilians can't even dream of owning, gun laws or not. It's unlikely that a sympathizing billionaire would just happen to have a hundred air superiority fighters or state-of-the-art surface-to-air missiles in his bike shed.
Plus, what can you use guns for besides killing (or at least maiming)? Not much. I mean, a knife can double as a useful tool but if you use a gun as a tool you fully deserve the accident that will likely happen to you. Oh yeah, and hunting, which is just killing again. Since "KILLING IS BAD" is deeply ingrained in our minds we're not too keen on doing it. We do play violent video games but that's comparing a shooting range to running amok.
I guess the answer in a nutshell is that we place a very high value on human life. Taking it is something you do when you have absolutely no other option**. Thus devices with the primary purpose of killing people are something that doesn't belong in the hands of anyone but trained professionals (= soldiers, the police and permit holders; you don't get a permit easily over here).
Of course that also means that any gun not inside secure storage is presumed to be out of storage because the wielder intends to use it. Outside of a shooting club or a forest that pretty much means that the wielder is ready to kill someone. Since we're generally not ready to kill someone we tend to get nervous around someone who is.
Note that I don't see the situation through rose-tinted glasses. Strict gun control isn't automatically good. I was present when a burglar shot my brother in the leg and the strict gun laws worked against us - the gun looked kinda fake and it was much more likely to be a blank pistol***, thus we assumed it wasn't a threat and tossed the guy out the front door. Had we handled that guy differently my brother wouldn't have a metal plate in his leg today.
Then again, the burglar ran away after we tossed him out and he only shot when my brother took up pursuit; had he assumed we were a threat, he might have shot sooner. Such as when his gun was pointed at me. I'm really glad he found me non-threatening.
Every stance has its up
A classic case of a global economy confronting local norms and attitudes. Who is right and who is wrong?
In cases such as this (concerning the global use of local resources when equivalent resources can easily be obtained elsewhere) I'd say that the local norms and attitudes have precedence. You want what they have. They get to call the shots.
Things would be different if Libya was the sole provider of domain names, in which case an argument can be made that they should provide unregulated domain names for the benefit of mankind but they aren't so it can't.
Actually, it appears that Barbara Streisand was wearing the suit...
Oh, we just mandate VTOL for all airplanes. Boeing and Airbus might object that it's difficult to build a VTOL plane with usable passenger and/or cargo space but that's a technological hurdle they'll have to take on our eternal quest for safety from terrorism.
Easily fixed. Everything within five miles of an airport is declared a restricted area with access without permission being a felony. The area is surrounded by high walls and the roads leading to the airport run inside tunnels so it's not easy to enter the area. If any (parts of) cities happen to lie within the area then people will have to relocate and pay for the costs of their houses being demolished. Tearing down a few cities is a small price to pay for a marginal increase in safety.
Once we clear your elementary faux pas, we can move on.
This is the paragraph following the out-of-context quote. Usually, this will be a semantic discussion of what you said which does not actually adress any of your points but tries to make it look that way.
In the next paragraph I will segue into my own opinion on a topic which may or may not have any connection to the matter at hand. Usually this will lead into a diatribe exceeding the article in length, all crammed into one to five paragraphs. Actual facts to back up my claims are entirely optional.
This is the obligatory Sentence, which is written in awkward, slightly incorrect english to remind everyone that english is not my first Language.
An equally obligatory paragraph is used to remind everyone that I'm from Europe/the USA/somewhere else, which means that my opinion is automatically more important than that of most users here. This paragraph may contain lame comparisons between the subject at hand and differences in handling guns/alcohol/freedom of speech in Europe/the USA/somewhere else.
This optional paragraph is used to complain about Slashdot's lack of support for Unicode/LaTeX/a markup language of my choice in contents.
All of the aforementioned content may be skipped if I fill the comment field with a link to a potentially related xkcd comic, optionally preceeded by a single sentence about how Randall Munroe said it best: http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/
Wasn't the last real leap on x86 when AMD provided an upgrade path to AMD64 aka EM64T aka x86_64?
I think we may need to write a GUI in Visual Basic first so we can capture the IP address of the L5 cache.
But what would be the chances of that happening? I think that storing millions of unlock codes for years when only a fraction of them will ever be used sounds like it's unneccessarily expensive. And if Intel can't recreate an unlock key I'd expect them to get sued when someone tries to unlock their ten year old CPU only to get told that Intel doesn't have the unlock code anymore.
However, if Intel can create new unlock codes that means the unlock codes are most likely the output of an algorithm which takes the serial number (plus pehaps other distinguishing features) as its input. Which means that reverse-engineering the algorithm should be possible.
Plus, what's to stop you from brute-forcing the unlock procedure? Will the CPU permanently disable itself after a few tries? Is the key space so large the a modern CPU can't be expected to get through it withing reasonable time? (This seems fairly unsafe as a partially reverse-engineered algorithm could drastically reduce it.) Will Intel require you to boot their special live-CD with encryption and trusted computing up the wazoo so the no one can look at their tool, which uses a proprietary but secure cypher to communicate with Intel?
I expect either a crack or a lawsuit.
On second thought, let's not go to P-RAM. It is a silly technology.
Again, it's not people doing annoying things on Twitter, it's people using Twitter as a poor substitute for other technologies. It doesn't happen very often and it's far from the most annoying thing on the net; it's more an example of how for any given technology someone will have a bad idea on how to use it. For the one site where I do miss an RSS feed I just wrote a scraper that builds one for me. Problem solved.
The pointless use of URL shorteners is a bit more annoying but it doesn't happen often enough to be a real issue.
That's my point. Twitter is useful to some people. I personally don't use it but I know they do. However, some developers have this weird idée fixe that Twitter and its mannerisms supersede all other forms of online communication. Thus you see autotweeting devices and programs, programs that exchange data via Twitter and websites that assume that just because they can announce site updates through tweets they should do so.
It's not Twitter itself that annoys me, it's how some people abuse it.
It does appear to have its uses but what troubles me most is that some people feel the pressing need to use it to implement bad copies of existing technologies. I've seen Twitter as an IPC platform (after all, nobody ever said that tweets must be human-readable!) and, most annyoingly, as an RSS replacement. Because 140 characters of unformatted text are apparently superior to well-structured arbitrarily rich markup that has space for a description.
Of course there's the companion gripe of some developers using shortened URLs everywhere. These may be useful in the context of Twitter but they have absolutely no right to exist on a website not constrained in such a fashion. (This gripe does not apply to user-generated content. There are really websites where every single external link has been run through a shortener.)
Oh yes, I've heard the argument that Twitter as an RSS replacement effectively turns the Twitter network into a special-purpose CDN. But seriously now, if you can't afford to keep around an RSS feed but you can comfortably afford your site without one you have to be something wrong. If you're constantly near your limit without RSS then even moderate additional interest in your site would push you over anyway so an upgrade would be the wiser path.
Avatar is a spectacle movie. That means that things like a decent plot or intelligent dialogue is secondary next to dramatic camera sweeps through breathtaking scenery. The genre kind of died out ages ago - the concept of seeing exotic locations on the big screen just lost its novelty.
What Cameron did was to take this old genre and mix it with cutting-edge animation technology (which has recently become good enough to look almost photorealistic if you toss a few filters at the rest of the movie) and with competently-used 3D, which is the next big thing for some reason. 3D, that is, not competently used special effects.
To be honest, if he ever makes a second Avatar I expect it to bomb. 3D will lose its novelty soon and I doubt that the spectacle film genre will hold up without that novelty.
As for me, I haven't seen it either and don't feel particularly compelled to do so. A year ago it probably was pretty fun but, well, it's all about novelty and the novelty has worn off.
Note that the railgn in this design is not supposed to impart significant velocity to the craft. It's just supposed to et the craft to a speed where scramjets can become operational. The scramjet-powered "first stage" then takes the craft to "the upper reaches of the atmosphere" where a more conventional rocket stage takes over.
Now, I'm not an expert but to me it seems like they're trying to create a more easily reusable first stage, using the railgun as little more than an ignition helper.
The question is: When does it become safe to say things again? When terrorists no longer target the United States? That could be a very long time indeed and at that point people may be accustomed to a government that operates on a "need to know" policy.
That's not entirely uncommon for wisdom teeth.
So essentially native apps with a synchronization feature?