No, Twitter can contain a link to the original article, as I mentioned, but most of it is just pointless babble. The fact that you can make shortened URLs through link-rotting BS organisations like bitly doesn't mean Twitter is anything like RSS. They're not even meant to be, and if you think that's the purpose of twitter, or even what people tend to use it for, you're deluded.

In conclusion, just because some idiots occasionally post tinyurls or bitlys does not grant legitimacy to Twitter, or mean that it is a useful means of communication. And frankly, why you'd want to sort through 500 "bitlys" a day from random jackasses posting nonsense is beyond me.

See for yourself. This is what people are calling revolutionary, an exciting new medium, and proves that Twitter is awesome. Of course, when you look, it's nothing but vapid third-hand "information" based on what people who weren't even there are seeing on their own TVs or other news reports. Reading this, you get absolutely zero context, or even any real idea about what was going on, other than a vague sense that, well, the situation was bad and lots of people were fighting. In, it seems, a hotel. That tells us nothing.

I can turn the TV on and watch the news just as well as you can. I don't need "tweets" telling me about it. What mindless gibberish.

But hey, you keep pretending that anonymous hearsay is "information", champ.

They can, but this is for residential service, where most people don't have ethernet jacks in the walls, but rather, just have a router somewhere and their computers are typically nowhere near it thanks to wireless. So how is the average yob going to get his phone connected to the router on the other side of the house? Now he doesn't need to worry about it, since he can just plug it into his computer, which is probably on his desk anyway.

Twitter is communication. It's a poor man's RSS feed. You do know RSS, right?

Yes, smartass. How Twitter is a "poor man's" version is unknown, though, considering they're both free. RSS lets you actually view a story or article. You know, information. Twitter is just a few words about "situation bad, everyone fighting" that tells you absolutely nothing. It is not at all analogous. At most, someone can put a "bit.ly" or other cutesy 2.0 BS shortened link up, but hey, if I was going to bother looking at that, why wouldn't I just, I don't know, USE RSS?

I was careful to define meaningful communication in my diatribe, something you apparently failed to notice. Graffiti on a bathroom wall is, if you want to get technical, a form of communication, but it's essentially meaningless. Twitter is the exact same thing -- short, incoherent messages from anonymous nobodies, about nothing, that provide no value to anyone, anywhere.

Twitter is the answer to a question nobody asked, and will never amount to anything of worth.

Communication saves lives. Always has, always will.

Twitter is not communication in any meaningful sense of the word. It never will be.

I've had this argument before so I'll be brief: Yes, I've gone through the BS twitter logs of the Iranian crap and the Mumbai crap, the two incidents twitter-defenders love to bring up as examples of how twitter is a useful communications mechanism.

You illustrate this quite nicely:

When the zombie attack comes, I'll definitely hear about it before you.

No, you won't. Oh, maybe you'll hear about it, but you won't have any information that I won't. You'll know that "zombies are in the streets" and "reports of zombie attack in downtown" and "more zombies on the way". You won't know where, who, how, or anything else -- you'll know that zombies are "somewhere". And you'll act smug because you're so much ahead of the curve as the rest of us.

Here's a scenario for you to consider: While you're busy "tweeting" about the zombies your brains will get eaten because you were busy staring at your cellphone. I'll be the one getting away because I wasn't obsessing over freaking Twitter. Now what?

Without fail twitter is totally devoid of content or context. Every "tweet" is nothing but "situation is bad, lots of people fighting" rephrased in some form, or "reports of blah blah blah at something something something" because the user is "tweeting" what he's watching on TV or hearing on the radio, which means that information is already out there.

The Mumbai one was particularly awful, since every tweet was along the lines of "terrorists driving around shooting, no word yet if apprehended" or similarly pithy nonsense. You can't tell what's going on from such garbage. A report by an anonymous nobody that something bad is happening at some unspecified location in a vaguely defined geographical area is not information. It is not communication in the normal sense of the word, as nothing is being communicated.

That example is not cherry-picked either. The logs are freely available so anyone can do their own homework. "Tweets" that you call communication are in reality devoid of context, devoid of content, devoid of detail, and deliver absolutely zero insight into what's really going on.

The whole world knew what was going on in Iran through normal media channels without twitter. Twitter did nothing to facilitate understanding. Nor has it in any other situation, nor will it ever. As a medium, twitter is fundamentally worthless. Pretending like it's some grand new communications forum that will revolutionise the oppressed and impoverished is wishful Kool-Aid drinking.

Speaking for myself, I will be quite merry when Twitter finally collapses as the moronic fad that it is, just so people will shut up about it.

Sales count for a lot for minor artists, who make up the vast majority of musicians. Many of them will perform for free just in the hopes of getting some exposure and maybe some merchandise sales.

This is purely anecdotal, so it's not evidence as such, and I won't name names but I know someone who opened for KMFDM one night. KMFDM is, to put it mildy, huge in the industrial scene. It cost just over ten grand for the club to book them for one night. You'd think anyone who had fame enough to open for them would at least be compensated for their time.

Such was not the case. The club offered this artist nothing. The money made was purely from merch and publicity.

Don't tell me that money is made in concert tickets. That may be true for the top 0.1% who are lucky enough to hit the big time, but the rest are making next to nothing for their efforts. A couple hundred torrents instead of a couple dozen itunes downloads is significant.

You're also failing to factor in the legitimacy issue. An artist wishing to further their career can go to a label and point out that they've done very well on iTunes or Amazon mp3 sales, and have real, hard numbers, representing actual cash-paying customers, to back that up. An artist saying that they're really popular on piratebay is going to get laughed out of the office. These things matter to someone trying to make a career.

Wait, so do you want a stupid photo or an interesting one? Make up your mind.

Who reads a book on an iPod or phone?! Seriously? Do you carry around one of those magnifying screens from "Brazil"?

I used to read quite a lot on an old Palm III that I acquired. It was easy to upload text to it, and then I could take it anywhere. It was certainly easy enough to read.

That's only true if you believe your vote matters. I don't. Not to get too George Carlin on this, but the country was bought, sold, and paid for a long time ago and shuffling things around every few years doesn't make a lick of difference.

In response a lot of people like to suggest that Gore, unlike Bush, would not have instigated the war in Iraq, for example. But the truth is we were already in Iraq and bombing the hell out of them on a weekly basis and had been since the Gulf War. Bush certainly escalated the situation but variances of degrees isn't such a fundamental shift in policy as we like to pretend it is.

Furthermore, thanks to the antiquated electoral college, I can rest assured that my vote will be rendered 100% meaningless, simply because I happen to live in one arbitrarily defined boundary on a map and not another. Where I live is perhaps the least significant factor about me, yet it's what's used to determine whether or not my vote matters. I am not a fan of conservatives or Republicans, but since I live in Atlanta, which means Georgia, any vote I'd place for a Democrat would be nullified.

I might start caring more if the electoral college system was demolished, or at least, used in a sane way. I share real concerns about the economy and healthcare and social security and foreign policy with people in my age group or income bracket, for example -- those two factors, while not perfect, at least group me with people who are in the same boat as I am when it comes to such matters. The fact I happen to live near some other people, however, does not mean I share anything in common with them.

In the end, though, voting is stupid, and a lack of participation is not, in and of itself, a "vote for the system". It's a lack of participation in that system, and that's as much as I can do against the system short of taking up arms and mounting some kind of revolution.

There's no security value to NAT. NAT does provide a stateful firewall that disallows inbound connections, but you can do that just as well without NAT, and with a great deal more flexibility.

You can. I can. Aunt Myrtle can't. I for one am glad that most home users are behind NAT these days. It's better than nothing. Unfortunately, it does tend to cause issues with SIP, which is my industry, but I've learned to live with that.

I read that portion of TFA and what he conveniently doesn't mention is that lesser-known artists get some benefit from the increased exposure by having their songs available to millions.

Perhaps, but that doesn't really matter if nobody is buying the songs because they can just download them instead, does it? Unless the musician is just making music for the glory of having his name out there, then the increased exposure means very little unless it translates to sales.

Not me, man. I didn't put these clowns in office. On election day, I refuse to vote. Anyone who goes to the polls, whether they voted for the person who eventually won or not, is party to the system that legitimises this crap. People who vote put these morons in office. Since I don't vote, I have absolutely no part whatsoever in this mess.

The only way I'm responsible is that some of my tax dollars are helping fund this lunacy but since my tax dollars are collected at gunpoint I don't feel responsible for it.

Around 1985 my father recorded all the Star Trek reruns on VHS as they aired nightly, so growing up, those are what I watched. And honestly, they're way better than any DVD or Bluray or whatever futuristic medium might come along. Why? Because of the commercials. They are absolutely hilarious. Jason Alexander prancing around in the street singing the praises the McDLT from McDonald's. Jingles about milk. Announcers solemnly explaining the state-of-the-art technology in the new Nissan Sentra. Circuit City's offer to beat any competitor's price, illustrated by a clerk giving a kid extra change back when the kid showed him a competitor's ad. Lisa Lisa live at the Omnidome -- get your tickets now. The Radio Shack Color Computer. Great stuff. Give me those old tapes over the Bluray's any day.

It's also interesting how short commercial breaks were then. There'd be two, maybe three very short commercials, then back to the show. The interruption was never more than a minute and a half.

Stephen King already demonstrated a tactic for turning a profit on eBooks: serial releases.

I was also thinking about what Trent Reznor has been doing lately. He'll release music you can download absolutely free on his website, but you can also pay and get a higher-quality mp3, or a DVD with extra stuff, and the album artwork and so forth. Many people are content with the 128kbps free versions, but he made a killing off the number of people who were willing to pay for better copies and the extras. Clearly, that doesn't translate directly to the business of book distribution, but he did show that it's entirely possible to release art for free and still make quite a nice bit of money.

The awesome bar, for starters. I start Firefox, type "s" in the address bar, and have to wait for-bloody-ever while it sifts through uncountable megabytes looking for any page I may have visited in the past ten days where the URL or even the title might contain the letter S. Not begin with the letter S -- just contain it somewhere in the url string or title. This is freaking ridiculous.

They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle.

Where did you get the idea that we can't handle it, other than pointless fear-mongering from babbling political blowhards? The US has vast areas of desert where we've been test-detonating nuclear weapons for decades. Blast a huge hole miles deep out in the middle of nowhere, line it with concrete, and dump the waste. It's not going anywhere and even if it did, who cares, it's miles beneath the surface. And that's just off the top of my head.

Meanwhile, burning coal releases radiation as well, plus tons of smoke containing all kinds of vile pollutants, but we're happy to just release that freely to the atmosphere and not worry about it? It's this kind of idiotic thinking that got us where we are.

We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely.

Did it occur to you that the economies of scale mean that centralising power generation and distribution is a lot more safe and efficient and cheap than each neighborhood having their own reactor or coal plant or whatever? Until we have Mr Fusion Home Energy Reactors that can be put in every basement or utility closet, it makes no sense to decentralise.