http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAvfDhr5_hk

Well, the 3D isn't quite "fancy pants" but yeah, I totally agree.

There's also processingjs, which is a javascript flavor of it (though IE support seems to be missing)

http://openprocessing.org/ is a pretty neat view of what can be done

Horizontally?

"For personal one to one text communications I don't see how you can improve on texts/SMS, and for anything else what does twitter do that a web site can't?"

It's the one to many thing -- not "many" as in "countless hoards of fans", but many as in "a set of people I know in real life and who I've run into online" -- most people don't generate enough content to make a website worth coming back to on a daily or more basis, but amalgamated with a bunch of other people's thoughts, and now you've got something!

There are other paths to the same thing -- if everyone used RSS heavily, you could be part of your audience's RSS feed, and still get a proportional amount of timely attention. And Facebook has a similar "fax machine effect" as Twitter -- for close friends, I would hope to get personal email or a call or word in person of important events, but for a big mass of people who I'm not that close to but not entirely distant, FB fills a niche. (That said I barely keep up with FB -- in general it's more "day to day" boring stuff and less people trying to be clever than twitter)

So that's what twitter does that a website (in practice) "can't" - aggregation is the key.

"In fact, I would say it is the communication (real or imagined) with "famous" people that makes it so appealing."

I'm sure this is true for many twitter readers, but it's certainly not universally applicable. I might follow some famous people, but only ones who seem to be trying to write funny or smart stuff.

Ironically, your clever (and shibboleth-ish; I had to google UDP to make sure I got it) line about twitter is an excellent example of what twitter is excellent for, as a "tweeter" -- the sharing of an engaging twist of perspective.

There's a lingering perception of twitter as a "what I'm having for dinner right now" kind of thing, but in practice that's a small fraction of the use of it (YMMV)-- conversely I would say Twitter's "right in the moment" aspect makes such talk a little more engaging and less banal, because there's more a chance of it being part of the shared human experience, distributed across space but unified in time -- but I think most people who "tweet" in that mode don't have big followings outside the group of people they know in real life.

So I'd say, as a tweeter, if you can come up with lines like the UDP one frequently, then you should be using twitter to increase the sum total of cleverness online and garner some of that old school egoboo. If all you're going to post about is what you're doing right now, then why bother?

I can't tell you why you should be using Twitter, but some of us have friends or know of folks online who are good at dropping the pithy bon mot, or find it a convenient way to announce things.

Why again should you be using email? Or SMS txt'ing? Or slashdot?

https://launchpad.net/bugs/+bugs?field.searchtext=remote+code+execution&search=Search+Bug+Reports&field.scope=all&field.scope.target=
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2009-1252
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Critical-Vulnerability-Silently-Patched-in-Linux-Kernel-152678.shtml
http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-20-01-2007.html
http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-14-01-2007.html
http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-01-01-2007.html
http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-01-01-2007.html

And to clarify, for the haters. Government subsidized anything is not economically feasible. Privatized rail and you'll have competitive free market stuff to determine what's feasible and what's not, then the question won't matter except to Entrepreneurs and investors.

Next question please.

The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, and this magazine, and the chair and that's all I need. I'm not some kind of jerk, after all.

I find the iPad's screen distinctly non-sucky, and got through "Anathem" over a course of subway commutes.
Of course, YMMV. I suppose glare might be an issue if you're out in the sun.

I read "Anathem" on iPad, in iBooks, and am now getting through "How the Mind Works" on the kindle app -- mostly on my subway-based commute.

The iPad reading experience is, for my money, a world better than the Kindle, with its screen change flicker and Palm-circa-1996, Gameboy-circa 1998 screen. Intellectually I guess understand people saying the like e-ink better; in practice, to me it just looks like a gray smudgey, low-contrast mess.

The charge is a week, at least. It's not really difficult to recharge a device once a week.

So with being a superior (IMO) e-reader, a drawing pad, a swift and responsive browser, and a decent little game machine, I think iPad is gonna start eating Kindle's lunch. They aren't worlds apart, not by a darn site. (There are interesting rumors about smaller scale iOS devices coming out, like roughly Kindle size, which would address your "enormous" weight issue. But for now I find the iPad a convenient size for many tasks, and easily stowable.)

JRI sounds like you want, but rJava is there when you want the reverse.
http://rosuda.org/JRI/
http://rosuda.org/rJava/

Similar things exist for Python, Perl and probably others.

To protect the world from devastation!