If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.

There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.

Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.

There are real arguments to be made here, but the "distracting other students" one is, in a word, ludicrous. Even from the article summary - "...when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction,' - plays to it.

If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.

There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.

Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.

So how do you address this? Is it illegal for me to watch you drive your car to the urologist? Is it illegal to then google for your license plate and/or address to see who you are or where you live? Is it illegal to see you visit the pharmacist, and remember that I'd also seen you at the urologist at some point in the past?

Should it be illegal to say to my one friend "Hey, I saw IndustrialComplex at the urologist, and again at the pharmacist. Funny that! His license place was 'ASSMAN' too!" ?
Should it be illegal for my friend to tell his friend what I told him?
Should it be illegal for my to tell ten of my friends?
Should it be illegal for me to make a blog post about it?

At what specific point do you intend to make something like this illegal?

Ahh, but our entire society's expectations of privacy have been unreasonable for the better part of the last several decades. This false sense of privacy has existed solely due to the inefficiency of access to public data, much in the same manner that entire localized business models disappeared with the advent of national television and freeways.

It's a nonissue only because the work, both in law and expectations, to actually address the fact that we're finally having to come to terms with the fact that there is a lot of perfectly legally accessible information about all of us in the wild will never be undertaken by our government or our society, and technological workarounds will evolve far faster than any legislation or agreement can. The point is moot. If Facebook didn't do it themselves, someone with a screenscraper and a database would.

If you can see it, you can correlate it. This is a nonissue only because there is no possibility of a solution for anyone who is upset.

If this information was already extant, and this functionality is just an aggregation and compilation of said extant data, then there is no problem. No new information is being provided: public information has simply been correlated, something any person could do on their own at any point prior.

Making already legally accessible data more readable is not in any way wrong. Anyone who fears or is angry about this is in for a shock over the next decade or so as technology reveals all sorts of already public things about them, and younger generations simply won't care.

The Financial Sector.

Also, synchronized robotics, precisely coordinated CNC, and a host of other applications. Primarily, it's where absolute time isn't the concern, but rather where arbitrary time must be consistent between multiple devices (accounting for propagation delays, failures, etc...). Of course, protocols like PTP solve this fairly neatly: this particular product solves a different problem, and probably isn't actually useful.

There are two time issues to consider. One is how close your environment is to true time. The other is how close your individual devices are to one another. Messaging time-critical information between devices is severely complicated when the two devices are not on the same plane time-wise. Atomic clocks and the like solve the first problem. PTP solves the second problem. NTP almost (95%) solves both, but falls short in certain extremely time-critical situations.

I'm confident that at least some Twitter apps will simply not do this. What's Twitter going to do? Ban the popular apps? How would they even go about this? I fully expect the following interesting behavior by the apps that will end up being used the most by people like us.

1. The faker. It will report semi-random clicks or route garbage through the gateway, but never the user's real clicks.
2. The shirker. It will simply not route anything through the gateway.
3. The hider. It will shirk the gateway, but simultaneously masquerade as some other app that itself plays by the rules.

Twitter really has two options if they want to enforce something like this. They can force ALL apps to play by their rules (breaking functionality for perhaps a large portion of their userbase) or they can accept the fact that people will route around this. I don't see the former happening, in all honesty, and they've engendered little love from third party developers of late, so they can't count on developer goodwill either.

While that is what D&D (or Chainmail, really) was originally, there is a great deal of tabletop roleplaying that is nothing of the sort. While Dungeons & Dragons basically became "tabletop World of Warcraft" with the release of fourth edition, games like Burning Wheel, Inspectres, Prime Time Adventures, and Mouse Guard have broken far away from this progress quest paradigm. D&D is, simply put, the "WoW of tabletop gaming," and just as with WoW, the savvier gamers have moved to the independent scene or to games with less mass appeal but also less grind.

The real issue is simply that, for mass appeal and mass profit, the addiction model can't be beaten. D&D polished it as much as it can be polished on a table, and WoW did the same on a screen.