Wow. A message from an alternate universe.

Well, not for long, no.

But we weren't trying to prevent other people from standing on the same shoulders.

Lee will have to engage an attorney to deal with this, which will eat up a shit load more of his time for no good reason.

Well, it looks like Lee has already gotten at least one offer from a lawyer to handle this pro-bono.

Is this anything like the game of Rouge, where you've been miniaturized and have to descend the layers of a woman's handbag? Watch out for things wrapped in tissue, they're deadly.

That's if the SMS can actually be sent to Google Voice. I've run into situations where SMSs can't be sent to Google Voice. Just today, I was using a web site that wants to verify your account by sending you an SMS. If I put in my Google Voice number, the site came back with an error. And this is not the first time I've run into this.

Good luck getting an evidence-based culture developed in the face of the entrenched Bulverism of modern political discourse. Even more generally, we don't argue over the issues at hand, we argue over why the other side shouldn't be listened to (and Bulverism is just one tool in that arsenal). Not even the geeks or the scientists are immune. If you really want to move to an evidence-based culture, you're going to first have to pull people's focus off of defeating the opposition, and onto actually investigating the truth or falsity of particular issues. As C. S. Lewis put it "Until Bulverism is crushed, reason can play no effective part in human affairs". There's your assignment. Get to it.

The Democrats are just as much in the pockets of Big Media as the Republicans. Blame this on the corruption of politicians in general, not just those of one party.

President John Adams was just one of many who noted that unless the citizens themselves prize virtue, government will be corrupt and ineffective.

Which doesn't hold out much hope for a culture that denigrates virtue, does it?

We all complain about various political policies on both sides of the ideological spectrum, but at the core of our most important problems lies a big heapin' helping of hypocrisy... on our part. There's no conspiracy about that. We have to look in the mirror.

Our representatives are much more representative than we'd like to admit

A critical detail absent from the summary is that these tweets took place weeks before their trip -- they weren't done at the airport.

This itself I find interesting. This isn't just the TSA involved here, you have to have some of the U.S.'s intelligence apparatus involved, possibly including the NSA(for capture of communications). This essentially exposes the fact that U.S. intelligence has the capability of taking minor tweets (and no doubt other forms of internet communications), correlating them with the real-life identities of their authors, and matching them to people entering the U.S. These statements weren't made where TSA statements could hear them. That the TSA agents knew about them at all implies some sort of ECHELONish mechanism for collecting even minor tweets such as this and matching them to people entering the U.S.

To some degree, this isn't surprising. Give a government organization the task of keeping terrorists out, and this is the type of capability you would expect them to develop. But why 'spend' this kind of capability on such a minor, harmless target? This implies to me a couple of things:

1. Over reliance on technology vs use of actual human analysis or review. An actual human analyst might well have spotted the cultural references and noted that they were harmless. The implication seems to be that intelligence collected via technical means are presented directly to minor TSA agents who don't have the training or analysis skills to correctly understand them. This is likely done to speed up 'getting the information to where it needs to be used', but increases the risk of failure due to poor quality of information or interpretation..
2. Is it possible to go from a tweet to the real-life identity of the sender in this kind of time-frame (hooking up a tweet to the identity of a person entering the country within a week or two) without the cooperation of Twitter? Note that there's no questioning if they got it right - the couple in question acknowledge they actually sent the tweets.

Finally, does anyone else get the feel of something out of Person of Interest, except that the computer isn't actually capable of spotting malicious intent?

It might not have been matched on the phone number. If you're both on Facebook and friended, it might have pulled the information from Facebook (assuming your friend has also set up the Facebook app (which comes by default in some Android phones)).

Perhaps, but man of us who work with computers (where words do have rather rigid meanings,) do so because we are not really very good at dealing with ambiguous wording.

And yet, the computer industry seems to be one of those who tend to produce conflicting uses of words (I have long maintained that to keep up with computers, you have to have the ability to keep multiple sets of conflicting vocabulary in your head, and keep them straight). You even see conflicting uses within the same company (e.g. two different lines of Burroughs minicomputers had conflicting semantics for the terms 'Cold Start' and 'Warm Start: on one line, Cold Start meant to bring the computer up from a power off condition and Warm Start was essentially what we now call a reboot; on the other line, Cold Start meant to erase the disk drive and load the operating system, and Warm Start meant to replace the operating system without erasing the disk. Failing to disambiguate this terminology properly could have disastrous results.). In the computer language arena, it's not at all uncommon for identical concepts to be expressed in different terminology in different languages, and at the same time seemingly identical terminology in different lanaguages refer to slightly different concepts. I begin to understand why Platonism developed. It almost seems like you've got an arena of rigidly defined concepts out there 'somewhere' that we can only access through terminology that is constantly changing and at times in conflict.

Don't even ask about division.

Indeed, being hunted down by a secretive, rogue, covert action group can just ruin your whole day.

Well, given that Microsoft currently has a marketing campaign that seems to be trying to communicate "We designed our phones to be so boring that you don't pay as much attention to it as you would pay attention to other smartphones", and is trying to present this as a good thing, it's hard to dispute that Microsoft has a marketing problem. I'm just not sure that that's their only problem.

Looks to me like it's an example of Bulverism in action.