The problem wouldn't be articles about Twitter, but articles that use the word "tweet" in a way that assumes the reader knows what it is. Think of "telephone call" or "electronic mail message." Self-explanatory terms like those stand the test of time far better.

Not according to trademark and copyright law.

Mock the NYT memo all you want. 50 years from now nobody will have the slightest idea of what a "tweet" was without having to go look it up. Using sappy, faddish slang words like "tweet" to mean a "Twitter messaging service text" (or whatever) is doomed to speedy obsolescence. Go ahead, laugh. Tweet your hipster friends about it. But you'd better tattoo it on your arm as well so that you won't forget to tell your grandkids about it.

It is not inconceivable that it will continue to vent petroleum for months or years, even in the presence of relief wells. At very least you will have the oil that managed to come out before enough relief wells were drilled to reduce the flow to something relatively minor. That's a few months away. Even then you will have some non-zero leakage until they manage to seal it up for good.

No, it's like a bottle of mezcal.

Well, one way to find out...

You sound like you don't believe it's possible in the US. Better go have another look out there.

When they came for the perverts, I said nothing because I wasn't a pervert.
When they came for the [etc etc]

You're kidding right? When has that ever worked? While the hydra has a dozen heads, it has hundreds of millions of legs. Taking out the little guys is little more than Roman Circus for law-and-order politicians to prolong their dubious careers.

Go after the little guy to stop the big-time mobsters. Oh yeah, sure, that'll work. Why didn't we think of that before? Put all the small time drug dealers in jail and it will put the big guys out of business. Put all the small-time incompetent terrorists who light their shoes or underwear on fire and put the big guys out of business. Put all the Abu Ghraib prison guards in jail and stop Pentagon Brass and civilian military leadership from being war criminals. Put Fabulous Fabrice on trial and stop finance industry mobsters from raping the planet.

Yeah. What a good idea. Get some good headlines at least.

Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans
. For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]

Wrong wrong wrong. Computer intelligence, when it arrives, will not have been programmed, it will have been trained in with patterns drawn largely from human behavior, culture, and other sources. So, lamentably, it will be as stupid. And worse.

Imagine the very complex and dynamic standing wave of the magnetic field around a biological brain. Can it be duplicated with a machine to produce coherent thoughts in a biological brain by magnetic induction? Can two biological brains induce such coherent activity in each other? Could this be the basis of the legendary powers of telepathy that so many have claimed to possess throughout history?

It took supposedly state of the art equipment to drill it. It'll take better stuff than that to cap it. AFAIK, this is one of the deepest wells in the Gulf. Please post add'l info if you have any.

Why do we have to go through the slashdotted blog.alexanderhiggins.com to see images hosted at NASA? This is the dumbest thing so far this month.

Some people offload significant computing to the cloud. Word has it that a well-known online DVD rental outfit offloads its re-encoding for online streaming to the cloud owned by a well-known online bookseller, just one example of people with a more elaborate business model than the one you describe. These are terabytes of data that aren't going to get sync'ed very often.