I think mainstream media has an irrational exuberance over twitter because it sees it as a cheap and effective marketing channel. It's like the mid-90's where having a .com web page was seen as hip and got you some extra attention. Likewise, the twitter subscribers will eventually become numb and bored with the novelty, and corporate tweets will become nothing more than shouting in the wind.

*sigh* If governments are truly concerned about child welfare, sexual abuse and exploitation are in about, oh, I don't know, 32nd place on the list of real problems. Somewhere below domestic violence, child negligence, lack of proper health care for the impoverished, undernourishment, and illiteracy.

I guess the problem is that those can't be addressed by token laws targeting internet surveillance.

I once heard that The Unit switched attention away from the military operations of the men to the lives of the women left behind at home, as a result of focus group studies. Soon thereafter, it tanked in ratings and was canceled.

I can't help but feel something similar must have happened to Lost somewhere within the last 6 years. When the show first started out, I got the distinct feeling that the many mysteries had meaning and rational explanations. (I believe that the writers themselves even said so.) Sure, the Dharma Initiative was a peculiar operation, but it explained some things. But this ending, I don't know... It smells as if the ending that was originally planned was scrapped because it offended too many focus groups. Perhaps the original story promoted that all mysteries are only a lack of scientific understanding? (Sufficiently advanced technology, and all that) Perhaps it promoted predestination? I don't know.

All I can say is that with this ending, something changed somewhere. The carpet doesn't match the drapes.

This "article" has all the smells of 10% sensationalist reporting. That is, the part of the story that has been reported is likely just the tip of a much larger, more rational, iceberg. I failed to find any info in the article about if this was the first offense. I suspect that it isn't. Has she been warned before? Does she have a history of knowingly sneaking in contraband? In short, how many other straws are there on the camel's back?

Twitter? Really? Joe Consumer actually uses Twitter? And here I thought it was only used for personal brand promotion...

Or did you mean that Joe Consumer wants to read Twitter?

I wish English 101 actually taught you to write this clearly.

"Advanced" writing classes in J-school will teach you to start off with an anecdote of someone affected by the story, which will get the reader to sympathize. You then bury the lead 5 paragraphs in and only get to the real point after the reader has continued on to page 5C. Pad with further anecdotes from people with similar and opposite views.

I went to college to get a comp-sci degree after I already had several years of experience in the real world. The one thing that I took away from that education that I had not stumbled upon naturally was Big-O notation. Specifically, how it describes the time and space efficiency of different data structures and algorithms. It really comes in handy when trying to optimize. There have been several where I had become focused on optimizing the crap out of an inner loop, only to realize that if I switched to a different data structure I'd get much faster O(log n) performance.

Other than that, many people only experience low-level C and assembly programming while at school. But you mention that you have C++ experience, so you're probably already well familiar with segfaults and buffer overflows.

Lastly, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a great read. The levels of recursion and abstraction that it employs will often blow your mind. Sadly, I can't use that kind of coding in the real world because I have to write "maintainable" code and most corporate programmers don't want to have their mind blown.

"Here he will come to a land and be engulfed in the conflict between two ancient gods ... and the battle between light and darkness."

Oh dear. If ever there was a formula for an incomprehensible plot, this is it. You see, when a writer can put himself in the role of a god, it gives him free reign to make things happen for no rational reason, without any cause-and-effect, and without any character development or background.

The result is usually a random meandering with no tangible purpose.