They're both hairy ... no.

Ah - they both choose their computer systems based on stubborn adherence to software ideology.

I never said the words "all in," and you complained above that I'm not going all in. I'm confused.

In fact I'm opposed to "it must work 100% or it's useless, and if we do it we must do it 100%." I thought that was clear, but I guess not.

No, we'll still get the years of use from the "old tech" while new tech is being developed, partly on the back of what was learned by bothering to develop the old tech in the first place.

What if we decided not to build cars until we developed the Prius? Or computers until the iPhone? You have to go through the stages, tech doesn't happen fully realized without what went before.

That's a lot of solar generators. So the sooner we start, the sooner we'll get there. The interesting thing is, just as better computers help us design and build still better computers, increasingly available energy will drive the cost of existing energy down, reducing the cost of energy used to build and maintain new capacity.

If we can only power the world half the day with solar, then that's a large fraction of our power that we don't have to burn oil or coal or biomass (food) for. If we can only power half the world half the day, it's still a win. If we can only make it through part of the night before lighting up an oil generator, it's still a win.

It astounds me that we're living in a blowtorch and we do essentially nothing with it, fight wars over oil, spew oil and emissions all over the world, and watch the elderly and poor die from lack of heat or cooling.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/702256.aspx

Two pdf links below the summary paragraph.

Man, I get crotchety just by going to different King Soopers (Kroger) stores in my area and having to deal with variations in "swipe your card" terminals and protocols.

We did, but we did it on purpose. Programming languages are mere tools, subsets of human language. Human language evolved as part of human evolution, and is as intimately part of the definition and condition of "human" as a beating heart and a gleam in the eye.

Programming languages are created for limited and specific purpose, relative to human language. They take a few months to a few years to create. They're "received" by most of us, and only if we volunteer.

Human language wasn't created, it evolved, like feet and stereo vision, over hundreds of thousands of years, from grunts to sonnets. We have no choice to absorb language because language is part of the bath of human existence. It grows with us as the result of interaction between environment and genetic capacity, just as we grow arms.

To refer to computer languages as "language" is somewhat grandiose. They are very little like human language, and more like the rules and vocabulary of baseball. In other words, a computer language is merely one use of human language. You could refer to the traffic code or the penal code as language, and it makes about as much sense as referring to computer code as language. They all three are the same thing, a description of rules and vocabulary, meant to accomplish a set of goals in a constrained environment.

In contrast, human language has no purpose, not in the sense that traffic code and computer code have purpose. You can't decide to use human language or not, no more than you can decide not to use blood. Human language just is, and it's that difference in specified purpose and no purpose that tells me they are not the same thing, nor even like each other. At best, computer language is an extremely small and constrained subset of human language.

The answer to "why are objects so unintuitive" is in the question's implied requirement that a computer language be able to describe an object as fully as human language, and that we can understand such an object with all the precision and ambiguity which human language allows; that's impossible.

The relationship between real world objects is both: physical and independent of human thought; and subjective, contextual and dependent on human thought.

A real world object, like a car or a row in a database table, obeys physical or mathematical laws independent of human thought.

Objects also have relationships that don't exist without humans. The car and row mean different things depending on how we decide to perceive them. The row, in the limited context of SQL, is a collection of data that must adhere to constraints, and that's expected to be produced and consumed in limited ways. The car, in the limited context of the traffic code, is an object that moves through the traffic system according to (or not) designed and learned rules of motion and safety.

The row, in the limited context of love and ambition, is potentially my partner for the rest of my life, or this afternoon's rejection. The car in the same language is a symbol of desperate love, as so memorably programmed by Bruce Springsteen in Born To Run.

To expect a computer language to completely, intuitively and consistently describe an object makes no more sense than to expect a love song to determine the rules of traffic.

Or something.

"What possibly" and "conceivably" assumes that the current form of Twitter is all it could ever be.

If they're smart enough to do Twitter, they're smart enough to enhance Twitter in a way that people will pay for it.

Keep in mind, this is all based on the linked article's characterization of Twitter as an ad company, and what they might do instead.

Be an expert in Twitter and sell training to implementers and users, as GitHub does for git.

Have free and paid levels, as GitHub, Disqus, Dropbox and countless others do.

Have all paid services, as old school businesses do.

There's probably more else that I haven't covered.

Would that be a grammar Vichy?

"it's spelled "voilà"

Right. The dash was in there to emphasize mispronunciation of a mis-spelled word, to indicate mock astonishment in context.

Thanks. :)

Remember that facebook non-deleted picture discussed yesterday?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400128

It's 404 now. I suspect (purely guessing) they specifically took that one picture down, but did not also "solve" the problem that left it there in the first place.

I quit a social network a few years ago, but they would not delete my account. So I logged in and changed my name to something like NameOfSocialNetworkRefusesToDeleteMyAccount. And vi-ola, the account disappeared in a day or so.

The embarrassing wheel gets the grease.