DISQUS

This is a great list. I've forwarded it on to coworkers and many others, posted it to Twitter, etc. Working my way through the Stanford and UCB machine learning stuff myself. Thanks and happy new year!

Nope. Payment processing requires even more robust performance than Twitter's existing messaging/micro-blogging application. You can't give people the fail whale when they are trying to buy something or pay a bill.

Also Twitter would face competition from Facebook, PayPal (don't they essentially offer this already?), Google, etc. In the end this would turn Twitter into an execution play, and they've already shown that they can't execute on various key aspects of their business, i.e. reliability and scalability.

I was selected as an alternate juror for an attempted murder trial and had a similar reaction to you. The most interesting/difficult part was when I had to go to the judge and report another juror for making highly inappropriate statements about one of the main witnesses in the case as well as a female jury member. The juror making the statements was dismissed.

I once went to a party at the "A" wherehouse and on display there was a piece of art that consisted of a very large wall hanging covered with bloody (but fake) severed ears. Artist unknown.