UnNews:Engineering fixes more things that were not broken
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| Engineering fixes more things that were not broken | 
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1 October 2015
MENLO PARK, California -- Wizards of American engineering are making huge strides in fixing things that were not broken.
Twitter is reportedly working on a product that will finally allow messages to exceed 140 characters. That it is a "product" implies it might no longer be free of cost. Pulling an old tobacco pipe from the lab coat top pocket and lighting it, Twitter Chief Engineer Elizabeth Sparrow said: "Thirty to fifty characters extra looks good, provided they get some better quality grease and increase inspection frequencies." As Engineering is more adept at restoring steam traction engines than social media, the question of why inarticulate Twitter users would pay actual money just to be more verbose is left to Marketing.
Except that a division has broken out in Management. Unnamed directors have set their sights on a new limit of 170 characters, while outside directors and corporate raider Carl Icahn are holding out for 190 and are threatening the company with a change of pecking order. Chief executive Jack Dorsey, however, is not ruffling feathers. He stated: "Don't see why anyone needs >140, LOL. I mean, surely most points can be got across just by bei"
The issue has been skirted in the American campaign for President. Donald Trump says he could get his core points across even if limited to 4 letters, and continue to run circles around his amateurish and ugly opponents. Hillary Clinton claims to own only one device, and has deleted all her tweets anyway, as they are all personal and none concern either national security or money-laundering between the Clinton Foundation and hostile Arab nations. Bernie Sanders has stated that even 140 is more freedom than Americans need, and the resources should be redirected to guarantee everyone free food in a meatless diet.
UnNews has always allowed news dispatches to exceed 140 characters at no extra cost, provided one doesn't mind having ads for brony fan websites appended to the bottom of the page.
Meanwhile, today is the deadline in the United States for the wide introduction of credit and debit cards with computers inside rather than magnetic strips. This change will solve even more unspecified problems that engineers had but cardholders did not. It will also require that every card reader be replaced, but the eager United States recently junked all its televisions for HDTV, and most of its inexpensive cars by calling them Clunkers. The current mandate came not from the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency but from VISA and MasterCard, which also have revenue independent of Congress and maybe their own legislatures too.
Card issuers and card acceptors are to "compete" against one another to see who is the least late, with the loser exposed to new liability for fraud. Under this "free-market" solution, which is gentler than some unspecified, harsh alternative, Walmart spent $8 billion for new readers, and banks spent $200-800 million for...infrastructure, but the end-user won't face any new taxes, and everyone has a "choice." If banks impose new fees and refuse to loan money, or supermarkets raise the price of a loaf of bread to $20, it will be about something else — greed, probably — which can be remedied by a follow-on crackdown-on-the-innocent.
Sources[edit]
- Staff "Twitter looking beyond 140 characters with new product". Reuters, September 29, 2015
- Kim Zetter "That Big Security Fix for Credit Cards Won’t Stop Fraud". Wired, September 30, 2015