This doesn't necessarily have to be at the UI level. If sites have a well defined API they can still be indexed but serviced for users by native apps. In fact, this is better than kludgy scraping.
For that you'd have to have a standard API with indicators of content importance. Even then it would be akin to keyword meta tags which are bad representations of site content in general.
that is what I meant as having a better syntax for anonymous functions. I agree it's bad (even with nonlocal in python 3) but that is not a matter of different scoping rules, it's only syntax.
I think he has a great point that the value a person creates is not easily compensated in an information economy. Right now the information economy makes up less than 5% of the total in the U.S.
So advertising for the other sectors in the economy works well to support most of the information sector right now. What happens as those other sectors become more automated though? The smaller and smaller amount of people in charge of those sectors will become disproportionately compensated for the value they create. This is already happening in Wall Street for example. So we're going to need to find some way to compensate people for their digital contributions to things like open source, online communities like this, and other informational public goods or we'll be left relying on the government and/or super rich to distribute the abundance of wealth. Neither of which sound very appealing to me.
I've been developing for app engine since 2008 when it came out and absolutely love it. The price changes are a result of turning a successful and massively growing product into a profitable one a la search, youtube, etc... Google should be praised for this. The changes in price also accompany an SLA that guarantee developers will receive three years notice before a breaking API change or service shut down.
The SSL problem is a limitation in some browsers that causes the type of certificates that GAE needs to use a CNAME, not IP, based routing to display huge warnings.
veetle.com does a really good job at this. I have a six year old media center box that doesn't run anything that well besides veetle and 1080p at that.
Right now (though without any contractual guarantees I'm aware of) Time Warner hands me via DHCP a publicly routable IPv4 address that doesn't change except during extended outages, which don't happen very often (the address stays the same through brief outages - less than an hour every month or so). Effectively, I can initiate a connection to my home machine. There are no explicit data caps, though if TWC were to start slowing things down after more thann 100Gbyte per month, I wouldn't know. Tomorrow I could find out that TWC has decided to use NAT'd private addresses and quenching at 40Gbytes, and I'd lose all that, with the only recourse being to use AT&T ADSL.
I haven't adopted use of any dependencies on high bandwidth - no internet backups, no TOR participation, yell at the kids when they torrent anything already available to them on Netflix.
TWC business class effectively guarantees the features which I'm getting but not paying for - for an extra $200/month. I would pay that if I were running a server for customers, but I'm not.
I find not caring about what people think ends up hurting my personal relationships. I have to try really hard to be aware of my identity and how that fits in with the people around me. Naturally I am aloof. Is that what this article is saying I should be?
I think identities are layered. Perhaps underneath your day-to-day persona, you are aloof and solitary, but what's beneath that? Perhaps if you explore where that comes from and try to understand it, you can find a way to engage with others and feel true to yourself. After all, a belief like 'I am aloof', is exactly what the op is advising against. You aren't aloof. You aren't anything except what you decide to be in any given moment. Your aloofness is a box of your own construction.
