ajitk

That is true. Amazon has been in cloud hosting space for a long time to cover almost all areas required to run a server. I am rooting for competitors though who could offer more services. That should bring interesting services and drive down cost even further.

Recently stumbled upon very competitively priced DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart

They have APIs to manage on-demand instances as well.

I wonder why they choose not to use native input element for a checkbox. Was it for a consistent visual theme?

Using custom widgets instead of native often leads to usability issues. In this case, when the a checkbox gains focus, a SPACE BAR scrolls the page instead of toggling its state.

There was a period in 1920s during which alcohol was banned in US. It was based on morality of the time. This shows that authorities can decide to ban something based on morality of the time irrespective of how deep the association of the subject/object is with our culture.

In game economy is nascent but becoming more complex every day. It required Valve to hire an economist. It may have been a novelty. But for how long?

> Games cannot really go "underground" though.

I meant the economy will go underground to meet the demand of in game favors.

Recently read http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a... where Yanis Varoufakis, an economist, is studying in-game economies. And now this where South Korea bans trading virtual goods since "The main purpose of the games is for entertainment... item farming for commercial gain is a “serious hindrance” to a “healthy gaming culture”".

Isn't it same as banning sale of alcohols/drugs since they can be harmful? It will push the activity to go underground.

From the draft:

> ...network A, B and ... are AIP networks; Domain node "www.yahoo.com" in network B is expressed as "www.yahoo.com.B" for its external domain name.

It mean that www.yahoo.com can co-exist in AIPs A and B. The "external domain names" will be www.yahoo.com.A abd www.yahoo.com.B. Would HTML documents be linked using local names or external names? Local only names are not going to work across APIs unless www.yahoo.com maintains same document hierarchy in all of them!

On the contrary, wouldn't OP's solution be an example of more generalized implementation of multiplication? I can see that it is similar to (X * 2) where X defines behavior of __mul__.

Yes, there is chance that arbitrary objects can provide different semantics for __mul__. It would be true for any language.

Now that you you mention labels, I see the similarity to C. I might have been influenced by OP's reference to use indentation to make code more readable instead of using braces.

My mind parsed the first code block as a mix of Python and C. IMO, the later would be more readable since it involves parsing only one rule that the eye is already used.

What I like more about Backbone is loose that it provides loosely coupled small components. Small components that work well independently. This is a great feature. It makes it easier to adapt them according to an application's model/architecture. To top it off, this has encouraged developers to build a rich ecosystem of plugins.

Concur that a switch to either Chrome or Firefox is a win. Both have been competing with each other after Chrome raised the bar. In either case winner is the user.

Personally, I have been using Chrome and Firefox both. Firefox being the primary browser for browsing the wild web and Chrome for development and for using Google's services.

It is interesting to note why Thorium is not being used as widely as it should have been. Most of the nations chose to invest in development of Uranium since it can help them build nuclear weapons whereas Thorium does not.

On the other hand, India, which has scarce Uranium but a lot of Thorium, has been leading the research and development of Thorium-based reactors using fast breeder technology. China too has focused its research based on molten salt as the coolant as are other countries including US, France, Japan and Russia.

Till now I had never seen Ellipsis. It seems very similar to slice notation [:]. Found an StackOverflow comment [1] that has more details about usage of Ellipsis in slicing higher dimensional array numpy.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118370/how-do-you-use-the...

In addition to mentioned suggestion I will add some here. Make difference layers difficult to understand and use (which will affect real user too!):

1. Script delivery. Use dynamically loaded modules.

2. Content delivery. Use websockets to deliver data. Does any developer tool show content going through websockets?

3. Content rendering. Use canvas to render content on the screen. Use fonts that make OCR difficult. Handwriting? :)

4. Use of browser plug-ing like Flash and Java.

5. Content delivered over video.

6. Quota based content delivery for requests originating from the same source. Use of multiple signals like cookies and IP addresses to pinpoint the source. Progressive

However, I would not recommend doing most of these. As mikeash aptly compared it to DRM, usability of the website will be affected negatively.

Like software, we can make it hard to reverse engineer them but cannot prevent a determined person from reversing it. There is no way to prevent a determined scraper. They will scrape your data using appropriate tools like real browsers, OCR or real people (mtrurk?).

Edit: formatting.

Clicked on the subtitle "purveyor of impossible dreams" shown below his name "BRET VICTOR" till I had a `screenquake`. Cool!

Or a deliberate link bait to get eyeballs.

I did not say Google is not a big corporation. The emphasis is on patent system being used for by big corporations (against big or small entities) for a purpose that is not "good".

In a way, I am happy that Google was outbid in its bid for Nortel patents. This highlights how broken this system really is. It is being abused by big corporations to maintain their hegemony.

It is allegedly a protection racket: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-why-google-and-android-mu...

Email is the open social network that has managed to work for decades.

Will I ever be able to install and host these alternative social network apps on my server. Can I modify and re-distribute them? There are a few but they are too different (from email) and are big monolithic silos.

Quoting from the article:

Thurner and co found that positive behaviour intensifies after an individual receives a positive action.

"The probability of acting out negative actions is about 10 times higher if a person received a negative action at the previous timestep than if she received a positive action," they say.

"We interpret these findings as empirical evidence for self organization towards reciprocal, good conduct within a human society," they say.

In other words, humanity is fundamentally good.

These "tests" are hardly a measure of competence. A good quantitative score to measure competence should be measured over a longer period of time.

There are good programmers in India. But the signal to noise ratio is very high. IMO, this is attributed to an over abundance of engineering colleges with poor faculty quality.

Is "Pandorama" in title an intended invention? Pandora+Panorama == Pandorama

I like it.;)

However, the official name is Panorama.

This is done using Steganography. The bytes in a binary file are change to store the hidden message. Though not very secure, it serves as a very simple tool to fool human eyes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography