I can understand why they do it - diminishing the page rank of sites that give answers to questions on Stack Overflow causes Stack Overflow to gain more traffic - but it still seems kind of underhanded. They rely on others for the content of the site, so they should give credit to the producers of that content - without it, they would have no service at all.
This actually seems VERY important, although probably less so if you've been exposed to the idea before.
Regardless, the results are impressive, and the ability to impose the mathematical properties' of PDFs or CDFs over those of discrete numbers could have an enormous impact on the efficiency of certain types of algorithms.
Knowledge has an incredibly large impact on the possibility of the betterment of human life, be it individually or socially. It is better for everyone if knowledge is more widely available, those who run businesses involved with its distribution included.
Simply posting something that already exists, be it through a Tweet or a link or what-have-you, does not create anything of value.
However, creating said link with a short description or within the context of a greater article does create value. It's not a huge amount of value, but I know that I, personally, am much more likely to examine a link posted by someone if they explain what it is about and that explanation is both interesting and relevant.
There's also the bit where attempting to get people to support a piece of positive legislation is infinitely harder than getting them to oppose negative legislation.
If for no other reason, you have to agree with all the parts of a bill to truly support it, while you only have to strongly disagree with one part to be opposed to it.
The end bit is kind of creepy, in my opinion, but I'm liking the way this is going overall.
I, for one, would love to be able to talk to people over the Internet and still have some sort of physical presence on both ends to make it seem more natural.
Then again, I dislike even having to talk on the telephone, so perhaps I'm alone on that one...
Reflection on work is an important step in getting work done efficiently, and this process forces it quite well. On top of that, it requires little action on the part of the managers.
Having no readers is a bit of an over-statement. I have some friends who read it occasionally and ask about specific topics, and a few random people who probably glance at it once or twice a week.
Point is, blog's are useful even if only a few people are reading it, because it's just important as a tool for you as for other people.
I find this article to be spot on, especially for professionals in very technical careers.
Specifically, the bit about improving your writing skills is very pertinent. Most technical professionals would benefit quite a bit by learning how to communicate with those outside of their profession, i.e. a large portion of the people who might read your blog.
I, for one, keep writing a blog with essentially no readers for more or less this reason.
Even so, the laborious market as the writer describes it would be better characterized as an olipsony, as collaboration was required to perform the action the article is speaking against.
I'm not familiar enough to speak on anything else in the article, but this in particular bothered me.
With more and more emphasis on remote storage rather than physical, present storage mediums, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar phasing out occurred among similar technologies.
Considering the vastly different uses people put different portions of Google's services towards, combining all of them seems rather counter-productive to me.
I suppose an option to partition different services into different relevancy 'portfolios' would solve the problem, but that puts a lot of burden on the user that, at least in my opinion, most users are not looking for.
From experience, I would say that a very good designer is worth considerably more to a company than a very good developer.
This comes largely from the fact that the beneficial cap in skill for designers is much higher than for developers.
With a developer, so long as they finish everything on time and it works as intended, other concerns are largely irrelevant.
With a designer, there is always room to improve, so the difference between the best designer and the next-best designer still provides some important benefits, while this is not necessarily true for developers.
This. Just because labor is no longer a factor in production functions doesn't mean capital is not.
Specifically, raw material scarcity will actually have a larger impact on price and availability of items than it does at the moment, even though the majority of items will be generally more available as a result of less constraining factors.
The question, I think, is more relevant than you make it appear.
The only factor of production eliminated by the introduction of what is, essentially, automated labor is labor. A similarly important factor of production is not - raw materials.
Just because you have some way to produce something doesn't mean you can create the materials to do so. Regardless of whether or not you can produce something when you have the materials, you still need to purchase or otherwise obtain the materials to do so.
I think the more important question is, "How does Ferrari stay in business, when the only thing that they truly control is the code for producing a Ferrari?" What this essentially does is transform everything into an intellectual property issue, much as the Internet has done for digital media.