I believe bootstrap is the product of the design community stepping up their game. It's the part of the community that is lagging behind that is doing the whining here.
I feel the same way although I feel that I have improved somewhat by writing an interpreter for my own programming language. The problem is we have no way to practice. I learn by writing code. If I didn't write a sorting algorithm myself then I don't know it. But how often do you find a legitimate reason to write a sort from scratch on a real project.
I think it would be great to build an entire computer science curriculum out of nothing but programming practice problems covering everything from bit twiddling to monads.
Economists and policy makers don't know how to calculate the monetary value of a clean atmosphere, nor do they know who should pay for it or how. So when making decisions they quietly assume the value is zero. We would be better off if they assumed the value was infinite.
I don't believe he said anything close to that. Part of the reason posts like this get people fired up is that they assume that they are being accused of shutting women out unfairly. He left open the possibility that women (for example) select themselves out of programming careers for whatever reason.
Imagine if you threw a party and invited half men, and half women, but only the men showed up. Wouldn't you be displeased with those results and conclude that you need to do something different to make your party more appealing to women? I know I would.
If you put a "Pay me a dollar just because you like my site" feature on your wordpress site you will probably not get many dollars. But since people are already comfortable paying small amounts of money via itunes and the app store it seems like a nice additional revenue channel, and probably leads to more site traffic, especially from the core fans.
As for the extra value to the user, no idea, maybe they can make it easier to submit comments? No ads maybe?
This reminds me of the debate in the media about high-frequency trading after the flash crash. The media and general public were pounding the table demanding data and analysis and solutions, and on the inside of the industry, no one cared. Even the SEC did not have the tools or expertise to do a proper analysis.
The demands for change have to come from outside, and they have to be forceful. I would go further than this article and demand that not only should the papers be available to the public, but so should all of the data from which the conclusions were drawn. And furthermore there should be some open repository of all the data, along with the analysis, with api's etc... If taxpayers are paying for research then why not also pay for a way to actually consume that research?