You're exactly right. When OpenID was getting started, I was quite hopeful that it would prevent lock-in and walled gardens. I used my myOpenID account. I also experimented with Google and Yahoo as providers. I was dismayed that while a number of small web sites were and are OpenID consumers, none of the big ones have allowed that. Eventually, I realized that's simply because it's not in the interest of a company with a large number of users to allow people to use outside accounts to log in. They know they can increase their power by restricting how users interact.

I was similarly dismayed when Facebook implemented an XMPP (Jabber) service but didn't federate, defeating the primary strength of the Jabber system. I was happy for many years that at least Google was interested in interoperability, but they've now shown they're little different from Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and all the other behemoths in that regard.

OpenID is an open standard which has been implemented by many sites, one of which is myOpenID. myOpenID was one of the earliest OpenID services. Lots of companies now provide OpenIDs for anyone with an account. However, the overall vision of having one OpenID with which one can log in to all one's online accounts hasn't happened. You can't use your Google account to log in to Facebook or your Microsoft account to log in to Twitter. It's not really surprising janrain is giving up.

Dropbox is a service. Presumably, they're successful because they provide that service better than many competitors. What does that have to do with hiding the code of client software?

Though there seems to be a lot of good advice in this article, the author rants misguidedly against several things. As someone has pointed out already, he seems to be addressing the writing of tutorials, but labeling that "documentation for programming languages and libraries." While good tutorials are often sorely lacking, that is only one type of documentation for programming languages and libraries. API documentation is extremely important as well and literate programming and docstrings fit in a similar category. The author's rant against wikis is particularly funny, especially since he acknowledges that there are quite useful ones. Of course there are many wikis full of poor quality information, just as there are many essays and blog posts of poor quality. Blaming a wiki for the poor quality of its contents makes no more sense than blaming one's editor for the poor quality of one's code.

There's no need to ask Guido about this and there's no way the company's lawyers and/or the NSA would allow him to answer even if he knew any details. Simply assume that if you didn't encrypt your data on your own machine, the NSA can intercept it.

There isn't yet artificial intelligence anywhere close to the level for which the laws of robotics would make sense. However, even if there ever is such AI, it is naive in the extreme to think there could be universal agreement on how such AIs should be constrained. I doubt even Asimov thought that was realistic. I think his interest in the laws was for thought experiments and plot devices more than anything else. Notice that he doesn't mention them in this essay.

For those numbers to be meaningful, one would have to control for the proximity of orcas and humans. I don't think we need a scientific study to say that orcas in captivity are within sight of a human far more often than their relatives in the ocean.

If you'd read TFA, you'd know that dysentery was not a way to die in the original game.

Ask Patents is a new weapon that could be used against competitors so I doubt those with large patent portfolios will be able to ignore it for long. If one of the "big boys" starts to use it, all the others will have to as well. Hopefully, it will be a catalyst to make it abundantly clear to everyone that software patents are harmful to society as a whole as more and more of them are revealed to be of poor quality and intentionally misleading.

Economies have indeed been becoming more global for centuries and will continue to do so. Currently, the most universal currency is the US dollar. One thing you can be sure of is that no government will favor a currency it can't control to some extent. Perhaps some governments would favor Bitcoin over increased ubiquity of the US dollar but I doubt it.

I suspect the primary reason for the unfounded dismissiveness is that most people don't understand the nature of currencies in general. Most people seem to think strong currencies like the US dollar have intrinsic value and since Bitcoin is "virtual," it doesn't. Of course, since the value of a currency is determined by peoples' confidence in it, the fact that people think the US dollar has intrinsic value does give it value, though that value is not intrinsic. I'm far from ready to declare Bitcoin a viable alternative to the US dollar, but it is a great technical achievement and a fascinating social experiment.

It is true that a difference between a government-backed (fiat) currency and Bitcoin is that the government attempts to force you to pay in the currency it issues, though how much they can enforce that varies throughout the world. However, everything else you say about Bitcoin applies to fiat currencies as well. The US dollar has no inherent value and if it goes belly-up, you have nothing except a bunch of worthless pieces of green paper or more likely, worthless bits. US dollars have value because of consensus, just like Bitcoins or any other currency. Exactly why people have confidence in the US dollar is as much about human psychology as anything else though such complex systems are well beyond our ability to fully comprehend.

"Focused on merchant adoption" means squat if merchants don't even know about it or understand why it's better than something they have heard more about. I'm not even sure why "being about to run on GPUs" is an inherent advantage since mining was designed to create a limited number of bitcoins and will eventually end.

I don't have any iDevices so I can't judge who's correct on this but there does seem to be some controversy. I think there are plenty of other reasons not to get an iDevice anyway.

Indeed, that's exactly why this weapon will have no effect on public safety as some seem to think. Someone who can afford that much for a single weapon can afford various other extremely effective means of murder.