People who've made up their minds about something often jump on things they think support their position. If you'd read the article, you'd know that's one of the human tendencies that often leads leading to bad science. Science is a process and set of tools for avoiding such human mistakes but since it's humans implementing it, it's a constant struggle.

I still say it has nothing to do with Make. I guess I shouldn't have replied to a post responding to an AC.

There are millions of replacements for make, which is part of the problem. I doubt there will ever be one canonical replacement, but Scons is a good choice for many projects IMHO. I'm trying to replace the use of make where I work with Scons, which especially makes sense we use Python for the application code. I think a Scheme-extensible replacement for make could be a very good thing, but adding more languages to the ugliness of Make is not the way to go.

Where in the announcement of Make 4.0 is there any mention of Lua?

You're really overthinking things. This is all you need.

Yes, you are missing something. The point of GPUs is to efficiently calculate pixel values to show on the screen. Specific algorithms can be implement in hardware or software and GPU hardware has been moving toward exposing more generic functionality for years, which WebCL can make available to Javascript code. It's the game engine or libraries used by the game engine that worry about low level details about how to talk to the GPU, whether that happens via OpenGL, WebGL, Direct3D, WebCL or something else.

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.