Nicely written. A couple of things, somewhat independent of the economic issue: the "big data - dumb analysis" trend is bound to change, it's a matter of time till volume is not an advantage anymore. And the fact that "academia" is by no means a uniform discipline, some fields can only move ahead with the gathering of more data, while other fields need new testable hypotheses more.
Could you point to the source of the "hackers and startups" quote? Didn't find it in the main article. (Edit: sorry if this is on a tangent)
(Edit 2: well, I didn't think it was a downvote-worthy tangent, considering the word's connotations debate and this being an official govt url)
Yes. And the net neutrality article on wikipedia is pretty comprehensive, maybe someone from sub-saharan Africa will come up with a better implementation ;)
Good luck.
Anecdote: after finding a small scorpion on the bathroom wall in the Honduran jungle, I had a huge compulsion to tear everything apart to make sure there's no nest. The only thing that calmed me down was access to offline, text-only Wikipedia on my Nokia n800. It was 2 a.m., slept like a baby when I found out this species was harmless. To this day, I never travel without it. (Edit: Wikipedia, not the n800 ;)
From travelling across India for a few months (also among the "backwards" populations, as they are referred to even in Indian legal texts), I can tell you that yes, corruption is amazingly prevalent. As far as money exchanged, you might be right (I don't know), but the way it affects day to day life is nothing like in western countries. It's a credit to the resilience of people there that they can function on top of that structure and still be enthusiastic about "India" - over a dozen fairly geographically homogenous languages, with most people never travelling outside their cultural comfort zone.
Weak argument, probably the right conclusion. Internet users number may be the most important metric, considering it spans continents now, including countries at different levels of economic development. There's more likelyhood of hedging.
edit: I think the metric is important because users can become innovators and providers easier then ever, not just because they have disposable income.
I use it all the time, but it's not exclusive. Love msdn too. But like all communities built around large entities, there will be some product pushing that's not very organic, and gets adopted regardless of merits.
Maybe the lack of a strong community is because of Microsoft trying to build it around itself, while always trying to push the new thing. WPF as an example.
Can you describe your setup when doing this? It's also annoying and irritating having half the comment ignored. Don't care about the testimony unless it's backed up.
Agreed, but there are some clues that testing was faulty (removing microphone and speakers), admittedly in a poorly written article. It's possible that the bias to prove the theory corect skewed the testing process.