If this seems like a lot of jibba-jabba, well, that’s because remote development is hard. It takes discipline to make it all work, certainly more discipline than piling a bunch of programmers into the same cubicle farm. But when you imagine what this kind of intellectual work — not just programming, but anything where you’re working in mostly thought-stuff — will be like in ten, twenty, even thirty years … don’t you think it will look a lot like what happens every day right now on Stack Overflow? That is, a programmer in Brazil helping a programmer in New Jersey solve a problem?

The house sold for $1 million at auction on Saturday, almost double the $533,000 its owners paid just five years ago and more than four times the $218,000 it sold for in 1996.

The housing market in Australia escaped the worst of the Global Financial Crisis, but it is hard to imagine that we’ll be that lucky forever — with such inflated housing prices, how can mere mortals possibly expect to be able to pay back such huge loans within 30 odd years?

In Stack Exchange 1.0 you could pay them a monthly fee to setup your own Stack Exchange site, on your own domain, and you were free to use it for whatever you liked.

In Stack Exchange 2.0 you no longer have to pay them a monthly fee (hurrah!) but you can’t use it for whatever you like (doh!). SE 2.0 will follow the StackOverflow.com, ServerFault.com and SuperUser.com path of being owned, maintained and monetized by the Stack Overflow crew. Oh sure, all of the content is licensed under Creative Commons, but the actual platform will no longer be licensed to or administered by third parties.

So, what’s free about this? Well, the content is free I suppose — in that, it’s licensed under Creative Commons, and the Stack Overflow team will not claim ownership of it. And you’re free to suggest new Stack Exchange sites, but you’ll need to go through a rigorous and drawn out vetting process — at the end of which, even if you’re successful, you won’t own anything.

So in short: Stack Exchange 2.0 is not free. Sure, you have the freedom to participate in sites that use the platform, and you have the freedom to suggest new ideas for sites, but you do not have the freedom to create your own site and determine its direction, like you did in Stack Exchange 1.0.

“Of course the real reason why Australia may be headed toward a one party state at the moment is because the opposition is too disunited and too bereft of talent to be able to lay a glove on the Government.” — Bernard Keane

With the departure of Ponting, the Aussie’s quickly crumbled, and a previously subdued England finally started to believe that — this time — they would not grasp defeat from the jaws of victory. That they would in fact, win.

Is England a better side? Statistically speaking, not really. With the exception of the leading run scorer, Andrew Strauss, six of the top seven batsmen with the most runs were Australians. The English team only scored two centuries, while the Australian’s scored eight. Again, with the bowling, the top three bowlers with the most wickets, were Australian’s and eight of the ten biggest batting partnerships were by the Australian team.

On paper, Australia looked like the better team. They have some very good players, who one could imagine, will turn into very good and consistent crickets over the next few years. But England were none the less, prevalent, despite their timid middle order and general inconsistency with the bat and ball. They will no double feel a little lucky to have one this one, given the debilitating injuries to two of their best players.

Australia’s biggest problem is the perception that they should still be a great team. Nevermind the fact that some of Australia’s best ever players have retired in recent years. The likes of Shane Warne, Glen McGrath, Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Steve Waugh, Justin Langer, Jason Gillespie and Damien Martyn can’t easily be replaced. Australia aren’t a great team anymore, they are simply a good team — and good teams don’t win 16 consecutive Test matches. Good teams are vincible.

This series defeat will hit Ponting and the Australia team hard, since they most likely think that they were the better team, but calls for Ponting to resign as Captain are reactionary and absurd. It’d be like a tired and fading marathon runner shooing themselves in the foot, in the hope that it would give them an extra burst of energy to get to the finish line. It just doesn’t make sense. He is still Australia’s best batsmen and most experienced player and using him as a scapegoat would just illustrate the Australian cricket teams decline from great to good.

The key for Australia is to realize that they are no longer invincible and that when they lose, it isn’t simply an aberration, soon to be brutally rectified with a crushing return to form in the following match, it’s a sign that maybe some batsmen or bowlers aren’t performing as well as they should and that more of a horses for courses approach needs to be taken since Australia no longer has a well rounded bowling attack that can bowl unchanged in any conditions, no matter how green or dusty.

Unfortunately they don’t appear to have the will. The cynic in me thinks that it’s so they can charge you a $30 dishonour fee — but come on, it’s Banks we’re talking about here, they wouldn’t do something like that…

That’s right. Google will not index sites that have a valid Robots.txt file. What’s more, creating a Robots.txt file is very simple. So simple in fact that Ropert Murdoch, or indeed the most challenged of computer users could create one and upload it to their website.

But of course, the newspapers won’t do this. If they were to block Google then they would lose a significant portion of traffic. Yes, you see, these newspapers have a dirty little secret. Google is actually good for them. It drives traffic to their websites, which means they can serve up more ads, and make more money.

The newspapers appear to want to be paid some sort of royalty-free for allowing their news to be indexed by Google, and then they want to continue to make the money from ads which they already get from Google traffic.

Can’t. Have. Cake. Eat. Too.

The irony is of course that if Google actually went ahead and decided not to index content from these websites — to guard against any potential legal action, or to simply make a point — the newspapers would be up in arms about how evil Google is trying to suppress the free press… or something along those lines.

They’re just looking for some else to blame…