Not only is this a really awesome thing for Epic to do, it could have much further-reaching consequences than UT if it's successful.

At the very minimum, it's going to be an excellent source of quality net/graphics code samples for UE4 developers. If it's wildly successful, we may see some neat ripples around the industry.

Also, this thing is going to get Occulus'd, Hydra'd, and everything else. That's going to be fun.

You don't think Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, lobby?

This isn't just a matter of throwing money at the right people. Its part of a larger ideological debate about how to regulate the telecom industry. The trend over the last 20 years at the FCC has been rooted in conservative economic thinking. Deregulate the industry, use auctions to allocate spectrum, etc. The 1996 reforms didn't achieve everything it was billed to, but the fact is: 1) at the end of the day, Washington views it as largely successful; 2) the state of the internet in the U.S. is competitive with other large western countries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709948. The telcos certainly don't lack numbers to point to to show the competitiveness of the U.S. industry under the existing regime.

Net neutrality is a hard sell because it goes quite against the prevailing thought at the FCC. It has the support of many netopions, but not really among the mainstream/conservative economists that carry the most weight in these policy debates.

The internet companies need to lobby, sure, but they also need a "hook." And "openness" and "neutrality" which are words that resonate in Silicon Valley on their own are not ones that resonate in Washington.

To compare, look how the environmental movement has responded. Environmental groups don't talk about "conservation" and fuzzy ideas like that, not anymore, not in Washington. They talk about externalized costs and concrete economic phenomena that justify regulation. The tech industry needs to ground net neutrality in something like that.

Incidentally, this is part of a debate that has been raging for 30+ years. Telecom and wireless regulation has spawned thousands of journal articles and thesises. Politicians don't read these things, of course, but they're hugely influential to the technocrats that do the first draft proposals. At least to the extent they can back ideological viewpoints with a theory-based narrative.

I think this whole exercise gives you a false sense of security. The thing is, there's a closed-source firmware running on the baseband processor which can do rather nefarious things: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-fin...

So if you really want to be 'free', get rid of the cellphone.

This is a pretty good list of gotchas, but it's important when writing something targeted at beginners to be as precise and clear as possible. Nearly every section here either uses terminology poorly, is slightly incorrect, or has difficult examples.

  Python supports optional function arguments and allows default values to be 
  specified for any optional argument.

No, specifying a default is what causes an argument to be optional.

  it can lead to some confusion when specifying an expression as the default value
  for an optional function argument.

Anything you specify as a default value is an expression. The problem is when the default is mutable.

  the bar argument is initialized to its default (i.e., an empty list)
  only the first time that foo() is called

No, rather it's when the function is defined.

  class variables are internally handled as dictionaries

As dictionary keys, and that's still only roughly correct.

In "Common Mistake #5", he uses both a lambda and array index based looping, neither of which are particularly Pythonic. A better example of where this is a problem in otherwise Pythonic code would be good.

In "Common Mistake #6" he uses a lambda in a list comprehension -- for an article of mistakes mostly made by Python beginners, this is going to make it tough to follow the example.

In "Common Mistake #7", he describes "recursive imports" where he means "circular imports".

In "Common Mistake #8" he refers repeatedly to "stdlib" where he means the Python Standard Library. Someone is going to read that and try to "import stdlib".

It's not exactly purely an aspect of Western companies ignoring China or localizing property for China that is the culprit here. The Chinese government also makes it difficult, especially in the realm of internet services, for Western companies to play.

I know plenty of American technologists who are well aware of Chinese internet properties, how could they not, when disproportionately many American technologists are of Asian descent, but many of them have made the decision that it is preferable to run your startup in the relative unfettered chaos of Silicon Valley than to navigate the maze and minefield of considerations of running an internet service in China.

I'm pretty sure Google would love to have another billion Gmail users or Google search users, or to have Google Play store available (for paid apps) in China. Do you think the fact that these services are blocked are because of ignorance?

How can companies get away with saying things like 'the most affordable premium option' without providing any pricing information whatsoever? Why do they even think that it is acceptable to do so?