If your definition of "easily exchanged" requires a techno-survivalist farmer, I think you need a new definition. One that substitutes crackpot for "Walmart". If you can go to Walmart and use Bitcoin, I will definitely accept that you can easily exchange it. However, if you really do have to go to your local anarchist/survivalist I will only say that you can currently only exchange Bitcoin, in limited quantities, in limited locations, for a limited stock of a limited set of items.

And no, the jump from crackpot to paying your taxes and water bills with BTC is neither obvious nor even likely, at this point. Right now, the rest of the world would need to get over the stigma that it is used to buy pot, CP, and is mostly used by fringe elements. And is highly speculative. And that the government hates it and while it will recognize it just enough to tax it, but they will never recognize it enough to be easily used to replace their own monopoly money.

That said it could, through some unknown mechanism, come out a winner, but the means by which that might happen is far from obvious at this point.

Right now the cultural norm is NOT to run people over. However, when you automate, you also make things uniform and increase awareness of the vehicle to that of a machine.

Whereas most people will not run you over right now *purposely*, you can never tell if someone is going to be watching properly or not when you cross. So you are in actual danger of being hit, even if there is no norm to say that this is acceptable. Computers will not make this mistake, as they are always vigilant, unless disabled. Therefore, a pedestrian may become much more comfortable with what used to be considered to be unsafe behavior.

Also, humans will get impatient or fail to pay attention, and yes, they could be psychotic killers who want to run you over. The difference between programming and a cultural norm is that with programming, the units are significantly less likely to act unpredictably, unlike individual humans.

I've seen people at red lights suddenly decide to start moving through the intersection while there was cross traffic. Why did they do it? No idea. They may have been in a hurry and consciously breaking the law, they might be impaired, or they might just be jumpy and thought the light had changed when it had not. The only thing I know is that for whatever reason: it actually happened. That is why you are careful in traffic as a pedestrian, or even while driving. With a computer in control, though, such an anomalous event is far less likely to happen, and there would be much more consternation when it does happen, as computers are expected to be perfect.

A carbon tax remains a policy option, but if you focus on one policy option, you might as well plan for what is really going to happen. No one wants a tax on that because no one wants to be taxed on something they don't understand and can't perceive. I know everyone's all fixated on making people pay the "social costs" of something, but I think we should drop the idealism and work on some policies that don't thrust the concept down people's throats, because it is an entirely alien concept.

I'd envision a multipronged approach that focuses on outreach and smaller remediation proposals with education that will eventually explain to younger people the case for voting for more effective proposals. With conservatives or people too old to care about the future, it is usually best to compromise with them and wait for them to die. Otherwise, they will work to poison the political landscape for future generations instead of remaining blissfully ignorant and letting progress take its course.

Global warming wouldn't do anything to the profits of oil and coal. Those would still remain uniformly high. You still need to burn something to get energy.

Global warming, or rather, programs to counteract that effect would, however, have a big effect on energy generation companies that would have to figure out how to keep CO2 emissions down from burning those hydrocarbons.

I expect that forward looking oil and coal companies with any intelligence will be looking at diversifying into other resource or energy segments. It is understandable that they will be conservative on moving forward with a program that seems to require them to do most of the changing of their business model, but even companies eventually come around. Companies are made up of people, and people will eventually come around to a manifest fact, especially if they can still make a profit.

In the meantime, if "global warming" is a political problem for allocating money for R & D and infrastructure, I am sure it can be justified in other ways. I am certain that the Defense establishment is very interested in not having to rely on foreign oil to run its wars. That's one reason that there's all these nuclear powered ships running around.

If you're really interested in stuff to prevent global warming, but a little tired of the political bickering, identify technologies and practices with other practical advantages and work on those with other justifications. It is amazing how you can repurpose technology to have a different effect. And if you pick the right tech, you might have the singular amusement of same people who are opposing global warming policies, instead be the ones who are enthusiastic about what you are doing.

All of this is extremely important, but how does any of that affect their Time to Market? It doesn't.

I am a big proponent of VM or "cloud" infrastructures for the flexibility that they give you for capacity or repurposing resources on the fly.

However, none of that is particularly important for faster feature build outs. Product development times are usually so long that you could probably order, rack and stack actual boxes before some features even get out of development. Hardware is almost never the reason that something isn't ready on time, assuming that the product team communicated the capacity requirements. And if they can't communicate with you effectively, you have bigger problems than VMs or a cloud can save you from.

As for dev resources, back in the 20th Century, I could probably have ghosted up a dev server for someone in less than hour, and most people don't even need that kind of re-purposing to do their work, it's just a convenience. Possibly a detriment, since coders in their own environments frequently tend to ignore the need to program against the existing production infrastructure.

Most places I have worked would have to streamline their product development process by a factor of ten or something in order to even begin to make deployments a bottleneck.

OpenStack is interesting to me, but it is far from the long pole in the tent for Time to Market.

I agree. When I read about their 15 minute rule I was like: "Well that's nice, but are deployments really where they are losing time in reacting to competitors?"

Having been involved in production deployments for over 15 years now, I can tell you that deployment time is pretty much a non-issue with speed to market. Things like VMs and storage options and all of that make for easier, and less risky deployments, I agree. However, I have never heard of a piece of software that was ready for prod that was waiting for more than a simple scheduled maintenance window in order for it to go out. Maybe some of the more complex deployments might have required a week at most to practice and get the scripts right. That's it.

Compare that to the weeks and months that marketing, product management, development, QA testers are working on features and it is insignificant.

When I do a deployment, I'm perfectly willing to do 8 hours of prep work to make sure that my customers could get 5 minutes less downtime, and preferably no downtime. Rushing things into production from test is like spending your R&D budget on improving fuel efficiency from 50 to 51 MPG while you spend nothing on getting 12 MPG trucks up to a respectable 18 or something. Where is the real time savings?

If this is Paypal's solution by itself, I predict that they will remain behind the curve going forward as well. Maybe they should figure out how to improve their development process?

Synergy seems like an almost too simple concept to me, and that's why I think it gets read as being "content-free" or "marketing speak". While it is marketing speak, it really is just a term that describes what positive effect that you get from a partnership or an acquisition in relation to the strengths of your own organization. If you acquire a company, you need to identify where you can find synergy and then ensure that you incorporate that successfully. If you don't, the merger or partnership fails.

Once synergistic effects, and necessary components are identified, you make sure that you maintain enough support to handle the increased demands of the merged organization. However, since most companies have departments or positions that are required only if they are independent organizations, then you have redundancy which is usually where you cut to maintain efficiency.

Find synergy, calculate new supporting requirements, eliminate redundancy. And sometimes, even add new positions or assets if your synergy has a multiplicative effect on some part of your business. Synergy as a term can be vague, because synergistic effects will vary on the type of businesses you are dealing with, but I think it is useful as a placeholder for the specific effect involved, which again, may only be obvious to people in the business itself.

Moving to your point, though, it is a fair and good question to ask specifically what effects are expected to provide synergy. That said, many companies do specify those details to investors and in various documents which they produce outside something like an earnings call. Checking the documentation they they file with the SEC, for instance, might yield some information.

Here's hoping that those who are getting laid off were given good packages and that they find themselves employed again as soon as possible. Having had that done to me in the past, I know what a difference a good separation can make in the process of keeping your life together. Cutting redundancy is a legitimate business practice, but it sucks to be on the receiving end of it.

I agree with your point.

I would say, though, that it might be nice or useful to see if they can make use of some of those employees for internal positions that will be opening up as Salesforce grows. I realize, this is not going to be possible for some, or even most of those jobs, but it is also an efficient practice to keep people on who you don't have to go through the full hiring process to locate and vet.

The problem is... they have no plans to remove Assad from power. That would almost have a point. They are just going to dump a few hundred cruise missiles in a civil war.

An action with the desired effect of removing Assad would require us to actually put troops in there, or at least advisers. Otherwise, we aren't doing anything to remove Assad. The resistance might still win, but that wouldn't be us.

We're just shooting at them because chemical weapons.

It was not illegal to do that because was nothing that said that it was illegal to do it. As long as no one got thrown in jail for it, the legislature can do what it wants for investigations. The control, of course, is the votes of the members, and then the votes of the people. So let's be clear, if most of the country was upset by those meetings, they would not have gone on. Certainly not in the open the way that they did.

Mind you, being a member of the Communist Party organization was, in fact, illegal, but that was because it was a foreign sponsored agency with a goal of undermining the US. So there would be some interest in that.

Yes, there are Constitutional protections, but that will really come into play if the Congress is compelling someone to do something. Congress has the power of investigation in the Constitution itself, so calling people in would be possible. Once there, the people being called could cite the Fifth Amendment for not implicating themselves. However, if the Congress grants them immunity from prosecution, then there is no longer anything that would incriminate the witness and they then must answer questions put to them by Congress or be in contempt. And if those questions happened to be "are you a communist"? then the question could be asked. Because the government can't throw them in jail (due to immunity), it is not illegal, but if it is broadcast on TV, the public can get that information and shun them. Perfectly legal.

Democracy only guarantees justice or diversity if the majority is committed to that. Otherwise it is a dictatorship with many heads. Most people at the time were afraid of the Soviet threat and went along with it... at least for a time.

Thing is, what happens when someone decides to stand in front of an auto cab in order to cause a denial of service attack? The car won't run you over and will probably be programmed to take no action that it can reasonably predict will harm a human including trying to get around you.

You'll need fleet managers driving around, troubleshooting issues and making higher level decisions for the cars. And probably humans working in other parts of the system.

It would essentially be distributed mass transit. There's plenty of jobs in mass transit, albeit not as many as having a driver per car or truck, of course.

Oh yeah... and you should hire trustworthy admins too, but there is still a lot that process can do when you can't be 100% sure you have good guys with root access.

No true root access at terminals, so all accesses of data that could be loaded on your thumb drive are logged and flagged to your credentials.
All physical access to hosts is with an escort or preferably by remote hands (who are escorted).
Physical searches when you enter and leave secured areas.

In other words, pretty much what I thought they already did in TS/SCI work areas.

Yes, having root is a big deal. No, it is not impossible to secure it, because you don't need to be superuser all the time and so in those intervals it is feasible for you to be monitored.

It may not be perfect, but it should prevent massive downloads and removing storage devices full of data like this. I mean, it's not like this isn't exactly what a real spy would try and do.

I expect that there are a few security professionals who are SO fired right now. That or some stupid government initiative from high level caused all of the normal procedures to be circumvented in order to make their pet project work. This should be preventable.

I've worked on systems where brilliant people design them, who then explain how it should work, how you need to use it, and what would happen if you didn't do those things.

Then they give the system to people who ignore those practices and proceed to completely undermine the system. Usually in the name of convenience or ignorance, but sometimes to enable that system to do something it was not meant to.

That is a good point. It could turn into one of those Hollywood movie scenes where they sit around for awhile lounging around in their meeting location waiting for the "funds to check out". And then the heroes show up and save the day. Or something.