Agreed. I'm on G+ daily, post occassionally (both public and privately), and almost never go on Facebook. G+ just developed better communities and people tend to use the communities instead of blasting everything out to everyone; perhaps because G+ has a higher technical userbase than others, but nonetheless it works well.

Though, thinking about it more, G+ by design is community oriented. Blasting out to the everyone doesn't really stuff very far; while sending it to one or more communities does - that is, unless you're a big celeb and have lots and lots of followers, but that's just not typical in G+.

One use for cryptocurrency that isn't talked about much is as a gift certificate.

If a store created a custom BC clone and pre-mined it completely, it could assign them an arbitrary fixed value (1 Slash-Dollar = 1 USD???) and sell them as gift cards. The advantage over a regular gift card is that the buyer can then split them and give the pieces to friends as gifts or even trade them on an "open market" if he wanted to (okay, that's being done now, but you get the idea).

The company that created and pre-mined the cards would be on the hook for all transaction fees. Unlike a "real" currency like BC they could set an expiration date ahead of time or say that "after a certain date, we will charge a hefty fee for all transactions OTHER than through our store" or if the currency is designed to be "short lived," even "after a certain date, we will accept it for purchase at a discount, and this discount will increase each month until the currency becomes worthless."

Saying whether or not climate change is real, is not real, or is unknown is not a statement for non-subject-matter experts to make until/unless there is enough evidence that it is clearly real or clearly not real to the layman. If either one were the case, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

In other words, every Senator who isn't either a subject-matter expert or an arrogant person and who doesn't want people to think he is in one of those two groups must abstain if this comes to a vote.

So I guess you are sqrt(-1)???

"Things" like the Fridge or Thermostat should be extremely lightweight. If you need "apps" use a user-replaceable front-end-controller.

The "thing" itself should be so lightweight that, at least for "things" like those that existed 20 years ago, they could run on an ASIC no more complicated than a mid-1970s desktop calculator or even with just a very simple circuit similar to that of a simple "dumb" home thermostat. The only complexity would be the optional front-end controller.

The optional front-end controller would come in two connected parts:

Part 1 would be a very basic box that provided only a very basic connection to the outside world (e.g. a serial port, Ethernet, WiFi, etc.) and the security services necessary to ensure authenticated private communications (SSH or similar). Strictly speaking, the front-end controller would be optional - without it, the fridge or other "thing" would still work but it wouldn't be any "smarter" than today's "dumb" devices. It would also be user-replaceable, because we all know that security and networking technologies change over time.

Part 2 would be a "computer on a chip" that ran apps and optionally provided "real" connectivity to the outside world (e.g. WiFi, a web server, web-based apps, etc.). Since the functions of this device can be handled by any PC, it should be optional and easy for the user to remove or replace.

The physical and logical interfaces between the 3 components will be well-defined, and for the interface from the device to "part 1" of the front-end controller, they would also be simple and designed to not become obsolete for more than the life of the actual "thing" they are controlling.

Drone swarms got you down? Use your smart bomb. Just be sure you are close enough when pod intersection happens or you might miss part of the swarm.

Call it an "enhanced security zone" staffed by well-trained, well-armed civilians with broad arrest- and secret-court prosecutorial powers which report to a newly-created cabinet level post. How do you say "Department of homeland nuclear security" in French?

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Disclaimer: This is supposed to be funny. Anything that amounts to a huge government power-grab at the expense of its citizens' and legal residents' basic freedoms whether it's called a military force or a "civilian" force scares me and it should scare you as well.

If you simply can't live without your Win2003 server and don't plan on paying MS for additional support, make sure you:

* Move everything that can be moved off of that server onto a vendor- or reliable-third-party-supported solution.

* Make and test backups frequently. Make sure you have a way of bringing the server back if your hardware dies or server room goes up in flames/earthquake/flood/whatever.

* Put a vendor- or reliable-3rd-paty-supported hardware* firewall between it and the networks that it is attached to. Make sure the firewall(s) block all in-and-outbound traffic that isn't absolutely necessary.

*"Hardware firewall" could be just a PC or server providing firewall services, it doesn't have to be a box that was designed to be a firewall. If you are running Win2003 server in a VM, your hypervisor/host-OS can act as a firewall. Make sure it is supported by the vendor or a reliable 3rd-party though.

Come to think of it, this is good a good "starting point" even if you are using vendor-supported equipment and software throughout your enterprise. The difference is that if everything is supported, you can probably get away with putting multiple functions including your in-house-custom-apps in one server and (for small-load-situations) enjoy the cost- and speed benefits that come with doing it this way.

I can't think of any legitimate reason for any government agency that is providing services to the public to accept outside advertising.

If they must accept outside advertising for whatever reason, the traffic should be one-way and "blind" to the advertiser.

This means the federal government web site will need to host the ads and if they provide analytic data at all, only provide summary data, such as the number of hits in a given day or hour rounded off to a level designed to prevent teasing out additional information and if the numbers are large enough so privacy isn't an issue, the number of hits believed to come from particular states or metropolitan areas.

The New Testament is very common with 5,000 Greek copies (and all within 400 years of the events, some within 100 years). But after that it drops off quickly. There are 643 copies of Homer's Iliad, but the closest to his writing is over 500 years. There are only 20 copies of Tacitus, but the closest is 1,000 years later. We have only 7 copies of Plato and 5 of Aristotle.

All that to say we might find something incredibly significant in this library. Something we have never had before or something that is a much older copy of something that we already have against which we can check accuracy.