Everybody knows Goonswarm (EVE Online alliance) is a CIA front. Glenn Beck obviously knows what's up.
http://themittani.com/media/glenn-beck-goonswarm-cia-front

I don't think I have seen *any* innovation or indication of long-term strategy from eBay. They seem to be basically the same as they were in 2000.

At the moment Australia is looking at desalination to support the growing population and as a backup for when floods and droughts cause problems with our existing dams. Desalination tends to take up a lot of energy so you have to wonder if pumping this fresh water is a better solution. We already run some large pipelines so what's a few more?

This is no secret... And yet it's not really done enough. At Griffith University a language called MaSH is used to lower the bar and allow people to actually make stuff happen, while still being a good introduction to *real* coding (it's a subset of Java and a few specialised APIs). Simple text processing, simple graphics, simple robotic control. http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/arock/MaSH/

Get peanuts.
What we saw in this election was the other edge of the double edged blade which is democracy. There's wisdom of the crowds, then there's the complete opposite too.

Call me when they levitate that thing.

Ah, I got distracted while writing my initial reply and failed to re-read TFS to get the answers I wanted. Yes, the programmers are doing IT/support tasks rather than addressing business needs and things are going pear shaped because of lack of focus. Though my solution remains the same.

The way I see it - the "IT Department" is really just you because the programmers are more akin to an "Engineering" or Tooling department IMO. Are the programmers providing IT support? If so, this is a double edged sword for obvious reasons.

I have worked in offices only slightly smaller than that company and we needed at least two people most days - and we had the benefit of having outside help for a lot of things (having a high staff turn-over didn't help).

I think it's worth making a business case focused argument rather than a "we need help" based one. Perhaps you should get the help of a manager who is not in the "IT Department" to help build, mentor and deliver the case. This isn't necessarily because your existing IT Manager is incompetent, but mostly because he is too close to the issue at hand and is unlikely to be taken seriously because of it. He also sounds like a typical tech guy - and thus probably isn't quite as tuned into non-IT culture.

Oh yeah, Zed Shaw saw that guy today. https://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/408018099284090880

Asian guy with dreds walks in with a car battery and a charger, sits down, plugs the charger in, and hangs out while the battery charges.

Satoshi helped found a completely un-innovative Litecoin derivative? I think that just about invalidates the analysis.

FTFY.

I agree... However the old farts don't.

Because Canonical are scrubs.

From the creator of Zerocoin: https://twitter.com/imichaelmiers/status/407529344626864128

Richard Stallman's calls for anonymous Bitcoin. Good thing we've fixed the main efficiency limitations of Zerocoin

and

Spends are now about 300 bytes and take about 10ms to verify. Took a completely different set of crypto primitives to get there.

Depreciation isn't really the right word. You can keep value indefinitely - as long as you move the money periodically. You don't have to actually spend it. Perhaps you could mark some addresses as being "storage" addresses so that people can keep cold wallets without worrying... But that runs the danger of being confusing or people just marking every address and cold storage (perhaps increased transaction fees could discourage this).