This will be more like the old Star Trek episode where war is so impersonal that no one bothers to resolve them (then Capt. Kirk destroys the war computers). However, I doubt that automated killing machines will ever exceed the human capabilities for atrocities and the lack of common sense. War in general implies both anyway.

Of course, on the other hand, do you notice that the managers never get outsourced? Of all the jobs that could be easily outsourced you would figure that management, especially middle-management, would be at the top of the list. These people are just information conduits and list makers. Heck, many of the foreign students in the US were in MBA programs anyway. If we outsource executive management, then we'd have enough money to pay for high-end engineers and scientists. People who are co-located with the people we try to sell our products to - and therefore understand the problems they are trying to solve. Sales management would be the easiest to outsource. Just train some people to continually shout at the top of their lungs, "sell more this quarter than you did last quarter!"

Exactly right. A 'statement of direction'. In fact, the poster should have read the article. IBM states that they should know in 2 years whether lithium-air technology will work or not. They didn't state a battery would be ready at that time.

I was going to say that I'm really getting tired of the 'geek' and 'nerd' terms. But after reading several of these posts, never mind. :) Anyway, I don't understand why we still put up with those labels. The Palantir team is making a contribution. More than I can say for the WSJ geeks. Hell, they can't even make money off of advertising.

Many of the production data centers I've worked on have been using VMs for web servers for quite some time (e.g. ESX 2.x). That includes one of the companies that is on the list of unknowns in the article. I'm surprised it wasn't addressed and that so many jumped to a physical server conclusion. However, even if the 50k servers are all VMs, that's a major management load. 50k of just about any configuration item takes some work.