It is also about delaying the big financial crash.In many countries of the world banks have a negative interest on money parked at the respective central bank. Of course they would like to forward this cost to their customer, but guess what would happen, if banks put negative interest on the savings of Joe Average. It would start a run on the banks, because everybody would prefer to put his money under their mattresses. This is the only reason there are still small interests of 0.01% or so on every type of savings, only because the banks know what happens if everybody tries to cash his savings. As soon as cash has been abandoned, there will be no alternative for the customers but to accept it, at least those with incomes and savings to small to buy into gold or diamonds. Which also makes clear that abandoning cash will not solve the big cases of tax evasion or to impair organized crime: Those people will just keep on using those "currencies", as they do it already.

AFAIK they are commuting. From what I was being told, nobody with a typical middle class salary can afford to live in the Bay Area. Disclaimer: This is just second hand knowledge, but I got it from people who actually lived there.

I just imagined DeepCode to flood Stack Overflow and similar sites with postings like: "I need to code ERP app! Howto do it? Source code plz!"... BR Kosmo

Sure it is. Or did they install a high bandwith wlan or umts cells in the himalaya? Maybe there are dsl jacks hidden under the snow, installed by the people of Shangri La? Or how does the guy get a high quality video stream on the roof of the world? If Reinhold Messner (famous germon climber and adventure, lost many toes) gets the next time onto the Everest, maybe he'll find the new satellite dish on the top.
I read in the heise-forum, that somebody was asked by a friend, how much the access to the intel-satellite would cost. This person has already been misled by this adverts.

Kosmo