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Boards are just highly paid people

“The nature of boards,” says Buffett, “is such they’re part business organizations and part social organizations.” Buffett hammers home his point by noting that directors are “getting paid $200,000-$300,000 a year,” so “believe, me, they are not independent.” Boards are just highly paid people

The single most important lesson we learn from the short history of the consumer internet industry is that winning internet business models are engineered around consumers. In fact, consumer internet businesses must be designed, architecturally, to be more consumer centric than their physical world equivalents. This is because, fundamentally, the internet increases transparency and information availability to reduce friction, and thus shifts market power to users relative to physical world models. Therefore, competitors can and will exploit every opportunity to be more consumer centric, a dynamic fuelled by the quasi absence of barriers to entry into the industry.

Michael Zeisser (via datainsightsideas)

Sounds interesting…?

Here’s what happened in America between April 14 and 17. In the state of Washington, a 6-hour downtime of the 911 emergency phone system was caused by a third-party vendor’s router failure, resulting in 4,500 missed emergency calls. Police responding to an unrelated incident at the home of a New Jersey man found three containers of radioactive material he had stolen from a military arsenal. A bomb threat was made against a Verizon call center in Tennessee. Copper thieves stole cabling, causing internet and phone outages in New Mexico, and then again in Hawaii. A routine police traffic stop found four people with over 100 counterfeit Walmart gift cards, $32,000 in blank money orders, and a credit card coding device. And a new piece of malware was discovered that compromises Android devices and makes them mine for the cryptocurrency Litecoin, among other things. This is only a sampling of the 90-plus events that were reported over a three-day period, but it is more than enough for the plot of a cyberpunk novel.

Adam Rothstein, on DHS’s Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report, which compiles a list of news stories about threats and calamities affecting United States infrastructure on a daily basis (via mikerugnetta)

"M.C. Escher's cloud"

Always love some funny writing, eh? Since Google’s (virtualized) cloud is itself built on top of Linux containerization, this means developers will enter into the paradoxical situation of running a container-based OS on a hypervisor on top of a container. “M.C. Escher’s cloud”