I do not believe democracy is a sensible process for any businesses. If it is, it is wise for a very small number. Now pushing decision making down to those doing the work as much as possible makes a great deal of sense to me, but not democracy.

For government I think real democracy makes more sense. And the internet makes it more practical. But still it is not practical. The representative governments - like the USA - is the best model. People elect others to craft laws, oversee the executive branch and vote on laws.

The current result of the USA representative form of government is pitiful in my opinion. We chose to elect people primarily that raise the most money. They do this by serving those that give them cash (so they get the most money). Obviously if they are serving those that give them the most cash they are not serving the interests of the country.

The fault lies with the voters choosing to elect and re-elect extremely corrupt politicians (and their political parties). Until we stop doing that we will get the same results the current political parties have been providing for decades. It is very unlikely they will spontaneously start putting the interest of the country above the interest of those giving them cash. We have to replace them with people that put the country fist. Until that is done, we can expect a continuation of what we have been getting.

I thought they didn't access his account, but accessed people that got email from his account. So they got emails he sent but not through his account but via State Department accounts (the State Department IT has been messed up for a long time).

"The most pernicious case seems to be alerts that seem like they could be actionable but you really never take action on them. " The sad thing is when you have these that you know you should act on but don't have time until they cause more problems (which they probably will if you don't act, but you don't have time...) :-(

There is something I would call an alert that I want to get even if not-actionable yet. This is essentially the near miss type info. Basically I want some data that doesn't rise to the level of action, but puts it on my radar. Maybe sometimes I'll decide to act, but often I'll just wait and see on that type of thing. I don't know if you call that something other than an alert (or just want to eliminate those altogether).

I must admit I like the interesting data stuff. I might justify it as being useful just because I like to see it...

Great post, I think Clayton's Christensen's work on disruptive innovation is that rare actually pretty new management idea. Almost all ideas sold as new management ideas are just diluted old ideas where the connection to the old idea has been broken making it even less useful (plenty of old ideas are great and not used much so things don't have to be new). Most companies have done nearly nothing to account for the Human Side of Enterprise written over 50 years ago (theory x and theory y management).

Keep up the good work with Duck Duck Go, I am amazed how many of the search competitors just die off. It seems like their is plenty of room for good stuff and lots of money to be made in the long term.

Thanks for the post (William Hunter was my father, I like to see his work appreciated). For those interested in more from him and George Box: http://williamghunter.net/ http://curiouscat.net/authors/1-George-E-P-Box There are lots of great articles by them online, even if many are scanned pdfs :-(

Very nice list. For me, Linode, Ooma and Github are great. Google apps for business is ok, but as you say they fail to understand you need it to co-exist with other Google profiles much more easily. I am try Amazon web services for small side projects and find it a bit more confusing and/or expensive than I would like. But it seems great for many uses. I am probably going to try Netflix soon.

Very nice. I have tried alternatives to Google for years never finding one that was good (occasionally Yahoo was better at certain types of searches). In the last 6 months I have switched to using probably about 60% Duck Duck Go 35% Google and 5 bleeko (and bleeko really seems to have potential. I really hope this partnership works.

Nice addition. Maybe I am missing it but how about explaining the meaning of red, yellow... If I see a yellow (or whatever) icon, I would think it would be nice to see what yellow meant. Hover tooltip (or something). Non-color cue is a good idea (check-mark, x...).

Great idea. The 10% amount might be a lot for many people (granted it has historical precedent :-). But if we can get people to contribute to this idea that would be great. I have tried to get my organization to give some cash back to continue the development of the open source software we use, unsuccessfully so far.

We should also remember the contribution of time is often even more important (and for some people easier). I mainly wanted my organization to start donating cash because we had been unable to make the time to give much in the way of code improvements, additions - which was actually my fist priority.

So far for my own small company (part time), and personally, I haven't tithed, but I have given small contributions to open source software (also open source science - PLoS) and Creative Commons and EFF which play an important role in maintaining the proper environment for the success of open source software, I think. My goal is to give back more. But so far that goal has been held back by my failure to better achieve the goal to increase revenue :-(

I get so much from great open source software like Ruby, Rails, Ubuntu, Phusion Passenger, Apache, MySQL along with lots of less well known software... that it is important to me to contribute to sustaining the environment that will continue to produce such great software.

Keep up the great work with DuckDuckGo and this new effort.

Very sensible, a long term investment strategy is key. So is actually saving money - maybe people never even get to this step so don't have to worry how to invest it.

I have real estate instead of gold/silver. And I have been investing in oil and gas companies (not the same as hard assets directly but has some of the same benefits). I wouldn't mind getting some additional commodity exposure.