I helped by buddy Sam move a bunch of stuff today, and we were privileged to walk across Brooklyn in the sun from Greenpoint into his old neighborhood of South Williamsburg. It's a jumpin' Latin area, with lots of people immaculately attired in hip-hop gear. The kids are allright, even if the boys are a bit testosterony. Sam and I hashed out the state of the world as usual, with him giving some really interesting isights into the importance of design in things. Got my mind working on some good Buckminster Fuller tangents (ala Design Science). One of the things Sam is good at seeing is the interconnection of things, and how it's possible to do one thing which has other positive benefits.

I saw that mirrored in this little article about the people who are making computers (the Open BSD operating system) more secure:

The research was funded by a $2.3m (about £1.5m) grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to the OpenBSD Project, but the latest changes go beyond the original grant request, de Raadt said.

"This really wasn't part of the DARPA grant," he said. "But it happened because the DARPA grant happened, because when you throw a bunch of... guys into a room and get them drunk, this is what you get." De Raadt was careful to point out that the group paid for its own beer

So one DARPA grant not only gets a bunch of geeks loaded and the Pentagon's needs addressed, it fixed buffer overruns as well. The reason for this (and the reason the Internet works at all, by the way) is that the people who are working on these technologies are passionate and motivated about what they do. This is in the end what scares the pants off of Microsoft, the fact that their quickest-growing opposition is a decentralized network of capable and self-motivated people. These are the kinds of human beings who will give you an exponential return on your investment. If only there were a similar network for politics...