InfoQ: Horizontal Scalability via Transient, Shardable, and Share-Nothing Resources

beyond SQL databases and OO languages:
key/value caching and data storage
and functional languages...

Adam Wiggins believes that now is the time of horizontal scalability achieved by using resources that are transient, shardable and share nothing with other resources. He gives as example several applications and a language: memcached, CouchDB, Hadoop, Redis, Varnish, RabbitMQ, Erlang, detailing how each one applies those principles.
 
http://adam.blog.heroku.com/
 

InfoQ: DoD Architecture Approach to Common Vocabulary Driven Service Implementation

Semantic Web in practical usage for communication.
As I was suggesting 5+ years ago on XML One conferences,
ontology (shared vocabulary) is used to build messages,
instead of hard-coded SOAP/WSDL...

Parag Khanna maps the future of countries | Video on TED.com

A very interesting view on meaning of formal and "real" maps. Instead of wars, modern economy is reshaping regions around the world...

So lets get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world. We can start with Mongolia, or as some call it, Mine-golia. Why do they call it that? Because in Mine-golia, Chinese firms operate and own most of the mines -- copper, zinc, gold -- and they truck the resources south and east into mainland China. China isn't conquering Mongolia. It's buying it. Colonies were once conquered. Today countries are bought.