I can understand the interest in the existence of Eucalyptus itself (it's a more or less interface compatible implementation of a bunch of Amazon's heavily used 'cloud' services that you can run stuff on in house or at a non-Amazon 3rd party). Amazon's pricing is crazy aggressive; but sometimes you need to do things in house, want to do things in house, or want to go mixed-strategy(in-house/Amazon for overflow, spread across more than one 3rd party provider, etc, etc.) and in general it's not a good feeling to have a stack of important stuff dependent on a single vendor.

What I find much harder to understand is what HP gains from this, or what I, the hypothetical customer, as supposed to be willing to pay HP to put its name on here.

Is this just more HP flailing, or is there an angle I'm missing? Are there lots of potential customers who won't touch Amazon (perhaps because they have to keep stuff internal); but won't touch Eucalyptus without some giant company selling them a support agreement? If so, since Amazon is off the table, why would they care about Amazon API compatibility? Who is the target here, and why aren't they either DIYing it, paying Amazon's incredibly aggressive prices for the real thing, or using an architecturally different cloud/VM arrangement?

A customer is someone who receives a service from a company, even if the (monetary) price for that service is zero.

Would you describe yourself as one of Slashdot's customers?

Unfortunately, while we have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, we could really use some work on domestic corrupt practices...

"In Cuba, on the other hand, the Castro brothers managed to hang on to power despite the economic crisis caused by the disappearance of theirr USSR sugar-daddy."

That's not a problem with my reasoning, that's exactly my point. They could do this because the US had opted to still keep them completely isolated rather than open the flood gates of US money and culture onto them - something they hadn't done to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and any others I've missed. That wouldn't solidify the Castro's grip on power - it'd do exactly what it did in all the other ex-USSR states, it'd result in the overthrow of such people.

Even if it were perfect, almost no ChromeOS devices have touchscreens and almost all Android devices do (especially if you count on the ones Google even slightly endorses, not the media-player-mystery-HDMI-dongle stuff). For applications that are basically hobbled by the touchscreen, a keyboard and mouse will be an improvement. For those that are enhanced by, or actively dependent on, it, that will be a bit of a mess no matter how perfect the runtime is.

Unless those proportions change fairly markedly, it probably makes sense for them to start with some popular, mouse and keyboard friendly, applications that don't lean on native ARM blobs much or at all.

It definitely doesn't just work if you need Japanese language support. You need to find the necessary packages, install them, configure ibus... Seriously it's a nightmare. On Windows or OSX you just choose it from the dropdown during installation. Every time I do a distro upgrade I have to go through this stupid pain-in-the-arse procedure again, trying to work out exactly which packages I need with no help from any documentation.

You call that cornal mass? You're feeling poetic in the bathroom.

Let me guess, you're one of those people who thinks culture stops at films, music, food, and dance right?

Don't forget the Khmer Rouge or the Rwandan Akazu: they had less to work with; but killing north of 20% of your country's population really shows a commitment to atrocity.

Sorry, my phrasing was ambiguous: the rPi I/O is 'broken out' in the sense of 'breakout board', it's substantially accessible on reasonably friendly headers that you can connect to without tiny elven soldering fingers or oddball connectors; unlike the (otherwise cheap and quite tempting) 'buy an android mini-stick-thing/used phone with 3rd party firmware support' option, which gets you power, sometimes a screen, and a few peripherals for crazy cheap; but where you'll be lucky to find a handful of undocumented test points, much less any headers.

The chip the rPi is based on really isn't quite right for the job(but feel the price...) so eth isn't so hot; but I've never had any serious issues, assuming an acceptance of the speed limits.

How about 'tablet'? Coming through Heathrow security, I get told to take laptops, iPads, and Kindles out of my bag. I guess any brand of laptop has to come out, but tablets and ebook readers only do if they're made by Apple or Amazon...

So what's your point? That if you've got one hostile nation a few miles off your border that it doesn't hurt to have another?

That's not a rational proposition, the fewer hostile nations you have neighbouring you the better, just because you can't make one of them not hostile doesn't mean you should not take efforts to make those you can potentially make not hostile actually be not hostile.

I think you're conflating leadership with the citizens. Unfortunately not all countries are in a position whereby the leaderships actions are reflective of the will of the citizens.

1) I'm not American, nor do I live in America. Don't make assumptions that because someone is arguing for or against some country or another that they must have some vested interest in that nation. Not all of us are patriotic or nationalistic goons, some of us are capable of looking at and understanding a much broader geopolitical picture than simply the one on our doorstep. I know it may fry the brains of some people here that someone could argue in the favour of one anti-Western nation, whilst attacking a Western nations and defending a Western nation against other anti-Western nations, but please try and stick with it, it's really not that complicated, I'm sure you can step out of this binary mindset if you try hard enough.

2) I didn't say they want to wipe Americans off the face of the Earth, I said they would rather do away with American culture. Having preference for the weakening or removal of a culture is not inherently the same as removing the people. The fact Putin was able to seize Crimea was based on past Russian policy of removing ethnic Tatars and installing ethnic Russians to dilute the Tatar population and increase the level of Russian culture there with the hope of displacing the much longer standing Tatar culture in the region. Are you really so naive to believe that if Putin had the opportunity he wouldn't love to be able to do the same to the US given that he's already doing it on the peripheries of Europe (i.e. Trans-Dniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Crimea)? Thankfully he doesn't have the opportunity, and probably never will.

P.S. Learn what hyperbole is, you don't have to take everything literally.

No, I'd rather that copyright on music and video be contingent on distribution in a form that does not lock customers into a particular platform.