It's not really polite to say so that bluntly; but the difference is that measles deaths are basically optional(1st world anti-vaxxers) or just another bad thing that happens to poor people in poor and unpleasant places. By contrast, Ebola is currently just another bad thing that happens to poor people in poor and unpleasant places; but we've got basically nothing available to do about it if it spreads beyond the usual outbreak sites(yes, unlike the usual outbreak sites, we have limited supplies of high grade medical isolation gear and some interesting experimental drugs; but nobody has enough of the cool tech to deal with an outbreak of nontrivial size, especially if they want their medical and logistical systems to continue handling routine functions and care at the same time).

There are loads of places far less poor and squalid than Liberia and the other oubreak sites; but without any good options on the table it wouldn't take long to run through your supply of isolation wards and fancy positive-pressure protective suits even in the most upmarket first world locations with well regarded research hospitals and such, were the population to be affected.

Was she asleep for, oh, the past quarter century? We've put together a neat little system (really an untidy patchwork of them) such that you can't touch something Turing-complete, drive on a substantial percentage of reasonably major roads, or do just about anything involving commerce without it dropping into the gigantic database somewhere and she's freaking out about somebody's little model airplane with a gopro?

It is the case that there are quite a few values of 'somebody' where worrying might be a good idea; but as a relatively petty footnote to the Orwellian world we've already put into operation. Pretending otherwise is clueless at best and actively dishonest at worst.

When Arstechnica ran that WP story about corruption in the USPTO, several current and past patent examiners posted comments that are worth reading. Two key ones in particular are this and this.

Short story is that USPTO has stupid counterproductive performance metrics, so everyone games the system to look good by the metrics (we've all seen that before). Some managers recognize this and don't want to be assholes about time charging rules because of it, as long as employees are doing good work. Others get upset that the rules are being broken and assume it is blatant time card fraud, and blew the whistle to the news outlets.

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?

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

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.

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.

I am genuinely baffled at how the embargo is supposed to support US policy interests(either idealistic, cynical, or both); but alleged damages that high do seem to suggest that the "It's pointless, they'll just trade with the EU and BRIC and things" theory is limited at best. I honestly would have expected a smaller effect myself. I just can't fathom why anyone thinks it's a worthwhile plan.

In all honesty, it's really a testament to Excel's relatively favorable balance of power and ease of use, even non-techies can do some reasonably heavy lifting and more sophisticated users can do some fairly impressive rapid prototyping.

Unfortunately, these sorts of horrors always seem to be the result. What I don't know is how much of the disaster is caused by Excel just not scaling well(which, at least in theory, is something that could be improved) and how much is caused by the fact that non-programmers may be scared away from programming by the stuff that Excel is good at hiding; but still get bitten by the stuff they don't even know is there(which, in fairness to them, is the same stuff that usually bites actual programmers, though less often if they are good ones).

$1.1 billion over 55 years is $20 billion/year, in a country with a GDP of ~$70 billion, so that arguably puts the embargo into the category of 'surprisingly effective; if not exactly at achieving any of the US' alleged objectives'.

When it comes to 'terrorizing and vile violations of human rights', though, that barely registers. Did this guy sleep through the entire 20th century?

They are evaluating different technologiess, some of which are implemented on and affect a single phone, others implemented with hardware in the car and affect all phones in the car. But even if it disables all phones in the entire car, I am completely fine with this. Yes it is inconvient, but it's not like it is being required as standard equipment on all cars all the time. It is only being applied to cars of people who broke the law and put others around them at risk. You want to keep using your phone when you are riding with a friend/spouse; then give them shit about texting while they are driving.

Your own doctors' and hospitals' inability to negotiate a good deal isn't the NHS's fault. You don't really think that if the NHS paid more the drug companies would say "oh well, we'll charge everyone else less", do you? They'll charge as much as they can get away with, just like now.

A more likely reason for drugs being so expensive in the USA is that they spend more on sales & marketing than R&D. How much cheaper would it be if they didn't do that? Don't blame your own dysfunctional system on the NHS "not paying up" because they do, and the companies make a fat profit out of it.

I had the displeasure of observing(thankfully, not of being called in to clean up after) some very, very, heavy Excel users who were eventually forced to capitulate and move to something less insane because it was becoming a matter of pure chance whether a multi-day simulation run would cause Excel to exhaust its memory space and fall over(this was maybe a decade before 64 bit x86, much less broad support for it, was a thing, so just throwing money at the problem wasn't an option).

You just buy a WD-authorized helium cartridge... Make sure that it hasn't dried out, and that the activation chip hasn't expired.