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.

"...it's illegal for these ride-sharing services to charge passengers an individual fare..."

If you're charging for access to X (for any given X), you're not sharing, you're selling (or leasing). And you don't get to be exempt from consumer protection regulations just because you're doing your selling on the web.

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?

I mean, seriously, it's there any doubt left that most mainstream news outlets push their own half of the agenda for the machine? Assuming some did care.... look at what happened to yahoo or what's happening to Microsoft when they push back! Those are ( somewhat ) thriving companies, these are dying media giants who wouldn't have the same kind of financial resources to fight the regime, it's secret courts and it's legion of spy agencies. Additionally, they likely don't own enough if the infrastructure like a tech giant for it to even matter... I fully expect to one day find out the NSA has root certificate authorities and secret proxies anyway.

...but some European countries (France is another one) have all these stupid little "we're special...and we don't understand the internet" rules...

Sounds like these nations understand the internet quite well. They understand that it's not magic and does not relieve companies of their responsibilities to operate in an accountable manner. "But...we do it the internet!" is not a legal escape clause, as companies like Uber are finally being taught.

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?

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.