It's also an overcomplicated solution. OBD can get pretty nasty if you want access to esoteric stuff or manufacturer proprietary crap; but a basic, bluetooth-capable, OBD dongle that'll report the rough outlines of how a vehicle is being used is quite cheap indeed and not especially complex. I wouldn't necessarily want to try dead-reconing with nothing but that output; but answering "Am I driving right now?" is considerably less demanding.

If it's patented, you're compelled to publish your method. Are you confusing patents with trade secrets?

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.

Which has always struck me as a bit illogical since the embryos actually used are already slated for destruction. What do people think is going to happen to leftover human embryos that aren't slated to be implanted?

I think that was exactly the point.

It's sort of like how, when North Korea attempted a satellite launch not too long ago, the news was full of stories about how incredibly irresponsible it was since a satellite breaking up in orbit could turn into a chain reaction that would scour all orbits of all satellites. These stories were coming, of course, from the propaganda machines of countries which have, on more than one occasion, intentionally blown up satellites in orbit to demonstrate military power.

there's not that much to mention about the iphone6 except nfc.

That's a ridiculous thing to say.

it costs less for apple to make the 6 than what it cost for them to make 5 when 5 came out. much less.

What's your source for this? The profit margin on the iPhone 6 is lower than for earlier iPhone models at the time of release.

I can send money from my GMail account.

Well I don't know whether the Amazon one worked outside the US, but the Google one definitely doesn't. But given a choice between Google and Amazon, I'd take Amazon. I find them slightly less intrusive and pervasive.

Well since you asked so nicely.

The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) earlier this month made available the next version of Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution. The distro is used on over 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says.

Yeah, but very basic functionality like actually being able to type your name if you happen to be Japanese requires you to install the OS, then get a combination of strangely-named packages like ibus, im-chooser, anthy, some font packages, etc. and then screw around getting it configured. None of this is documented clearly. Windows or OSX lets you choose a language from a list at install time. Which do you think is easier?

Device drivers are another issue. Linux is simpler if there's a driver in the kernel tree and it works adequately. If there isn't, then it's far more trouble than Windows to find a driver and get it to work. Also, drivers often lack functionality on Linux. For example the Wacom tablet drivers aren't adequately configurable. There are some options in obscure text files that you need root to edit, but there's no simple way to switch mapping on-the-fly or reconfigure your buttons per application. This is all dead easy on OSX or Windows.

Linux may be easier for you, but there are far more use cases than "person with no exotic hardware speaking a language using Latin script".

Great question. We are seeing a lot of interest among enterprises to have AWS-like functionality in their own datacenters. And we also know that they are eager to use OpenStack. So at Eucalyptus we decided to do something about it. Here is my blog about the topic: https://www.eucalyptus.com/blog/2014/08/11/why-eucalyptus-keynoting-openstack-conference

Thanks for the suggestion. That’s funny! I will do my best on all fronts at HP.

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...