An in-house data centre need not have an automated resource provisioning and usage metering capability, utility fashion (i.e. for SaaS, automated provisioning and deployment of data sets into your application instance(s) and reporting on their usage by relevant metrics such as users or data throughput; for PaaS, automated provisioning and deployment of application components and instances thereof and their usage by relevant metrics such as messages processed or concurrent transactions; for IaaS, automated provisioning and deployment of virtual machines and their usage by relevant metrics such as CPU time or IOPS). It can be automated, it can be manual, or a combination of both.
A real private cloud does.

An in-house data centre is your facility, whether leased, built or bought.
A private cloud need not be. As long as only you are not sharing resources at the level being sold (e.g. for SaaS, nobody else is in your application instance; for PaaS, nobody else is processing transactions on the same transaction processor; for IaaS, nobody else is running VMs on the same physical hardware), you need not be the only customer in the facility/floor/room/cage/aisle/rack.

In short, an in-house data centre is not automatically a private cloud, nor is a private cloud automatically in an in-house data centre.

Maybe this traffic and storage free-riding by other applications has hastened its demise.

So they want to use the single most unreliable hardware component in my PC to identify it and potentially control whether I have access to my online resources?

Over the years, the graphics card is the one thing that consistently ends up cooking itself. Never mind that something as simple and common as a firmware version change or a driver version change can and does modify its behaviour.

http://www.nursingtimes.net/home/clinical-specialisms/infection-control/cat-ladies-suicide-risk-probed/5046843.article?blocktitle=Behind-the-Headlines&contentID=4530

The Facebook Terms of Service state that "You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account."

What he said. Photos alone runs into several hundred gigabytes and I've only been into photography a few years, and only started shooting RAW relatively recently. With terabytes of storage affordable, I'm now keeping high-quality video from events that I wouldn't have been able to keep before.

Never mind PlaneScape: Torment, which has art (artworks) within art (the gallery) within art (the game, which has depth beyond most "real" art).

It never seems to amaze me at how different the rate of complexity in mathematical education varies around the world. I found the Australian curriculum slow after early childhood experience overseas.

Maybe 2nd grade doesn't mean the same thing to you as me (I'm referring to is as the "2" in K,1,2,3...12, for context), but to put it into perspective, I had to master long division to graduate from 2nd grade while overseas. In Australia, we didn't begin to learn long division until 5th or 6th grade. The thing was, the rate of learning accelerated in Australia, such that an advanced student in 12th grade (what we call "4 Unit Maths") ended up doing what was introductory university-level mathematics in the country that made kids to long division in 2nd grade.

My evidence may be anecdotal, but I've found that the country with the more advanced mathematics early in life resulted in a population whose adult median mathematical ability was higher.

There's no reason why you couldn't have an OpenID for each and every single site and a single shared password for all of them, e.g. site.yourname.openidprovider.net, since either way you're trusting the identity management capability.

Aquamation may supercede cremation due to releasing less greenhouse gases and otherwise wasting less of the body's nutrients.

There is a major problem with the approach you have described: it builds inflexible organisational silos where cross-functional business processes are extremely expensive to establish (due to interoperability issues politically and technically), operate (due to forgoing economies of scale possible with rationalised, consolidated technology investment) and adapt (due to the impact on existing complex interdependencies resulting from point-to-point integrations). This is particularly problematic for companies that have a complex arrangement of multiple customer service channels (e.g. retail presences, call centres, websites) and multiple loosely-related product/service offerings (e.g. sale of goods, provision of services) -- doubly so when this occurs under a unified brand.

The issue is that with every functional business unit owning their individual line-of-business applications, each with its own business rules, state management, reference data (e.g. customer identity/contact info) and transactional information (e.g. purchases), the organisation can fail to leverage important cross-selling, customer acquisition and retention opportunities, never mind falling afoul of regulatory compliance issues. Simply put, the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and the customer experience suffers, causing the company to suffer. Centralised full-function IT has its place, though you may be able to federate decentralised departmental development capabilities with a combination of governance and technology (e.g. the SOA approach).