Heh... Yes, she will rue it. Rue it hard.

As an outsider it was always clear to me that the (world-wide) hype that was generated around Obama could only backfire badly. He's not a dictator who can change all things immediately.

This is such a fantastic case of overhyped expectations and the bad, bad hangover people have realising now that he is only human after all. Obviously this also affected people outside the US as we saw with the really unhelpful awarding of the nobel peace prize. Way to shoot him in the back by putting more pressure on him to be the Messiah bringing heaven to earth. How can anybody not fail against that?

It was never possible for Obama to win the first year due to the hype, but he also wouldn't be president if he had stopped the hype. I'll be bold and predict now that Obama will have a much better standing after another one or two years. He will quite likely be reelected. The expectations of people are so low now that he has a chance to actually do better than widely expected. And he is probably very well aware of this.

Yes, be a tourist and help make the world better through it (I'm serious!), but...

1. don't go to the overrun places like Goa or Phuket. Go to countries/areas that haven't taken off yet such as the beautiful country of Laos. It's better for you and better for them. Be nice to people and open to their culture.

2. And DO NOT TIP IF IT IS NOT CUSTOM IN THE COUNTRY!!! I've experienced so many people thinking that they are doing something good by tipping a lot even if it is not customary. It is not good and in many cases creates many problems in society. E.g. in China tipping is not custom and often confuses people (exception are areas that have loads and loads of wealthy tourists who don't care about it and create lots of arrogant staff with tipping). The idea to pay good money for good service/product in the environment it happens in creates a much better way of improving societies than handing out essentially free money through tipping.

Have fun and do good!

First of all, I can't believe that so many people missed the humour of the article. It was meant to be FUNNY! But maybe it's too much of a British humour.

Living in London (weekends) and in Germany (working week), it's very clear to me that the UK plug is terrible. Many reasons:
1. The plug is HUGE. Why are all other plugs in the world smaller and still safe?
2. It has stupid fuses that need replacement. Why do none of the other plugs in the world need them?
3. It is terrible when travelling. Best to keep the Euro or US cables for travelling.
4. It can only plug in one way.
5. Why the hell do you need a switch on a socket? Is this a reason why the sockets are so big?

The plug just fits perfectly with some other British idiosyncracries such as the separate cold and hot water taps. You either burn your hands or freeze them. Ridiculous that this old system is still so much in use in the UK.

You can't beat British humour though (like this article showed).

Can anybody explain to me why it seems to be the general opinion of /. that "the cloud" is a waste of time and a fad? Apart from the silly name, I see many useful functions that can be used for people, who start from a small base, but want to have the ability to easily scale a service (e.g. with Amazons EC2).

If I had a service that is potentially computationally expensive, I could start with a small instance and scale it if I see I need more power or servers. Obviously I could do the same with dedicated servers but I would have more to pay without knowing if I need them and have more difficulties setting them up (I presume). I see it especially useful for small start-ups not so much for large organisations that have the resources to solve these things differently.

What am I missing?

I used to do this. I had a nice company laptop, but also wanted to use it for occasional gaming. I installed Windows XP on a (fast!) 8GB USB Stick, which I used for all my private stuff. Worked really nicely (after finding out how to actually install XP on USB, which wasn't that easy at the time).

The laptop is the company's. If they want to give it to a different co-worker, fine. If they want to check that I just used it for work, fine. Separation of work and personal stuff is your friend. Don't mix it.

Additional advantage: when the harddrive packs in (like it did for me during a project in the middle of the Amazon jungle), you still have a bootable system on the USB stick.

It's not that hard!

Not necessarily true: http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html#1