Firstly, those almost certainly weren't homeopathic, just placebo. Mint pills are cheap; homeopathic 'medicine' isn't.

Secondly, (IIRC according to Dr Phil Hammond, on HIGNFY some years ago), new rules prevent GPs from dispensing mint pills and liquids as placebos, which is a terrible shame.

Just.

qv the Bill Hicks routine where the waitress asked him "Whut yew readin' for?". Took him a moment to realise she hadn't asked what was he reading, but what was he reading for...

According to the back of this envelope:
660000 oil barrels spilt = 104931615 litres
At 17500 l/m = 5996 minutes.
At 24 * 60 min/day = 4.16 days.

So just one of these collectors could have hoovered up the entire spill in well under a week in perfect conditions. Even 10% of efficiency is still only six weeks. Even 10% efficiency and only working in daylight is still only three months.

We estimate savings of ~30% of server cost, none on IT staff. If you do it right. If you do it wrong, costs can rise.

I see your point. It's not my impression that moving things 'into the cloud' will magically make any complexity go away. But it does make that complexity easier and easier to manage.

We can stripe servers around the world at service setup time with one command.

Load balancers now intelligently remove defunct machines and increase capacity (from other zones) to compensate, provided you have defined how you want them to act (and no system will ever define that for you for a known cost).

It's not a panacea for all IT ills, but it is strong medicine.

But they weren't down. I have servers in Dublin. I also have striped redundancy across other EC2 datacentres. We had 100% uptime last night and I'm now watching the Dublin based machines recover gracefully.

Yes, I agree it's "advanced virtual hosting with a different name". But it didn't break its promises.