Your bring up an interesting point, but it would only hold if every cloud subscriber was a retailer. Cloud hosting services are used by a lot of different industries with different scaling needs: record labels about to release a new hit album need to temporarily scale up their web infrastructure, for example, and a similar thing happens with movies. Speaking of movies, some studios use cloud hosting services to spin up hundreds of nodes for effects post-production - we're talking about a lot more than just web hosting here. But the biggest reason such seasonal trends are not causing the issues you're talking about is that the major cloud service providers are growing constantly - their resources aren't static throughout the year. This is not likely to level off very soon, but when and if it does, that's when it would be interesting to see how they handle large seasonal spikes. -Dan

Funny you should mention HP: https://www.hpcloud.com/ It looks like they are implementing OpenStack very similarly to Rackspace, which should help back up OpenStack's claims of freedom from vendor lock-in. -Dan

Tons of dinosaurs and other creatures lie 'undiscovered' because the holotypes are sitting in a museum basement and no one has gotten around to describing them. If museums were able to scan their entire collections, and were willing to put up the data in an open-access way, paleontologists could get a lot more done. Of course, at some point someone would have to actually brave the dust and examine the fossil itself, but for cladistic studies and searching for new material to work on, it seems like a heck of a resource.

I'd have no problem with either, but an international effort is preferable and ISS seems a good precedent for it. Since it's a large area to work with, I actually think Antartctica provides the best model. Many nations have bases there but you don't see wars over territory or worries of militarization making headlines. We also have treaties regarding the use of the open sea that work reasonably well considering the age they were developed in. The Moon seems like an opportunity to take some of these ideas and build upon them in a way that fits modern times.

it's also not a problem in the Philippines, because over here real people will work for cheaper than robots.

I'm not the only American who doesn't change the clock - there are lots of us living in other countries where there isn't such a thing. I understand the problem DST is supposed to solve, I guess, but I think we should change our schedules rather than the clocks. Changing the clocks is about the kludgiest fix imaginable.

Swords and remote areas would form the basis of my Zombie preparations, in which case I'm off to a decent start. Swords made for hacking humans (not just farm tools) are still readily available in the southern Philippines and I would consider the Kampilan, Panabas and Barong to be ideal for zombies (nothing wrong with a sharp Japanese sword, mind you, but they are made more for slicing and a little extra weight shifted towards the end is nice for decapitation). Unfortunately, the population here is incredible, so the first thing to do would have to be to escape to another island. Not sure why this poll is so fixated on documents, emergency plans of any kind should be simple enough to remember. I'm also not exactly sure why I already had a plan in the first place, given that any real plague that only could be transmitted by bite and destroyed most of the brain would be contained and eradicated far too quickly to become an epidemic. -Dan

no you absolutely have a point, people have become used to being ridiculously over-armed in first-person games, which is too bad because it's a perspective that is great for immersiveness. Minecraft lets you do a lot more than shoot stuff, but others that exist are much less well-known. The Penumbra series and their successor, Amnesia, are games made by someone who has the same view, except with the adrenaline fix and a hearty dose of pure horror mixed in. I'm not sure if I know any recent titles that capture the qualities of Myst, but I'd be happy to see some, even if the overuse of puzzles turned me off to that series when I was younger.

Don't do anything, just donate. And now for the long answer: If you will build and maintain a lab, use GNU/Linux (it really is best for education on many levels, except for cases where the necessary software is unavailable, which is becoming less common). I prefer Fedora on newer machines and Scientific Linux on older ones, but if you're more experienced with Ubuntu it's a great choice too (I maintain an office and two small educational labs in the Philippines that only use Linux, there are drawbacks but the benefits negate them for us). If you will donate machines to someone else, unless you are also donating a 'blank check' amount of support, leave Windows on it. If they don't have the ability to manage Linux machines, you won't have caused them any difficulty, and if they do know how to manage Linux, they certainly know how to install it (lately that's the easiest part).

if it's crashed upside down you'd still only see the bottom of it from the orbiter ;)

i love how, given the context of the current situation between Google and Facebook, 'loosing' users is more accurate than a non-typo. although it wouldn't be practical to be loosed from FB just yet. maybe some day.

don't forget easily editable posts, the ability to back up everything to a computer (i LOLed when i saw they named that Data Liberation, given recent FB events) and not having photos sold to advertisers

the first thing i thought of was using Zerg Overlords for transport. I used to use mind control a lot in Broodwar and always felt like I shouldn't use the Overlords to transport Protoss troops, because ew.

i think you'd better re-read what he wrote. no one would render a Captcha string in the clear in alt-text. i hope. he was talking about alt-text on the button that triggers the audio version, just like you are.

yeah, i figured someone who drops Linux because they don't like the Fedora defaults might be more likely to try a LiveCD (or better, Live USB media) as a weekend project than do another install from DVD sources and install a non-default desktop. When I get a new computer I'll just use groupinstall and load all three desktops on there and see what i end up really using (I'm holding out hope the Gnome devs will come to their senses eventually). As a side note, would you believe I don't have access to a DVD burner or a USB key large enough to put the DVD ISOs on? People like me are probably what is holding Fedora back in that regard. Either way, live media is for many people the first taste of Linux, and also a good way to test whether a release supports their hardware, and people will download a smaller ISO for that if they can. so probably they should just show both prominently and trust people will understand the choice.