That gloves-off approach is just one of many recommendations for combating industrial espionage outlined in a new report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, which is headed by the former director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, as well as Jon Huntsman, who's served as the governor of Utah as well as U.S. ambassador to China.

"China is two-thirds of the intellectual property theft problem, and we are at a point where it is robbing us of innovation to bolster their own industry, at a cost of millions of jobs," Huntsman told The New York Times. "We need some realistic policy options that create a real cost for this activity because the Chinese leadership is sensitive to those costs."

The report offers 21 specific recommendations, including increasing the budget of the FBI and Department of Justice to investigate trade theft and amending U.S. counter-espionage laws to allow businesses that suffer intellectual property (IP) theft to sue foreign organizations for damages. It also advocates longer-term measures, such as rating countries on their ability to protect IP, as well as ensuring that U.S. officials "push to move China, in particular, beyond a policy of indigenous innovation toward becoming a self-innovating economy."

That trend continued Wednesday at the Citrix Synergy conference in Anaheim, where Dell announced a range of cloud computing products for Citrix-based environments, including options that support Citrix XenDesktop 7, also unveiled on Wednesday. Dell hopes the moves will diversify its revenue streams, which are currently reliant on its low-margin PC business.

The announcements include a version of Dell's Active System 800 converged infrastructure line optimized for Citrix XenDesktop. The product is a pre-integrated system that fits server, storage and networking into a modest footprint. It includes Active System Manager, which facilitates single pane management of both physical and virtual assets.

Dell is also offering two reference architectures that add additional features to the Active System 800 configuration. One supports NVIDIA's GRID and targets users whose virtualized graphics needs are particularly demanding, and the other includes a local storage option that Dell says will drive down costs by eliminating the need for SAN.

The new facilities will be "a seamless extension" of customer facilities where they will be able to shift workloads at will with a few virtualization management console commands. VMware is building commands into its vCloud Director product and the modules in its vCloud Suite to automatically provision a designated virtual machine with networking that connects between the customer's premises and a remote Hybrid Cloud Service data center.

VMware is not about to build a global chain of cloud data centers on the scale of a Facebook or Google. It's more likely to lease space in existing third-party facilities, equip them with its own hardware and software, and operate them as public cloud facilities. CEO Pat Gelsinger said VMware, in making such a move, is not backing away from continued use of channel partners and existing data center partners, which include Bluelock, CSC and AT&T in the U.S. That list formerly included Dell as well, but Dell announced Monday it would no longer try to provide public cloud services.

In an interview after the announcement Tuesday of Hybrid Cloud Service, Gelsinger said that VMware was creating model VMware public clouds in the four data centers -- locations unspecified -- that its many regional service providers could emulate.

As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger explained to partners Feb. 27 in Las Vegas: "We all lose if [enterprise customers] end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud ... Own the corporate workload now and forever."

Maybe the event will even get underway with COO Carl Eschenbach repeating the exhortation he made to partners Feb. 27. Don't get beaten by a competitor "that sells books." He misspoke, of course. What he meant to say was don't get beaten by "a mere bookseller."

It's already known that VMware will say the hybrid cloud will include its own version of infrastructure-as-a-service, a public cloud that customers may turn to if they want to migrate into a large-scale version of what they've already got on premises. As a plus, their existing management tools will see workloads in either place, giving them an extension to their data centers.

That interpretation comes from Forrester Research analyst James Staten, who on March 13 posted a blog reporting what he heard from VMware executives as they told investors what they intended to do next: "Yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others."

Under terms of the agreement, USRA, a nonprofit research organization, will operate the computer at the Ames facility. Twenty percent of the system's time will be allocated to universities via a competitive selection process.

The computer system selected for the facility is D-Wave Systems' D-Wave Two. Quantum computing combines the principles of quantum physics, where a bit of matter can exist in two states, with supercomputing processes that manipulate billions of bits of data. A bit can be 0, 1 or both, allowing the computer to test all possible solutions simultaneously.

NASA's interest in quantum computing lies in trying to solve extremely complex problems in areas such as optimizing air traffic control, navigation and communication, and robotics.