You'll notice that when you watch cartoons on NetFlix that when there is scene scrolling or lots of changes across frames, that the quality will go down which is probably due to the mpeg layer compression that they are using to minimize the amount of data transfer, so it can't be processed on the client side.

ha.. i meant to say on NetFlix

Dedicated hardware also performs better per the cost especially when it comes to disk io. I've experienced minutes of waiting time just making a MySQL database around 15 tables none having more than 5000 rows, whereas it was nearly instantaneous on my local machine. I've also experienced a lack of consistency on EC2. If someone is watching an episode of the smurfs where it is raining, you will notice a difference.

I don't see why it would be any different than any other business that writes off the cost of electricity and equipment.

Perhaps if the Bible said '7 units of time' then there wouldn't be such a big emotional fuss over such a meaningless argument.