I know this isn't what you were looking for based on the summary, but you never know, sometimes there are options you've never thought about, so I'll posit it anyway:

Verizon Wireless offers HomeFusion Broadband for a professionally-installed, rooftop-mounted 4G home broadband service. It sounds like it's ideally suited to your parents, and for $6.99/mo, you get the peace of mind knowing that they will send a technician out to fix any issues that may arise.

I don't know if it's in your parents' price range (it starts higher than a Jetpack, but with a higher monthly bandwidth limit), but it's a fantastic option for those currently struggling with satellite or dial-up and have access to 4G LTE.

When will that be installed in, anywhere else, exactly?

My bad, I thought we were discussing Verizon as an ISP on this thread, I apologize for bringing in facts about Verizon as an ISP.

Verizon doesn't want to upgrade their network and supply the bandwidth they actually sold. Overselling is lucrative -- hence the data caps

What? You mean the same Verizon that unveiled FiOS Quantum, a 300/65 connection, earlier this year?

In fact, they've invested anywhere from $23 to $30 billion dollars in FiOS. To say they didn't upgrade their network is the height of ignorance.

But hey, I guess this one didn't exactly fit into your "X does Y because of Z, always, no exceptions" template.

Under the law, these dealers are absolutely right. Chrysler was forced to sell a company owned Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram store in LA for this exact reason.

If Tesla doesn't like it, then lobby to change the laws. You can't just ignore them.

They wanted to have branding so people would see that app X was pulling google data. Doesn't seem to be all that unreasonable of a request.

Yet the world was up in arms over Verizon Wireless' suggestion, when news of the AT&T-only iPhone was revealed, that one of the reasons they passed on it was that they wanted carrier branding as they've enjoyed on every device in the past.

Apple doesn't promote other brands. You won't find an Intel sticker on a MacBook Pro, you won't find a Verizon/AT&T/Sprint sticker on an iPhone, and you won't find a Google logo on the Maps app. Period.

They'll get rid of those other apps at the same time as they let you use an unlocked CDMA + LTE phone on their network

So, you mean, now?

What's the price? We have higher state taxes in NY, well worth it in many cases.

And an unemployment rate a full percent higher than in PA.

Where are all the good end-user tools for S3 now?

As others have mentioned, Dropbox and SugarSync are consumer interfaces to S3. I think the fact that Amazon references "objects" and "buckets" in S3 terminology is directly because they didn't really build S3 to be an "online file system" type service (though s3fuse provides it). They intended to be merely the backend for the consumer services you mentioned.

That being said, clients aren't always strictly downloadable software. My most-used S3 client is built into my Synology DiskStation NAS and provides nightly backups to S3 (hopefully they add support for Glacier). Also, I frequently use Panic Transmit for Mac OS X, which is an FTP client that also has support for S3.

Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?

According to the AWS Blog, 24 hours:

Each retrieval request that you make to Glacier is a called a job. You can poll Glacier to see if your data is available, or you can ask it to send a notification to the Amazon SNS topic of your choice when the data is available. You can then access the data via HTTP GET requests, including byte range requests. The data will remain available to you for 24 hours.

Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

Then use Amazon S3. Reading the article (or even summary, in this case) has not yet been linked to cancer, so give it a try.

I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide [...] tools for end users.

You hit the nail on the head about AWS' goal: They are providing the APIs for others to develop consumer-level tools and products by utilizing their existing infrastructure. Everything, from EC2 to S3 to R53, is geared towards developers (which will then market to end users) by providing full functionality via an API. Glacier is no exception, and as you said, there will be great tools available for end users for those ready to create them.

Maybe someone reading this thread is already fast at work developing exactly what you say.

It's not like write off's magically pay for themselves.

Obligatory Seinfeld reference...

Amazon has already rolled out a $52 million plan to install air conditioning at their warehouses.

Correct. There isn't a better example than the The Oatmeal saga.

I know the "cloud is bad" and all, but have you ever looked into Amazon Web Services' Free Tier?

You can run a low-volume server with whatever OS you want (though your choices may be limited in the free tier) for free.

And when your site grows, you can scale up easily.