They just might get marginalized a bit. Lots of people still prefer paper, paper books still look better on the bookshelf or coffee table, lots of people would rather read a paper book at the beach or poolside. There will always be a market for paper books - it just may shrink a bit as cost-conscious consumers sometimes choose the eBook option.

Frankly some of my friends who buy eBooks will ALSO buy the print edition of books they really like. And some will get the free sample chapter on their Kindle then go out and buy the paper version if they like it. Even better for publishers.

Except the reality is that only a very few actually make an "obscene profit". The vast majority of books, films and music wither and die with very little revenue. For every Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling there are a thousand other writers who will never make even a part-time wage for their works.

Book publishing is an expensive business and e-books level the playing field considerably. The three biggest costs in book production are (not necessarily in this order):

1. Printing
2. Marketing
3. Distribution

A publisher needs to have confidence that a book will sell X copies at Y price in order to know that they will at least break even on publishing it. And I guarantee you that every publisher has a warehouse full of books they guessed wrong on and nobody bought. But those costs are sunk. They pay get pennies on the dollar at the paper recycler but otherwise they've blown a lot of cash printing books they never sold.

As on-demand, and now e-book, publishing has become more and more viable the break-even point has come WAY down and books that would never have seen the light of day are getting their chance.

And publishers should LOVE eBooks - it takes printing and distribution largely out of the equation and means far greater profits off a much lower price. I wouldn't mind if my publisher did Kindle versions of my books, that's just one more medium and a much higher net profit from the books.

Competition is a good thing, no doubt about it. I'm a solid Firefox user but I'm happy to see Chrome or even Opera (or even IE for that matter) make significant advances in browser technology because I want to see that push Mozilla to further improve Firefox too.

I think having browser diversity helps to keep web designers honest as well - hopefully gone (or at least numbered) are the days when sites would only work with one particular browser. I'm pleased to see that I rarely have to use IE Tab anymore in Firefox as a lot of sites that used to be IE-only are now starting to work in Firefox as well.

It would probably be pretty easy to fake that though. Create some bogus plans to produce the thing you're patenting but never actually go through with it. It would be too costly to follow-up on every patent to make sure people actually did what they said they would.

Plus there are folks who get patents who don't intend to actually produce the thing themselves, rather they want to license it to others. Sort of an "R&D Department for Hire" concept. Unfortunately it's a fine line between those who intend to license their patents and those who intend to lay in the weeds and wait for somebody to infringe their patent and then sue.

It's those kinds of parasites we need to figure out way to deal with.

Seems to me a hosted email service essentially IS a backdoor. I can already get into the e-mail accounts of any server I'm the admin of - hence the power of Admin. Heck, not only do they own the admin accounts, they own the physical servers.

You haven't handed them the keys, they made (and own) the locks!

It's true that keeping your data in-house doesn't guarantee it's security. However...I'd suggest that the more layers and people you put between you and your data the inherently less secure it becomes. The employee may not be 100% trustworthy but at least I know who they are. I have personally met each and every person with a key to our datacenter because I'm the one who handed them their keys.

Every additional contractor, sub-contractor, sub-sub-contractor means more hands and eyes with access to my data and increasingly they are hands and eyes that I don't know, have no direct control over, can't even monitor. That's not security.

That's true, though the government we have is a lot better than the government most people in the world have to endure. That's not to suggest that it couldn't be improved, just that flawed though it is, it's still better than most.

There's a reason why millions of people around the world still risk life and limb to try and come here and it's not because of American Idol.

Yes, I know why they have these clauses. My point is that these clauses specifically allow them to ship your data off to unnamed third-parties who may be located anywhere in the world.

And that is a potentially serious issue for people storing confidential and/or mission-critical data in the cloud. Especially when they thought they were storing it with a domestic provider, only to discover later perhaps that their data was actually shipped off to a 3rd party in another part of the world.

Actually my point was that rather than being worried about keeping it out of the U.S. he should probably be more focused on keeping it IN Canada.

ANY country other than your home country exposes your data to laws and risks that are likely unfamiliar to you. At least at home you know what you're dealing with.

And I'd suggest that the U.S., while far from blameless (hence the thread) is actually one of the better ones. At least the government here is at least sort of transparent. In some countries they don't tell you what they're doing and they shoot you if you ask.

Yes, certainly they should need a reason...but at assumes that the 4th Amendment applies at all. I believe that the 4th Amendment SHOULD apply to electronic communications, including in the cloud, but what I believe and what the U.S. Government does aren't always the same things.

But now that I have THREE(?) separate cloud providers to run a single application, where is my advantage over just hosting it in my own data center? How many different 3rd parties am I going to pay to touch my confidential data before all of the promised cost-benefits of the cloud disappear?

And if something goes wrong in my 3-headed cloud won't each provider just point at one (or both) of the other two and claim it's their problem?

The problem is that the abstracting ends when and where the government of the country wherein the server exists decides it does. Note the whole China/Google kerfluffle. In the utopian view of the Internet Google and their searches roam freely across the landscape, unencumbered by quaint political systems.

In reality the Chinese government actively restricts (or at least tries to) what passes into and out of their country by land, sea, air and cyberspace. Other countries have intervened on the Internet as well - jailing people for political postings, actively monitoring traffic, even trying to shut down the Internet (in their country) during times of crisis.

Whether we want to believe it or not, the Internet only rises as high as those political entities allow it to and that means that having the protection of the 4th Amendment is still important.

So you'd be happier if your data was stored in China, where there's a decent chance it's being actively monitored?

No, and that is exactly what I consider to be one of the biggest issues of the Cloud. The Terms of Service of many, if not most, Cloud Computing/SaaS providers explicitly allow them to outsource their storage (or either primary data or backups or both) to unnamed 3rd parties. Where are these mysterious 3rd parties located?

Like all businesses keeping costs down helps them keep profits up and since Cloud Computing IS largely sold as a low-cost solution (we can discuss price vs. cost later) we know that keeping costs low is imperative. As we know the Internet crosses International borders (most of them anyhow) effortlessly. Is there any reason to think that a Cloud/SaaS provider wouldn't gladly outsource their storage to a cut-rate data center in another country? Maybe even a country that isn't very friendly to the U.S.?

The 4th Amendment means nothing in Malaysia or China or Venezuela or ...you get the idea.