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.

They aren't advertising this at all, unfortunately. This only affects grandfathered-in contracts.

Sprint customers can use the Verizon network. So, why use Verizon?

Sprint can use Verizon for voice and 1x data, but they do not use Verizon's 3G service.

Not that I know of, I am on Outlook 2010 hosted Exchange with Appriver, unlimited storage. My mailbox is around ~16GB.

• Have only two folders: Inbox, and Reference.
• When an email comes in and it does not need to be acted on, read it, then move it to Reference.
• If an email needs to be acted upon, leave it in your inbox until the task is complete. This may be hours, days, weeks or months. But everything in your inbox is something that is waiting on someone.

I frequently had a habit of reading emails on my smartphone and forgetting about them. Now, I can either move them to Reference on my phone, or do it when I get back to my desk. But nothing slips through the cracks this way, which was a huge problem when I first got a smartphone.

If Duetsche Telekom doesn't want T-Mobile anymore (which evidence suggests is the case), and they can't sell it to AT&T, what is going to happen to it?

DT spins it off as a separate company with a new identity?

Can you really do group chat with no central server?

ICQ proved that it was possible over a decade ago. Simultaneously, they proved that it was not a good idea (as I remember friends saying, "Who are you talking to? I don't see him! Re-invite!").