I'm neither especially pro-cloud or anti-cloud, but I'm getting really sick of the people saying that compute is going to be just like electricity or POTS or some other utility. Their assumption there is that they can provide some sort of generic "compute unit" that customers can just plug in to and use on demand. The problem is that network-enabled applications are far more complex than plugging in a toaster. OLTP is different from scientific computing, which is different from graphics rendering, and none of them are similar to what most people use their PCs for. Some require little CPU or RAM, but extremely high I/O, others need a ton of RAM but little CPU (can anyone say Java??). They keep saying that "there's already a generic interface - TCP/IP". WTF? You gotta be kidding me if you think that Amazon or Google is just going to give me generic TCP/IP access to their data center! Can I use EC2 to run a bit torrent client? Tor? Test the next version of nmap or nessus? Whew, I need a smoke after that rant!

/me performs a violent act in the hopes of getting his comment noticed. Blood! Gore! Mean people!

Well, I think Grimes is getting his panties in a bundle over something that's not overly important, but he's right about one thing: they don't get it.

15 years and the best they can do is change the chrome to transparent?

Wow, their new business deal may not go through? The site has been shut down (again)? So many surprises! This is going to be horribly inconvenient, having to be slightly circumspect when we want to download stuff "illegally." I bet the *AAs have won, this time!

Boy, Bruce just keeps getting paid to pump out the same old specters, doesn't he? People don't want privacy! Why? Because by giving up information about themselves, they start, or enter, conversations. The value of the information they get back is greater than the loss from what they give out, because what they give out is usually pretty trivial. The bigger concern than confidentiality is integrity. Highly social sites like EBay and Facebook have already come up with ways to verify the integrity of information you're receiving from semi-anonymous sources. Banks, etc., generally do pretty well - if they didn't, there would not be such high adoption of online banking. Medical information is the next looming crisis, and we'll probably have some problems, then they'll get sorted out and we'll FINALLY have useful electronic medical records. Privacy isn't an either/or thing. It's about control, about trade-offs, and about protection that's equal to the risk. I really don't think pictures of my vacation need to require retinal scans to view. (But maybe yours do! That's cool!)

Yeah, because a common soldier is going to disagree with a general about how something should be done, in public view. Or challenge something that's been Army doctrine for 30 years. The whole point of the army is to have a bunch of people who can't think, just take orders.

This is a really good point. Another point to consider is how this benefits the U.S. government. China, in particular, has legions of "hackers" pounding at U.S. web sites all the time. There is an information war going on between the two nations every day. This technology allows the U.S. to get a foothold in to the brains of Chinese internet users, and possibly turn them pro-U.S. or at least less anti-U.S. The U.S. government is not doing it just because they think it's morally offensive that China and Iran censor Internet access.