Quote -
had those users been on a cloud, theyd have been completely at the mercy of the company and yanking their rights from under them would have been a trivial affair.  in fact, it would have been a simple matter for the company to say 'we have noticed that you have posted an image that violates the EULA for this product. your digital rights to the product have been revoked and your account has been closed'.

cloud computing tips 100% of the control over to the publisher. this is not a good situation for the customer to be in.

This has actually already happened a couple of times, even w/ only a semi-cloud rig, 

I know it's going to be pooh-poohed, but consider the following rather not-uncommon bork-ups by remote control:

• Paid-for books pulled from Kindle
• There has already been a massive data loss due to DRM+cloud, though only to certain phone owners.
• Ever seen what happens when your dumbassed management relies too much on WAN to do things, and some CALTRANS worker decides to cut the fiber? It was fun to watch, but the cleanup is lousy.

These aren't hypotheticals - these have actually happened. The third one happened at my former employer's remote production site, costing a few hundred thousand bucks in downtime before the connection was restored (because an incredibly dumbassed Head of IT forcefully told me to "stop worrying" about the realtime production BI system over a WAN, because "we have an SLA for that". All it would've taken on my part was to forward that little recorded IM conversation to the CEO, and he would've been fired that day.)

 

Anecdote aside, I fully expect these things to happen more often.

 

Personally, 'the cloud' has its uses. A quickie webhost, some temporary DB expansion,  maybe  a cool place for your mobile folks to use and grab computing power.

 

But... woe to the fool who depends on it for storage, or uses any with DRM ("Digital Rights Management") in it. That last part is what has (justifiably) kept me well away from the Kindle. If I don't have locally stored and sync'ed copies under my exclusive control, I don't want it, period. 

 

I own my data and applications, EULAs be damned. I don't (and won't) rent either.

 

To that end, I use rsync to my home server (runs any everything), and always keep a spare 2TB HDD full of encrypted backups at my Mother-in-law's house. The price of UPS Ground for that is way cheaper overall.

 (edited to remove the pre-coffee typos)