The only people who would be getting that are government officials or company executives who are in bed with the government. I think in censored countries, a 10/1 line is essentially non-censored. It's the same with cloud compute resources - sure EC2 and Linode and CloudNine and AppEngine have different interfaces, but you can view that as all just the plumbing on the way into the "remote universal turing mschine" which, much like the topologists who can't tell the difference between their coffee mug and their donut, in spite of their interface and language differences all the programmable remote computing offerings are identical - if you can compute anything on one of them, you can - in theory- compute it on any of them. You might need to "change the plugs" if you want to switch you cloud storage from S3 to BigTable to Dropbox to Tahoe/LAFS, just like I need to switch cables or use a plug adaptor for US delivered electrical equipment. There's no "vendor lockin" at the "it's just a bunch of ordered bytes" level. And much like the end result of electricity consumption is pretty much all the same, electricity is mostly just converted into heat - but with side effects varying from cooling your beer to blasting pixels onto your screen at 100fps to making your coffee machine hot ultimately cloud storage is all just ordered bytes more-or-less reliably stored and retrieved - whether that's plain text passwords, or massively de-duped mp3s in Dropbox or Amazon/Apples cloud music storage, or cryptographically secure blobs which no-one can tell whether they contain your bank records or your secret research project data or child porn - it's all just bytes. If you're an edge-case customer, perhaps wanting to use Amazon S3 to store data for your 12bit wide "bytes" from your PDP8, you just convert them on the way in and out. In general, "everything just deals with that", pretty much every modern-ish 8/16/32/64 bit device, regardless of native endianness, will happily emit and receive the same 8 bit bytes that S3 stores (converting on the fly, much like a switchmode power supply does for voltages). Cloud storage, for example, expects 8 bit bytes delivered over tcp (or perhaps udp). If I needed to (and I never have) I could use a US targeted UPS or inverter to provide 120V AC 60Hz. Fortunately, half my electronics doesn't actually care what voltage/frequency/current is available thanks to modern power supplies (I've seen my iMac happily keep running during a brown-out where the wall sockets were measuring just 90V AC, while all the routers/modems/harddrives with less capable power supplies were flickering and rebooting continuously.) Other devices I own I can use a transformer to change my 220V down to 120V, though still at 50Hz. You're probably thinking "120V 60Hz AC with type-b plugs", whereas for me the default assumption is "220V 50Hz AC with type-1 plugs". The power company only provides a "standard" volt and amp rated supply, and just like cloud computing, there are various standards to choose from. To stretch the cloud/powercompany analogy (perhaps too far)… (I have no idea on iOS, I suppose it is even worse, do they have VLC on iOS?) But on Android strangely only very few media players on devices acknowledge this need and let my slide pics, listen to music or watch video from the LAN. The obvious solution I used is a "local cloud" (just a samba server on a little Raspberry Pi actually). (And all your things should be right there even if you ISP is down.) It seems necessary to be able to do so, but it is not necessary to hand over all your stuff to Apple or Google or Dropbox to do so. On my bed, I can use my tablet to browse pics I have taken with my phone, while listening to music I have ripped on my desktop long time ago. Instead, people should use open tools, running on devices they own, storing things on some storage they own and control. People should not do their stuff in free apps running on devices they don't really own, and these apps should not store that stuff in a cloud vaguely rented by the app maker. Last time in a Pycon conference in Beijing, 5/4 speeches were about new cloud offers (it was advertising actually). Another bucket of fuel to my pool of reasons to think the "Cloud" is misguided.
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