"Ideally, what governments can do best is to clear the road, not pave it.".

That's where the paper lost me..

With google docs and the like, cloud computing has been happening for a long time now. I'm personally excited about this movement...

I'm not at all. Keeping all your shit in the cloud and working on it - sounds like a nightmare. It'll be heavily monitored, no saying what kind of government involvement will be enforced.

Companys could sue whoever runs the cloud and easily get anything you had on it..

Interesting in theory - really fucking scary in actuality. Not the end all answer to computing needs.

I can see it being really great for something like an individual company - but wrong for the masses...

"Cloud" is a bit misleading. If you are using Google Docs, the data is just being stored on Google's servers. What's "cloud" or distributed about that? "Cloud" is just a retarded buzzword for "not on my computer"..

I backup my computer daily to Amazon S3, not the "cloud"...

You Tube, Flickr are the perfect example of it. Certainly this one bring the revolution in internet world. Now you can enjoy any thing with just click and uploading is also quite fast.

We are entering into new era .....

Alot of misinformation in this thread. you can't just say youtube and flickr are an example of cloud hosting unless you know the underlying software/hardware setup running the websites. cloud hosting has to do with virtualization and being able to scale hardware/software across multiple servers/server farms..

And no cloud hosting isn't just a buzzword, there is a very big difference in the underlying technology when compared to dedicated hosting, vps, or any other type of hosting..

If you don't have computer networking design in your background it's difficult to comprehend the differences on the frontend because you actually don't see the difference, but in the software/hardware backend the design is completely different...

Cloud is basically distributing multiple websites across multiple servers. The idea behind cloud computing is that one is distributing the load and risk across lots of servers. Say for example, 30 servers...

Thank you! Finally some sense!.

Retarded tech journalists jump on these words and won't let go causing massive hype for something that isn't important at all, just look at web 2.0.....

Ive been using a networks of servers and computers for months to control my sites and backup my data... so have probably 90% of the people on this forum , I have applications on servers that I access remotely to control and modify things on my sites... cloud computing is nothing new... only the name is!!..