What I really loath about the special pleading of the 'content industries' is not so much its frequent-though-not-total dishonesty; but it's sheer lack of perspective.
Is it, quite possibly, the case that used game sales are bad for aspects of the game creation business. However, the right of first sale is a fairly fundamental aspect of people actually being able to 'own' things. Guess what, guys: Even if your direst predictions are true, this is a case of video games vs. meaningful property rights. A sense of scale would be in order.
The same thing goes for assorted other 'IP' issues. Is piracy hurtful to the music and video industries? Quite possibly(though history suggests that their estimates of how much so should be taken with a grain of salt that would stun an ox...); but can that possibly matter more than such minor quibbles as 'due process' and 'innocence until proven guilty', which are trampled on by most of today's more enthusiastic anti-piracy schemes? Even if it were true that the whole damn industry would burn without such legislation, what of it?
That is what really gets to me. Yes, it is also true that these industries have a history of mendacity about the real damage inflicted by various things that they don't like; but that is a petty footnote: When it comes right down to it, the thing that they don't like(used game sales) is derived directly from a right more important than the entire video game industry. GameStop can rot in hell, they are a thoroughly parasitic and inefficient middleman; but meaningful ownership of property is far more important than video games, even if the direst predictions of their self-interested proponents are taken at face value.
I didn't explicitly mention it, I'll admit; but on-site generation is subject to similar 'any major deviation from other facilities of similar size would be a major surprise' condition, which again makes a fivefold disagreement fairly surprising.
Solar, especially, should be able to get quite good estimates from climate data and generator area data from planning documents or aerial photos. Gas is a bit harder to tell from the outside; but it has a footprint of its own. Such a radical disagreement over how much energy a datacenter of known size is using and/or a generator unit of known size is providing seems quite odd indeed.
Unless somebody is sitting on something as clever as it is secret, it seems highly unlikely that Apple's efficiency per unit data crunched is all that different from any of the other large cloud types. There are certainly better and worse designs, but anybody who doesn't want to bleed money is likely to be in roughly the same ballpark, and using the same silicon, and bound by the same basic energy conversion efficiency constraints.
Given that, it seems unlikely that there could be a fivefold disagreement about how much power is being used, unless somebody is deeply incompetent, or there are two markedly different estimates of how big Apple's operation is.
In addition to the usual weasel-wording around just exactly what 'unlimited' means, and what conditions will get you throttled, there are persistent allegations that they deliberately oversold their coverage area and then collected early termination charges from customers who discovered that little or no service was actually available where they had been told it was.
This hardly wins them the title of 'most abusive', in the competitive world of the wireless telcos; but they aren't exactly a white knight.
Are you suggesting an Existentialist Frenchman as the epidemiologist? He could drink more heavily than is good for him, and mix statistical deduction with Camus quotations...
The real giggle would probably be a crossover into humans of a virus with substantial potential for horrid prenatal issues... Livestock diseases are quite expensive, especially if there is some vector in the wild that prevents wholly eradicating them even by scorched-earth means; but genuinely starving because the calves are sickly has somewhat gone out of fashion in the EU.
A big spike in spontaneous abortions and horrid fetal malformations, on the other hand, would really turn up the cheer...
I'm pretty sure that it's an argument in favor of assembling an international team of oddballs and hard-cases who have what it takes to do what needs to be done, against a background of entertaining interpersonal drama... Ideally, each one's backstory should be connected to broad stereotypes about their country of origin and somehow involve a hackneyed reason for their involvement in agricultural pathology. Of course, they should also be brooding and haunted, or hot, or both.
I'm thinking a fiery Irish redhead attracted to the study of plant pathogens by a desire to see that a famine of the likes that claimed her ancestors is never repeated; along with a technocratic, but nerdy and mild-mannered, Japanese chemical engineer with a boundless confidence in our ability to outwit emerging pathogens. An apparently shallow and hard-partying Aussie vet(whose sensitive core can be shown during close-camera scenes of his delicate work to save adorable furry animals) rounds out the team's zoonotic expertise, along with a fatalistic epidemiologist(suggestions for an appropriate national stereotype welcome). Finally, there would be a 'native' around to provide the folksy wisdom of the traditional small farmers, from some country and backstory that makes this culturally-aware, rather than racist; and an American who started out studying agricultural chemistry under Borlaug; but left to serve with the Chemical Corps in Vietnam.
It wouldn't actually, y'known, solve any problems; but the made-for-TV spinoff would be a hit!
It is true that direct transmission of novel pathogens to humans is more likely to happen from animals than from plants; but starvation will kill you every bit as readily as contagion will, so the plant-farmers aren't exactly safe...
I don't intend to pick on Philips specifically, not enough data to judge them against their peers; but more to express my frustration with the failure modes so common among the (not always predictable in any useful way) questionably well made offerings.
For some reason, the 'lightbulb' form factor seems to bring out the worst in designers of driver boards: Your basic, boring, overhead fluorescent tubes can be found running until their electrodes eventually degrade on some 80's inverter that has probably seen at least a dozen tubes come and go. LEDs, similarly, seem to last forever in their miscellaneous applications; but the moment they get shoved into lightbulbs half off them are either not receiving power, or in a series chain with a blown one, long before you get to start worrying about serious dimming or phosphor breakdown.
Neither tubes nor LEDs are, themselves, immortal of course; but it's just frustrating to see how often it's the driver board that keels over and dies long before the (generally not user-swappable) light emitters themselves are ready to go...
Unfortunately, both LED and CFL lights are devices where quality matters; but is difficult to infer by casual inspection or brand name(some ebay cheapie may last nigh-forever, especially if you get lucky, some 'real' brand may simply be the ebay cheapie's nastier cousin with "GE" stamped on it).
It is hardly impossible for them to meet their design claims; but there are many ways to achieve design failure, and an unpredictable number of products out there make ample use of them...
Don't worry, the LEDs will still have tens of thousands of hours left in them when a $.02 capacitor blows its guts out and terminates the driver board because a $.05 capacitor would have bloated the BOM too much...
From the perspective of the case of the more-or-less-stock academic economists writing studies, who just happen to work for the World Bank rather than some university, open access publishing seems like a good idea for all the same reasons that it does were the same economist to be working at a university instead.
However, and the weasel wording(" or have been otherwise vetted and approved for release to the public; and... for which internal approval for release is given") in the announcement suggests this has already been thought of, it will be very interesting to see if this announcement ends up having any implications beyond PR for the other aspect of the World Bank.
The 'openness' problem that has traditionally dogged the bank among its critics is not the 'Cry, cry, we need to pay Elsevier $30/copy to get studies' one; but the 'The World Bank is a more or less opaque and dubiously accountable instrument by which a fairly cozy group of wealthy nations push dubiously helpful or even well-intentioned schemes on others under the guise of development'. It seems unlikely that open access to some journal articles and research products is going to do much to counter that perception where it presently exists; but we'll see...
They are presently suffering togetherness issues on both fronts(Intel because Intel denied them authorization to build any QPI chipsets, AMD because AMD now owns ATI...); but Nvidia shoved a pretty significant number of integrated graphics chipsets out the door in the past few years. For a while, they more or less were the embedded graphics option for AMD boards, and they presented a fairly persuasive offer on the Intel side, given the dire state of Intel graphics.
That's quite a few performance-insensitive Nvidia parts in the world, in addition to the discrete ones, which usually indicate some level of interest in performance, or at least driving a greater-than-default number of heads...
Any outcome is possible, it seems, in these cases; but if I were the broadcasters I'd be worried about my chances of winning this one by anything other than burying Aereo in paper until they run out of money and stop twitching...
The Cablevision case, a few years back, over their 'cloud DVR' system was decided in Cablevision's favor(despite the long-distance transmission) because of the argument that, since Cablevision physically stored an individual copy of the recorded show, per subscriber recording it, the service simply amounted to Cablevision running a 'DVR colo' service.(I don't think that the case decided exactly what a one needed to do to demonstrate a unique copy. Does it have to exist at the disk level? Is it OK if the filesystem sees two copies but the SAN is silently deduplicating blocks in the background? Does a 'single' copy at the FS level stored on a raid volume count as slightly more than one copy, depending on the level of redundancy?); but there would seem to be a clear analogy between the, now vindicated in court, DVR-across-the-network concept and the antenna-across-the-network one.
I believe it is a legitimate concern IF and ONLY IF people that stream from the iPads even watch commercials to begin with. What are the studios going to do next? Sue all the people that don't watch advertisements?
As saith Jamie Kellner, Chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting: "[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."
People who living outside of Jamie's delusional universe don't actually remember signing any contracts, much less any that meet the requirements of hundreds of years of contract law precedent, to watch OTA broadcasts; but it isn't a big secret that the broadcasters would love to...
I get the impression that Team Content wishes to operate under the legal theory that anything that happens to their precious content without their permission is illegal, period.
They'd probably still be upset if somebody were using a clever arrangement of metallized balloons to bounce the RF from the New York broadcast region to wherever they wanted it... The fact that the filthy, filthy, internet, with its pernicious pirates is involved just drives them into a blind rage.
I've always found it ironic that cable TV got its start rebroadcasting OTA feeds to places with lousy reception(much against the preferences of the OTA broadcasters); but once it received government sanction and came into some money of its own, swiftly re-positioned itself as a crusading champion of the absolute dominion of broadcasters...
These Aereo chaps are virtually identical, in terms of business model, to the original cable guys(except that they are bending over backwards to accommodate the absurdities of the law by having an individual antenna in a huge array for each subscriber...
I've never seen one in person, to be sure. What I don't know is whether they were always a terrible idea, marketed on the theory that people wanted a 1-for-1 equivalent to the tape deck, only much more expensive and not re-writable, or whether they enjoyed a brief period of being reasonably sensible; back when CD burning on a computer only happened at slightly greater than 1x, buffer underruns were a serious consideration for those of us not cool enough to own SCSI gear, and having your OS die an awful death halfway through was actually a plausible consideration...
Given the existence of tape, which got good and cheap a fair while back, and minidisk, which was probably the most refined technology for real-time music recording in the field(Sony always was a hardass about doing anything useful with minidisks and computers; but a 'professional' minidisk unit would give you no SCMS and a choice of mic, line, or toslink, on cheap media for the time, if you wanted) followed by the transition to computers that were actually pretty good at burning disks, I'm assuming that very few ever entered the wild.
It's sort of a combination of being a diplomat and being a Chamber of Commerce hack, with the blatant national interest of the former, the shameless special-interest grubbing of the latter, and the professional obligation to dishonesty of both.
I'd be quite surprised if the chap hired to do the job is dumb enough not to know exactly why the product isn't selling; but that isn't going to keep him from trying to sell it as convincingly as possible....
I live in the US. With the recent mega upload fiasco and some of the other craziness, I think it's a smart move for foreigners to avoid hosting in the US.
US courts are trying to reach into other countries now. We've got way to much craziness here to trust us. The government should have known their actions will have consequences.
That isn't necessarily true, it really depends on what you are planning on doing. 'Jurisdiction shopping' for hosting purposes isn't all that different, strategically, from doing it for tax laws. Different jurisdictions are useful for different things and varying degrees of terrible for others.
If you, say, actually want to comply with EU and/or member state privacy law, or just don't want the NSA doing cloud backups for you, you'd be a moron to let your data get anywhere near the US. Same deal if you want to do something that makes the MPAA sad. On the other hand, the US is a pretty decent(and attractively priced) place to have strong opinions about assorted governments, religions, and ethnic groups that would quite possibly earn you an extended stay in a cozy correctional facility at home... The important thing is identifying your requirements and doing your best to ensure that the most sympathetic jurisdictions, for those needs, are where your activities occur...
The US has sufficiently aggressive surveillance and limited privacy protection(and I'm just referring to the stuff that has been declared legal) that it is neither obviously desirable, nor even necessarily possible, for entities in areas with more demanding privacy law to use US-based hosting or storage service.
Second, by the standards of places developed beyond the barter economy, Australia's overseas links are long, not terribly fast, and rather expensive(Also, Telstra...)
There is one obscure and largely irrelevant semi-exception: CD-R disks come in two flavors 'Data' and 'Music'. The latter are priced with the you-worthless-filthy-pirate-scum markup, the former aren't.
This distinction is, uh, deeply relevant to all owners of "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders". "Professional" ones are not affected. Much more importantly, computers are not affected and I'm pretty sure that "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders" are approximately as rare as unicorns...
Slashdot Mirror
What I really loath about the special pleading of the 'content industries' is not so much its frequent-though-not-total dishonesty; but it's sheer lack of perspective.
Is it, quite possibly, the case that used game sales are bad for aspects of the game creation business. However, the right of first sale is a fairly fundamental aspect of people actually being able to 'own' things. Guess what, guys: Even if your direst predictions are true, this is a case of video games vs. meaningful property rights. A sense of scale would be in order.
The same thing goes for assorted other 'IP' issues. Is piracy hurtful to the music and video industries? Quite possibly(though history suggests that their estimates of how much so should be taken with a grain of salt that would stun an ox...); but can that possibly matter more than such minor quibbles as 'due process' and 'innocence until proven guilty', which are trampled on by most of today's more enthusiastic anti-piracy schemes? Even if it were true that the whole damn industry would burn without such legislation, what of it?
That is what really gets to me. Yes, it is also true that these industries have a history of mendacity about the real damage inflicted by various things that they don't like; but that is a petty footnote: When it comes right down to it, the thing that they don't like(used game sales) is derived directly from a right more important than the entire video game industry. GameStop can rot in hell, they are a thoroughly parasitic and inefficient middleman; but meaningful ownership of property is far more important than video games, even if the direst predictions of their self-interested proponents are taken at face value.
I didn't explicitly mention it, I'll admit; but on-site generation is subject to similar 'any major deviation from other facilities of similar size would be a major surprise' condition, which again makes a fivefold disagreement fairly surprising.
Solar, especially, should be able to get quite good estimates from climate data and generator area data from planning documents or aerial photos. Gas is a bit harder to tell from the outside; but it has a footprint of its own. Such a radical disagreement over how much energy a datacenter of known size is using and/or a generator unit of known size is providing seems quite odd indeed.
Unless somebody is sitting on something as clever as it is secret, it seems highly unlikely that Apple's efficiency per unit data crunched is all that different from any of the other large cloud types. There are certainly better and worse designs, but anybody who doesn't want to bleed money is likely to be in roughly the same ballpark, and using the same silicon, and bound by the same basic energy conversion efficiency constraints.
Given that, it seems unlikely that there could be a fivefold disagreement about how much power is being used, unless somebody is deeply incompetent, or there are two markedly different estimates of how big Apple's operation is.
They have an... unenviable... reputation.
In addition to the usual weasel-wording around just exactly what 'unlimited' means, and what conditions will get you throttled, there are persistent allegations that they deliberately oversold their coverage area and then collected early termination charges from customers who discovered that little or no service was actually available where they had been told it was.
This hardly wins them the title of 'most abusive', in the competitive world of the wireless telcos; but they aren't exactly a white knight.
Are you suggesting an Existentialist Frenchman as the epidemiologist? He could drink more heavily than is good for him, and mix statistical deduction with Camus quotations...
starvation will kill you every bit as readily as contagion will
If you live in a agricultural monoculture. Think of the Irish potato blight. Something that hits rice hard, would be rough on Asia.
As a fungus in good standing, I would like to suggest that "Ug99", which cuts through wheat like nobody's business, could also ruin some days...
The real giggle would probably be a crossover into humans of a virus with substantial potential for horrid prenatal issues... Livestock diseases are quite expensive, especially if there is some vector in the wild that prevents wholly eradicating them even by scorched-earth means; but genuinely starving because the calves are sickly has somewhat gone out of fashion in the EU.
A big spike in spontaneous abortions and horrid fetal malformations, on the other hand, would really turn up the cheer...
It's the only way to keep yourself protected.
It's funny now; but it won't be when your continued enrollment in Monsanto Genuine Advantage is your only hope for agriculture!
I'm pretty sure that it's an argument in favor of assembling an international team of oddballs and hard-cases who have what it takes to do what needs to be done, against a background of entertaining interpersonal drama... Ideally, each one's backstory should be connected to broad stereotypes about their country of origin and somehow involve a hackneyed reason for their involvement in agricultural pathology. Of course, they should also be brooding and haunted, or hot, or both.
I'm thinking a fiery Irish redhead attracted to the study of plant pathogens by a desire to see that a famine of the likes that claimed her ancestors is never repeated; along with a technocratic, but nerdy and mild-mannered, Japanese chemical engineer with a boundless confidence in our ability to outwit emerging pathogens. An apparently shallow and hard-partying Aussie vet(whose sensitive core can be shown during close-camera scenes of his delicate work to save adorable furry animals) rounds out the team's zoonotic expertise, along with a fatalistic epidemiologist(suggestions for an appropriate national stereotype welcome). Finally, there would be a 'native' around to provide the folksy wisdom of the traditional small farmers, from some country and backstory that makes this culturally-aware, rather than racist; and an American who started out studying agricultural chemistry under Borlaug; but left to serve with the Chemical Corps in Vietnam.
It wouldn't actually, y'known, solve any problems; but the made-for-TV spinoff would be a hit!
It is true that direct transmission of novel pathogens to humans is more likely to happen from animals than from plants; but starvation will kill you every bit as readily as contagion will, so the plant-farmers aren't exactly safe...
I don't intend to pick on Philips specifically, not enough data to judge them against their peers; but more to express my frustration with the failure modes so common among the (not always predictable in any useful way) questionably well made offerings.
For some reason, the 'lightbulb' form factor seems to bring out the worst in designers of driver boards: Your basic, boring, overhead fluorescent tubes can be found running until their electrodes eventually degrade on some 80's inverter that has probably seen at least a dozen tubes come and go. LEDs, similarly, seem to last forever in their miscellaneous applications; but the moment they get shoved into lightbulbs half off them are either not receiving power, or in a series chain with a blown one, long before you get to start worrying about serious dimming or phosphor breakdown.
Neither tubes nor LEDs are, themselves, immortal of course; but it's just frustrating to see how often it's the driver board that keels over and dies long before the (generally not user-swappable) light emitters themselves are ready to go...
Unfortunately, both LED and CFL lights are devices where quality matters; but is difficult to infer by casual inspection or brand name(some ebay cheapie may last nigh-forever, especially if you get lucky, some 'real' brand may simply be the ebay cheapie's nastier cousin with "GE" stamped on it).
It is hardly impossible for them to meet their design claims; but there are many ways to achieve design failure, and an unpredictable number of products out there make ample use of them...
Don't worry, the LEDs will still have tens of thousands of hours left in them when a $.02 capacitor blows its guts out and terminates the driver board because a $.05 capacitor would have bloated the BOM too much...
From the perspective of the case of the more-or-less-stock academic economists writing studies, who just happen to work for the World Bank rather than some university, open access publishing seems like a good idea for all the same reasons that it does were the same economist to be working at a university instead.
However, and the weasel wording(" or have been otherwise vetted and approved for release to the public; and... for which internal approval for release is given") in the announcement suggests this has already been thought of, it will be very interesting to see if this announcement ends up having any implications beyond PR for the other aspect of the World Bank.
The 'openness' problem that has traditionally dogged the bank among its critics is not the 'Cry, cry, we need to pay Elsevier $30/copy to get studies' one; but the 'The World Bank is a more or less opaque and dubiously accountable instrument by which a fairly cozy group of wealthy nations push dubiously helpful or even well-intentioned schemes on others under the guise of development'. It seems unlikely that open access to some journal articles and research products is going to do much to counter that perception where it presently exists; but we'll see...
They are presently suffering togetherness issues on both fronts(Intel because Intel denied them authorization to build any QPI chipsets, AMD because AMD now owns ATI...); but Nvidia shoved a pretty significant number of integrated graphics chipsets out the door in the past few years. For a while, they more or less were the embedded graphics option for AMD boards, and they presented a fairly persuasive offer on the Intel side, given the dire state of Intel graphics.
That's quite a few performance-insensitive Nvidia parts in the world, in addition to the discrete ones, which usually indicate some level of interest in performance, or at least driving a greater-than-default number of heads...
Any outcome is possible, it seems, in these cases; but if I were the broadcasters I'd be worried about my chances of winning this one by anything other than burying Aereo in paper until they run out of money and stop twitching...
The Cablevision case, a few years back, over their 'cloud DVR' system was decided in Cablevision's favor(despite the long-distance transmission) because of the argument that, since Cablevision physically stored an individual copy of the recorded show, per subscriber recording it, the service simply amounted to Cablevision running a 'DVR colo' service.(I don't think that the case decided exactly what a one needed to do to demonstrate a unique copy. Does it have to exist at the disk level? Is it OK if the filesystem sees two copies but the SAN is silently deduplicating blocks in the background? Does a 'single' copy at the FS level stored on a raid volume count as slightly more than one copy, depending on the level of redundancy?); but there would seem to be a clear analogy between the, now vindicated in court, DVR-across-the-network concept and the antenna-across-the-network one.
I believe it is a legitimate concern IF and ONLY IF people that stream from the iPads even watch commercials to begin with. What are the studios going to do next? Sue all the people that don't watch advertisements?
As saith Jamie Kellner, Chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting: "[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."
People who living outside of Jamie's delusional universe don't actually remember signing any contracts, much less any that meet the requirements of hundreds of years of contract law precedent, to watch OTA broadcasts; but it isn't a big secret that the broadcasters would love to...
I get the impression that Team Content wishes to operate under the legal theory that anything that happens to their precious content without their permission is illegal, period.
They'd probably still be upset if somebody were using a clever arrangement of metallized balloons to bounce the RF from the New York broadcast region to wherever they wanted it... The fact that the filthy, filthy, internet, with its pernicious pirates is involved just drives them into a blind rage.
I've always found it ironic that cable TV got its start rebroadcasting OTA feeds to places with lousy reception(much against the preferences of the OTA broadcasters); but once it received government sanction and came into some money of its own, swiftly re-positioned itself as a crusading champion of the absolute dominion of broadcasters...
These Aereo chaps are virtually identical, in terms of business model, to the original cable guys(except that they are bending over backwards to accommodate the absurdities of the law by having an individual antenna in a huge array for each subscriber...
I've never seen one in person, to be sure. What I don't know is whether they were always a terrible idea, marketed on the theory that people wanted a 1-for-1 equivalent to the tape deck, only much more expensive and not re-writable, or whether they enjoyed a brief period of being reasonably sensible; back when CD burning on a computer only happened at slightly greater than 1x, buffer underruns were a serious consideration for those of us not cool enough to own SCSI gear, and having your OS die an awful death halfway through was actually a plausible consideration...
Given the existence of tape, which got good and cheap a fair while back, and minidisk, which was probably the most refined technology for real-time music recording in the field(Sony always was a hardass about doing anything useful with minidisks and computers; but a 'professional' minidisk unit would give you no SCMS and a choice of mic, line, or toslink, on cheap media for the time, if you wanted) followed by the transition to computers that were actually pretty good at burning disks, I'm assuming that very few ever entered the wild.
We at Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. refer to exactly this policy as "getting free inventory".
It's sort of a combination of being a diplomat and being a Chamber of Commerce hack, with the blatant national interest of the former, the shameless special-interest grubbing of the latter, and the professional obligation to dishonesty of both.
I'd be quite surprised if the chap hired to do the job is dumb enough not to know exactly why the product isn't selling; but that isn't going to keep him from trying to sell it as convincingly as possible....
I live in the US. With the recent mega upload fiasco and some of the other craziness, I think it's a smart move for foreigners to avoid hosting in the US.
US courts are trying to reach into other countries now. We've got way to much craziness here to trust us. The government should have known their actions will have consequences.
That isn't necessarily true, it really depends on what you are planning on doing. 'Jurisdiction shopping' for hosting purposes isn't all that different, strategically, from doing it for tax laws. Different jurisdictions are useful for different things and varying degrees of terrible for others.
If you, say, actually want to comply with EU and/or member state privacy law, or just don't want the NSA doing cloud backups for you, you'd be a moron to let your data get anywhere near the US. Same deal if you want to do something that makes the MPAA sad. On the other hand, the US is a pretty decent(and attractively priced) place to have strong opinions about assorted governments, religions, and ethnic groups that would quite possibly earn you an extended stay in a cozy correctional facility at home... The important thing is identifying your requirements and doing your best to ensure that the most sympathetic jurisdictions, for those needs, are where your activities occur...
There are really multiple problems...
The US has sufficiently aggressive surveillance and limited privacy protection(and I'm just referring to the stuff that has been declared legal) that it is neither obviously desirable, nor even necessarily possible, for entities in areas with more demanding privacy law to use US-based hosting or storage service.
Second, by the standards of places developed beyond the barter economy, Australia's overseas links are long, not terribly fast, and rather expensive(Also, Telstra...)
The US doesn't have a storage quantity tax.
There is one obscure and largely irrelevant semi-exception: CD-R disks come in two flavors 'Data' and 'Music'. The latter are priced with the you-worthless-filthy-pirate-scum markup, the former aren't.
This distinction is, uh, deeply relevant to all owners of "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders". "Professional" ones are not affected. Much more importantly, computers are not affected and I'm pretty sure that "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders" are approximately as rare as unicorns...