Hadron-colliding, volcano-tracking boffins pocket cloud freebie Euro biz bosses have donated a cloud to top scientists at CERN, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Cambridge-based European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) - to accelerate their boffinry breakthrough rate. The infrastructure donated by 18 businesses - including SAP, Telefonica and Interoute - will be used to store, share and …
"The idea at the ESA is to stick satellite measurements of the earth's surface - garnered from 20 years of readings accurate to within a centimetre - into the cloud, allowing more scientists to analyse the data."
They could use this data andt tell the nepalese how tall the Everest is, couldn't they?
( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/29/everest_appeal/ )
It will change our lives for the worse, by pushing more "cloud" mentality (aka the "WE control and can delete and modify your data as we see fit, and/or bill you every time you access your own files" mentality) rather than proper onsite data storage solutions. See, this "donation" gets well publicised and allows the cloud-pushing companies behind it to say "See, cloud storage really works, these scientists are making good use of it, etc, etc".
But once everything is in the "cloud", Orwell's slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" will become fully realisable by those whose interest it is to do so.
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