This is something I never thought of, the stronger hand of our government, at the behest of the Patriot Act, actually hurting us on the tech front. It turns out that is exactly what is happening:

Cloud computing is a gold mine for the U.S. tech industry, but American firms are encountering resistance from an unexpected enemy overseas: the PATRIOT Act.

The Sept. 11-era law was supposed to help the intelligence community gather data on suspected terrorists. But competitors overseas are using it as a way to discourage foreign countries from signing on with U.S. cloud computing providers like Google and Microsoft: Put your data on a U.S.-based cloud, they warn, and you may just put it in the hands of the U.S. government.

Cloud computing is a huge boom right now. Instead of having to buy one big server, you get little slices of servers all over the place and they can work together as one. Think of it as turning a computer into an actual service, where you use what you need and only pay for that.

Need more power? Not a problem as the cloud will instantly grow to what you need.

To the layman this might not seem that important, but it is. Cloud storage is actually becoming common in smart phones. Instead of having to buy larger memory cards, you can store your documents on a cloud drive and access them from anywhere. The technology is still relatively new, so expect it to grow rapidly. as matter of fact, expect it to grow a lot:

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