My organization does thin clients and I'm a big fan. It would be nice to have smaller quieter and more energy efficient ones, but I'm sure it was cheaper to keep what we have. I never have problems with software not being up to date or something going wrong. Just new problems like if there are network issues I can't do any work (was still a problem before moving to thin clients). I also like that I can just use my computer at home and log in and have everything set up like I'm at work.
I really like thin clients, but it seems like a solution that really lost traction. I remember using SunRay terminals, with 50 to 100 people on a single Sun server and it just worked.
Jump to today: Microsoft Terminal Server is pretty much what people expect when talking thin clients/remote desktop and it's just no nowhere near as good as the Solaris solutions back in the early 2000s. I really miss those "old" Unix solutions, it just worked.
I didn't downvote, but I can think of a few reasons.
1) It doesn't add anything to the conversation. Yes the NSA watches everything in some way, saying so is redundant.
2) Presumably the connection is encrypted, so the NSA just sees a long lived connection between your and an Amazon data center.
3) Actively pulling data off of a privately owned server inside the US is a bit (but only a bit) of a stretch for what we know about what the NSA does.
