> Alternately, it might be a plan to create literal cloud computing.
Thanks, I just snorted tea onto my keyboard after reading that. Seems like if you have the money and are maintaining a pretty critical system it would be silly not to get ECC RAM (and if you're building your own iron the price difference isn't that much as far as I can tell).
On the EC2 site they say "In our experience, ECC memory is necessary for server infrastructure, and all the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory"[1]. Amazon maintain a lot of servers and if they think it's necessary I'm inclined to believe them.