I’m an old fashioned – don’t need no steenkin’ cloud type and I will never store my pr0n in the cloud as long as I have a working HD ÷) I do also see the way things are going though. While there are advantages to having your own water well, electrical generator etc., it simply makes more sense to have those things as centrally maintained utilities and in the long term, I can imagine computing going in the same direction. The problems of universal high speed access and security are difficult but probably not intractable. Outages will be inevitable, but a well designed global infrastructure should minimize them and people will accept that they occasionally happen, just as they do with other utilities. Privacy seems to be a concept that is fading with each new generation. It is a concern for me but if trends continue, I suppose that in 50 years everyone will be content to have a camera shoved up their bums to continually broadcast their intestinal status to the world – and monitored by the gov’t. It does make sense to me though that web hosted 3D applications and content may someday come to pass. Downloading and managing gigabytes of content locally, along with installing and updating applications may make sense today… but if it could be done online, then I can see future users of Adobe ‘Poser Studio 2020’ happily creating scenes with Victoria 12 on their ‘pads while sitting in the park and having them rendered in seconds with the spare cycles of MicroGoogle’s global server farm. Rather than go back and forth in forum messages, you could have someone instantly log onto your scene and show you tweaks etc. Who knows what people would come up with in terms of group collaboration etc. Even as a ‘pry my Vickie from my cold dead hands’ luddite, I can see enormous potential. Remember, you heard it here first ÷)

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken