“Keep blathering, lmckenzie.”

Let it be on your head ÷)

I agree that wireless bandwidth definitely sounds like a problem. I have no idea what the situation is in terms of practical frequencies and the limits of data compression. Every time we seem to be about to hit a wall, they come up with something else. We may need a whole new design – the internet was never designed with streaming HD video in mind.

The remote experience can be pretty much the same as working locally. Essentially, you have virtual machines running on the server. Just like running another OS on your desktop in a VM, you connect to the remote VM and it works just like an individual PC. So, you can still have your ‘local’ web server. You get the benefits of centralized management, backups, updates etc., plus the ability to go anywhere that has a broadband connection and log on to your hosted personal workstation. I see that VMware can also synchronize local and remote VM images, so you could have a copy of the VM on a local PC to fall back on if the connection went down.

The security situation is probably going to take some companies getting sued, some going bankrupt and some people getting fired. Part of it is simple ignorance. Despite the inevitable objections, the government is probably going to have to get involved at some point – at least for critical infrastructure. I don’t think we can simply leave it up to the utilities, chemical plants etc. The same controllers that were driving those Iranian centrifuges are used in plants everywhere. Hopefully, it won’t take a Cyber 9/11 to wake us up.

The privacy thing is too complex. Reward is probably part of it. I’ve always thought of it as not valuing privacy but that may be backwards. It may be more a matter of valuing non-privacy. The reward is being a part of the group identity where everything is shared. I’m sure people still have secrets, but the tendency seems to be to ‘Book or Tweet every random act, thought or opinion – I suppose for group validation. Giving up privacy isn’t a toll, it’s the goal.

There’s also a youthful desire for fame and attention and YouTube celebrity. I think there’s some illusion that once it scrolls off the screen, it’s gone, no consequences. But … Society adapts. We accept that just about every politician of a certain age smoked weed. In the future, the fact that the President flashed her breasts or the Bishop molested a cantaloupe on the intertubes may be just par for the course as well. In the mean time, as Ben Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.”

It may be that the technology arrived to coincide with a generation that, for whatever reason (changes in childhood socialization, the rise in daycare, whatever), was predisposed to these attitudes. I don’t know how the 60s ‘me’ generation would have dealt with the web back then. I hate to put the blame on parents, but I think my parent’s generation, without being ‘tech savvy,’ would have known instinctively that letting their fourteen year old daughter have a TV broadcast from her bedroom was a bad idea. 

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