The "small world" nature of modern travel is a double edged sword. Yes, infectious diseases can spread rapidly and can quickly affect people over long distances, but because societies are constantly interacting with other societies, a large segment of the population is able to develop immunities to a large number of pathogens. When Europeans first came to the Americas, large numbers of the native populations were decimated by smallpox and other diseases. Because they had never been exposed to these diseases before and had no immunities built up to defend against it, a whole villiage would be wiped out within a short time. I have heard that far more Native Americans died from diseases this way than were ever killed during wars.

So by your reasoning, if someone steals your car, phone, computer, money...it isn't a loss...because it was someone else's gain??? Even by your calculations, there are real global losses when individuals and companies figure out that their property rights are not protected and thus fail to produce something of value in the first place because the chance of it being stolen are so high.

These things will really take off when you can easily reproduce that $500 part that is broken in your oven, dishwasher, furnace, or AC unit. You know the parts that only cost about $10 to manufacture, but because only the appliance maker can make them, they charge an arm and a leg to replace.

This is exactly the problem that lead me to develop a whole new data management system. It turns files into objects called 'Didgets' (short for Data Widgets) and lets you tag them any way you want. Unlike extended attributes on files, these tags let you find your data fast and easy without something like Spotlight or Windows Search indexing all your metadata into its own database (taking a few hours to do each time). I can import my whole boot volume (about 500,000 files) and can then find anything in a second or less. "Find all JPEG photos with tags Vacation=Hawaii and Year=2011" will give me all my photos with those two tags in less than a second. It can do that if there are 5 photos that match or 50,000. Check out DidgetMaster.blogspot.com for info and video demonstrations.

The mechanism is certainly in place. The problem is that too many inexperienced entrepreneurs don't know how to use it correctly. The guy starting the project has to know about most of the "large quantity" issues up front and plan for them. Too many projects get delayed because they didn't plan for them and now they are stuck dealing with many of the issues enumerated by tlhingan.

At $.90 per GB, SSDs are still about 15 times more expensive than the same amount of hard disk space. Forget about trying to put your 2 TB of data on SSDs. I like the trend of reduced prices for SSDs. They are finally affordable enough to put my most active data on (e.g. boot files, applications), but if you think they will be a viable complete substitute for hard drives anytime soon, think again.

Imagine all the scientists surprise when this thing crashes into the "solar system wall" with lots of stars and galaxies painted on it just like Truman did with his boat in the "Truman Show".

Backwards compatibility and support for legacy software, hardware, and archaic architectures can be a great stumbling block for innovative endeavers. Adoption of new technology requires a huge improvement in order to make the pain of migration bearable. Since the bar is often set so high, we tend to get more incremental improvements rather than revolutionary changes. How can this change?

So, how do we assume that the light we are seeing in the picture followed a straight line? In other words, could one (or more) of the galaxies we see in this picture be ours (the Milky Way). If the light our sun emits can eventually loop back on itself, we could look in any direction and see ourselves if we looked far enough.