great post , people are so naive about these things. i think its difficult for humans to understand exponential growth at this point in time i am 100% sure that in 100 years, some sort of AI will run the whole show on this planet. sad and cool at the same time , in 100 years or earlier maybe. ideas from planet earth will roam the Galaxy. wish humans would experience it tough

So you just forward your mail to another provider as backup ( or your own mail server if your really afraid of the corporate.and yes even if i had a local imap server i would still prefer to use gmail as my client instead of smth like thunderbird or outlook ) Use the offline mode in gmail if your afraid that google one day will be down for some minutes.

but never tought about it dns performance before and it showed one thing tough and that is that my local crappy router sucks . for windows users , try this one http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm The googgle dns servers performs "ok" , but for me atleast i noticed noticable difference by using my isp dns servers directly.( not by just looking what this prog gave me , but cache lookups is faster on my ISP than on my local router( yah i know my router sucks ) ) ( oh btw , you cant use ping latency to determine if a dns is faster or not )