I have to disagree with the author on this. I doubt Richard Stallman ever "roundly dismissed" either The Internet or Linux. I appreciate that this was not stated explicitly, but the way this article has been written implies it. In fact RMS wrote a large part of the GNU kernel which is used in Linux. His words are not a rant, they are the considered opinion of a man who has sided with freedom above all else. If you think he is spelling doom, better you think more on the subject before announcing to the world that he is wrong and you are right. That's my rant over! Now to a more reasonable argument... I currently have 100% control of my data; how could I possibly be "gaining more of it" ? An couple of examples of losing control: . Some government officials, domestic or overseas, want to examine my data for some reason. Currently I can say yes or no to this, depending on the circumstances, but if someone else physically has my data they may decide to give it up to whoever 'officially' asks for it, without my approval. . If I don't login to my free hotmail account for a month, my account and all my messages are deleted. I know I can pay a monthly fee to stop this happening, but then I'm paying for some control, not for the service. These may not be the most robust examples that could be made, but my point is that there are many negative scenarios applicable to many different people. Sure, some people will be happy to migrate entirely to a cloud; many others may find it useful for certain activities; but many will have enough valid reasons that they will have no part in it. Also, having your data stored remotely puts another possible point of failure between you and your work, i.e. your Internet connection. Failure of this would not be the responsibility of the cloud provider but if you are not able to access your data, who is 'liable' is largely academic. Finally, a quick word to khess: The scenario put forward by lelnet was a cloud scenario. Not only did you misunderstand, you then went on to be both patronising & condescending, smileys notwithstanding. I, for one, would prefer it if such comments were kept to yourself. »

Very nice idea on a very real problem. Unfortunately, your recursive solution will not run any faster on a parallel machine as each iteration depends on, and so has to wait for, the result of the next before completing. Likewise, each iteration can only be spawned by the one before. Any code inserted between "NEW_I=I-1" and "RETURN..." could be run in parallel, but only if NEW_I isn't (or can't be) changed within that block. It would take some dandy compiler or interpreter to work out if/how to parallelise that. Could such a piece of software be the solution to this whole problem? If so, the procedural/declarative distinction would become largely irrelevant. More likely, the programmer has to be smart, not the software. On the plus side, it does abstract the problem by a level and gets people thinking about it. Hmmm... »