Thing 15

Look, that cloud is shaped like a bunny rabbit! Wait a minute..... That is not the cloud we were supposed to look at. I will fix my gaze on the Internet cloud instead. Now here is something that can be very useful. No need to carry around a flash drive, floppy (remember those?) or a re-writable cdrom, we have a place somewhere out there where we can save files. Sounds like a computer panacea, does it not? Well, like everything else in life, it has potential problems. What if you type that ten page paper, go to school to retrieve it, and the Internet is down. I know it happens infrequently, but it does happen. (Maybe that is not important, since we are helpless these days without Internet.) What if a file is deleted by mistake and is not stored anywhere else? That provides us with a new student excuse, "the cloud ate my homework." The one thing that seals it for me, however, is a privacy issue. Have you ever noticed that when you use Gmail, the advertisements that appear on the right are based on the content of your mail? That is because Google is data-mining your email. If you also use Google Docs and the new Google Voice, they are looking at everything you email, type in a document, or say on the phone. Kind of scary, isn't it? Do you really think I should put my backups on Windows Live Skydrive? Great! Now both Microsoft and Google know everything about me. Oh what the heck, they probably already do.