Tree of liberty.

Editor,

Think Holodeck on the Starship Enterprise.

A real virtual office.

What prevents this for starters is the telcos' stranglehold on bandwidth and the USA's embarrassing lack of fiber optic cable for the last mile from CO to customers' door.

With today's processing power the necessity for onsite work, unless one is manually carrying soda water crates from one side of a warehouse to other, is all but nonexistent.

Today's sorry excuse for collaborative software is one enormous kluge because telecommunications infrastructure, provided by good old free market skulduggery, makes thinking anywhere but inside the box impossible.

Put on the virtual reality goggles, my friend. Welcome to the office that lives in the cloud. If your workstation is a cubicle, all you have to do is stand up, and you can see the rest of the work site. Turn to your side, and you can talk to your workmate next door. She can hear you, too, and respond.

With a little practice you can walk to the break room or the conference room or the project manager's office. Answer your virtual phone the same way your teenage boy shoots space aliens, by reaching for it and picking it up.

Think of all the gasoline that wouldn't be burned up commuting. Think of all the freeways that could be turned into organic farms.

But hey, the founders didn't have me paying for your high speed connection in mind when they armed themselves to spill the blood of tyranny to water the tree of liberty.

Re: "Workplaces Can Adapt to Reap the Benefits" (2/27/2013)