I find it terribly amusing, coming from a long history of data communications involvement, that my tactic, when deciding to walk away from my computer, is to turn the volume down so I don't disturb others.
Why is this amusing? Because I don't even bat an eye at the fact that I'm streaming 128kbps worth of music from a server in California through 4 companies' networks and 2 dozen routers, moving something like 20k worth of data a second (that's 10 full pages of text, to give it context) into my machine where... it is not heard, and discarded.
We've become so bandwidth-jaded.
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Yet, at this same exact moment, a man in Seoul is wondering why his American friends cannot share his enjoyment of watching full-length movies streaming over the Internet.
Everything is relative. Kilobyte is our new decibyte, and Gigabyte is our new Megabyte. The same way you "streamed" news articles to your computer today, and only read half, in that same (wasteful) way you are streaming audio today. Tomorrow you might be doing the same with video (or you've already done so if you live in some of the dozen countries with better broadband penetration than us).
By the way, let us end American telephony monopolies already!
Sorry for my mis-types: should have been "news articles to your computer ten years ago" and "the dozens of countries" not just "the dozen countries".