Networks All The Way Down

This, somehow, reminded me one of the Leslie Lamport's definitions for a distributed system [1]:

A system is distributed if the message transmission delay is not negligible compared to the time between events in a single process.

If link transmission rates continue to drop and latency to get lower with time, some dull distributed programming problems we have today will disappear, as another ones will raise and become feasible. On the day this happens, maybe a local network will be considered a single piece of hardware.

[1] http://awards.acm.org/p558-lamport.pdf