What more could you really ask for? It appears that particular nanite strain was a fluke that resulted from Wesley's tampering; it ended up pretty well only because the crew of the Enterprise is just that resourceful. There are a thousand ways it could have ended with the Enterprise AND the nanites being utterly destroyed, and the situation as it unfolded was hardly what you would call "ideal laboratory conditions."
If there is one constant in the Trek universe, it's that it is truly better to be lucky than smart..
Hmm, no I think it was the reverse...it wasn't an accident, it was the deliberate engineering of said nanites (something probably already protected against at least on an administrative level) by (a rather smart)Wesley. The accident was that he simply let them go.
The accident was them proceeding to feast on the Enterprise' internal circuitry and subsequently achieve sentience, neither of which was what Wesley actually designed them to do.
Under only slightly different circumstances he might have accidentally created a strain of flesh-eating nanites that would have slowly devoured the entire crew before figuring out how to manipulate the central nervous systems of the few remaining survivors (the Federation being a very big place, I'd be surprised if this wasn't the cause of at least one starship's disappearance).
Third world countries may be doubling our GDP rate, but they are still well behind the curve...even so some countries that are not as technologically highly thought of are outpacing the G8 in areas like adoption of nanotech, and so on.
If by "some countries" you mean "India" and to a lesser extent Malaysia and Indonesia, you're basically right. But this again dodges the question of whether or not the PEOPLE in those countries are the actual consumers of that technology or the beneficiaries of the knowledge used to create it. It's enough to know that the wealthiest human being on Earth is presently a Telecom tycoon in Mexico, but that doesn't make Mexico the world leader in telecommunications technology.
No, but the fact they can adopt and use it effectively, combined with the possibility that their new "liberation" may help free them of cultural and religious constraints that made it better to worship past cultures and backwards ideas...
No, it may free them of Moamar Ghadaffi, which is something pretty big in itself.
As for cultural and religious constrains.... WTF?
There is a deflation in cost that comes with exponential growth that will make almost anything available to anyone...
The deflation of costs also comes with the deflation in wages, which is a bad thing for anyone who actually WORKS for a living. In which case, the only people who possess the ability to generate wealth are those who can use the wealth they already have to position investments and ride the tide of exponential growth, while everybody else drowns. Therein is the difference between the third world and the developed nations: the only people making money off this exponential growth are the people who have invested financially in the process and can get a return on their investment later.
Imagine, for example, some new invention that allows for exponential growth in urban construction. Exponential, as you know, means that the first month a single construction worker can build one house; the next month he can build four houses, the next month he can build nine houses, etc etc. At the end of the year, this single worker has the ability to build 4,096 houses a month.
That construction worker is now fucked, because there's no way in hell he'll be able to sell that many houses in a month. At this point the demand for new houses is basically zero, so for all intents and purposes he no longer has a job (although he probably has a house, but no furniture, no food and no electricity).
The technology that eliminated his job is patented by the Tyrell Corporation, which goes on to make billions of dollars on its development and distribution. The houses he built before the industry imploded were all sold to Citibank, which still manages to sell them at about 200% above market price and turn a handsome profit. The people who live in those houses are very relieved that housing prices have plummeted, too, because the firing of every construction worker on the planet has drastically reduced retail sales on just about everything so half the stores and restaurants in the country just went out of business.
The moral of the story is, PRODUCERS--that is, just about anyone who lives or works in the Global South--don't benefit from overproduction. Only INVESTORS do, and the number of people capable of making a meaningful financial investment in the technology sector grow smaller every day.
I think the whole idea is that the next waves of technological gain influencing the human experience will be so dramatically increased in pace that it will equalize it for everyone, if not equalize then at least make the spikes in adoption rates of tech through cost and availability to vastly different cultures more comparable. I don't think past models will help us here as much.
Those technologies have ALWAYS been available across all cultures. The only difference is the rate of proliferation, which is entirely a factor of transportation. You seem to be holding to the myth that only a handful of cultures in the world have ever valued technology and that those cultures dominated all others because of it; this is MASSIVELY false. The only thing that's really changed is that transportation methods are faster and therefore market proliferation is also quicker; it took flintlock rifles two hundred years to make it into Japan, but it only took two years for Bluetooth cell phones to penetrate Saudi Arabia. It's not because anything changed in Arabian culture, it's because the internet is faster than horseback couriers and diesels are faster than sails.
And even still, the users of that technology and the
originators of that technology continue to be highly segregated. Only rarely have new originators come into existence and this always comes as part of a massive social/political/economic investment. The third world is what it is now because its residents cannot make those kinds of investments themselves. The United States is beginning to have similar problems because it REFUSES to do so.
They don't have to be over-matched because we don't have to consider it from a military perspective in most cases...
The military perspective is the one that actually matters if and when their relative positions are reversed. Since political power is backed only be the implicit threat of force, the elimination of that threat removes that power, and the REVERSAL of that threat also reverses that power.
IOW, when Libya has better drones, fighters and warships than the United States, then Libya gets to tell the United States what to do and what not to do. So when Libya tells the United States "We want to build a military base in New York. And by the way, there are these guys from Tripoli who want to open an electronics chain in your country... be a doll and grant them a business license, okay?"
The trend you seem to have missed is that even in the 20th century, the people with the biggest guns still have the most money. Now fast forward to the 23rd century where technology has reached a point where even single individuals can control arsenals capable of laying waste to entire civilizations, suddenly you've got to ask yourself of Flint or Trelane or even Adra would have possessed the advanced technology they did if they didn't ALSO possess incomprehensible offensive capabilities. It's not enough just to be rich, but to have the ability and the will to eliminate--or at least neutralize--any potential competitors. And if there's one thing Starfleet has in abundance, it's competitors.
You assume that the exponential growth of technology will make competition obsolete by making technology available to everyone. But competition is a powerful motivation in and of itself, and there are a number of people in the world for whom the end of that competition would be detrimental to their lifestyles and it is a lot easier to prevent that from happening than it is to put themselves into a position to profit from it.
I don't really care if they have last decade's drones...think of countries that came from almost nothing like Japan, Korea or Singapore...or even smaller European nations...They will have a chance to adapt like never before.
Provided, of course, they can get the local industrial class to make a series of strategic investments in an indigenous industrial program. For the moment, the Carlos Helus and Bill Gateses of the world are primarily just running their own businesses and raking in the profits; until they begin to use their sizeable profits to help build up industries in their own communities, it will be adoption, NOT adaptation.
Not my personal ego, but as part of this culture. I think it's a ridiculous idea. 
