Oh yeah, like, billions of people helping billions of users to bail them out of all the problems that stupify Windows users day after day. That's no vision of the future - that's the reality of the past - and of the present - and of countless people struggling with Windows - struggling with useless complexity that they can't figure out.

The company at the other side of the building from me takes in computers all day long that have been rendered useless by failing to update, by trojans/viruses, by spyware, by adbots, by fragmented hard drives, by bad sectors in hard drives and so forth. They spend half a day fixing them up, for $100-150, add Spybot, AdAware & AVG to them with instructions for use, then give them back to the owners, then wait another 6 months for them to return. The world is full of computers that have become useless to their owners. The PC is a failure to millions upon millions of people. It is an idea that simply doesn't work!

The point of the MIT project SHOULD be to revolutionize HOW PEOPLE USE SOFTWARE - without having to deal with PC's at all!

People don't need help to watch tv or to use a telephone - so why on earth should they need help to use software? There is NO reason for useful, valuable software to be any more difficult to use than it is to use a television or a telephone.

I think R.U. has a beautiful premise - - except that personally, in a city of 3.5 million people and being on the move a lot, I find myself without network access 99% of the time. I can only imagine the African plains.

You will live the rest of your life in the future, not in the past. The further you go either into the past or into the future, the less you can know about what it really was like, or will be like.

http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,69234,00.html
http://www.wififreespot.com/or.html

A computer without the Internet is, by today's standards, pretty useless. It won't cost one dollar more to build network access for terminals than it will to build network access for computers. It isn't about, therefore, whether or not there will be networks. It's about whether the devices we will use will be overengineered or not, redundant or not, affordable or not, easy to use or not, able to access software that is inherently collaborative or not, plagued with viruses, spyware and adbots or not.

This isn't my vision, really. It's merely an amalgam of facts, architectures, achievements, aspirations, hopes and struggles shared by millions of people. The only thing I'm doing that's unique is maybe the passion I have about it all and I'm certainly not even close to being the only person with passion about what it could be like to throw off the curse that PC's have cast over the phenomenon of software.

I know exactly what you mean. For all the wi-fi saturation, there is not enough viable access. The telecoms (or municipal agencies) need to get on-top of this.

BUT Wi-Fi (the next generation of wide area high speed wifi) will bring information access to even remote parts of the world. Unlike building complex infrastructure to support wires and poles and underground data channels/tunnels, wi-fi cqan be delivered via a large transmitter located sporadically, maybe even in a DNS type set-up where it will relay stuff. Thus wifi infrastructure is much cheaper to set up, deploy and maintain. I mean even the poorest of third world nations have radio. I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of decades they all have government run wi-fi.

As for the lack of omnipresent wi-fi here, its not necessarily the technology thats lacking. There's a lot of talk about municipal wi-fi, but there's also a lot of telecoms that would go out of business if government took over that sector and provided cheap information access anywhere to everyone.

When Tesla was first experimenting with wireless transmission of radio waves, I'm sure no one thought that Radio would be such a broad medium of influence. I highly doubt that government wi-fi will hapen here in the US on a wide level, but in some other countries where there is no pre-existing infrastructure, its a distinct possibility.

In my mind, the MIT laptop is aimed at that worldview.