It'll never work, these theoretical panacea's never do.

After all, if everything could talk to everything, you'd only ever need buy one set of 'things', not keep upgrading to get 'better' connectivity. We can't even get standard phone charge/data ports yet.

It's a small price to pay if it enables the following:

A large group of students are in a bar/cafe all with laptops. A blockbuster video is showing on the screen.

The MPAA/RIAA are foaming at the mouth because they can't find out which student is making the 'public performance' - every one of them has a legit copy on his/her laptop :)

>The big worry is that some folk might use this technology as a

> modern equivalent of the slide projector and bore us all stupid

> with their holiday snaps in bars and restaurants.®

Dude... if I could, I'd have my future Boss' PDA automatically display nudies everytime he passed a compatable screen. >WEG<

Ok, anyone want a nickel bet on how long it takes before a "context aware" bagel toaster infects your system with the storm worm? And the idea of wireless smart displays and keyboards on loan at every java stop might sound good to these head-in-the-smoke-cloud potheads, even if i wished to ignore the obvious risk of allowing somone elses gear to wirelessly sieze my display, keyboard or mouse inputs, and key loggers, malware and spyware...

Who would want to TOUCH a communal keyboard. I surely don't relish hopping a grungy, greasy, beat up keyboard that was just man handled by Joe Java to dowload some Pr0n before and AFTER he popped off to the men's room...

Whoever's job it was to review these ideas at Intel marketing need to be SHOT.

communism!

Perhaps someone may well make this work, but to me it seems too hard to sort out all the social problems, like hogging the display, running down someone else's battery by offloading computations to them on the sly, stuff like that.

Imagine a hypothetical situation. My mobile operator uses Phorm (I haven't heard of any mobile operators that do this, but it's feasible).

I start looking at some porn one day, then go out to meet a friend. I notice that the cafe we have agreed to meet in has a communal screen using this tech.

When she arrives, I want to show her a new web site I have found, and my phone screen is a little small, so I connect to the communal screen. All of a sudden, ads for loads of porn sites come up..

Anyone still think the tech is a good idea?

Ok, how about this? Someone writes a virus to exploit it. Your phone gets the virus, and starts making thousands of calls to premium rate phone lines, or sends 1000s of premium rate texts/messages.

Still think it's a good idea to use it?

Apart from that, what *exactly* does the system do that Bluetooth can't? OK, Bluetooth 1 doesn't have enough bandwidth for video streaming, but Bluetooth 2 does.