The Wall Street Journal's Phred Dvorak has a thought-provoking feature on the use of laptops and Internet services by homeless people, who, like everyone else, use them for civic engagement with politicians, social interaction, job hunting, and entrepreneurial pursuits.
Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.
And even then, there will be destitute former music execs, living rough on the streets, using their laptops to argue that no, it's not a human right: you should be deprived of your Internet access if you're accused of copyright infringement, because the Internet is just a machine for making copies of trivial, copyrighted entertainment products.
