I don't know about this one, but I know a lot of people are going to have strong views on the subject. Harnessing the power of millions of computers on the Internet in a distributed environment, or as this Scientific American article suggest, using an OS that spans the globe, well that's got to be too Utopian for me. The buzzword here is Internet scale operating system (ISOS) consisting of a thin layer of software (an ISOS agent) that runs on each "host" computer (your PC hooked up to the Internet) and a central coordinating system that runs on one or more ISOS server complexes. Nice read. Don't know about the politics. Check it out, it's not a new concept, but a good pitch by the authors, one of whom is, naturally, a director of SETI@home -

The Worldwide Computer