and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

The Java approach was called the sandbox model. The basic idea was that if you restrict access to a safe "box" within which a program (or applet in this case) can act, you severly limit the potential security concerns of said program. And indeed this is basically true; you'll hear very little about Java vulnerabilities in the wild because they never happen - either because nobody writes software that requires security with Java or because it is designed well enough to make up for us fallible programmers.

An eweek article was posted recently that talks about this sort of security model in the scope of the one-laptop-per-child $100 machines. It is funny to see some of these same ideas resurfacing, but it's happening probably because it is actually a good model:

"If [the One Laptop Per Child project] succeeds, we'll have created the largest monoculture in the computer industry. To answer whether that's scary or not is a nontrivial question. The security implications are deeply frightening," [said Ivan Krsti?, director of the security and information platform efforts for the OLPC project].

.. The laptops will force applications to run in a "walled garden" that isolates files from certain sensitive locations like the kernel.

I'm not saying it is going to be easy for them but I do believe in their approach and I think they'll be fairly successful with it.

However, the outcome of success could look very strange indeed. Consider an initiative to provide everyone in rural areas with a cheap vehicle.. except every vehicle shares the exact same key to unlock and start it. Would everyone give up on their attempts to secure their vehicle and just grab the closest one whenever they need a ride? Would the market for micro-purchases of gasoline skyrocket because nobody would want to put much gas in a vehicle they weren't going to hold on to?

Who knows. Regardless, Libya has signed on for 1.2 million laptops by mid-2008 and there are "tentative purchase agreements with four other developing nations."