By your logic, I believe everyone should drive around stretch hummers.

So what if it requires expensive infrastructure (far more road space) and is tremendously more inefficient. Everyone would be more comfortable and safer.

Clearly everyone should drive hummers as priuses also pollute and cause environmental damage in their creation.

Beyond that point, wireless power only makes sense in a few circumstances - namely when around something that is connected to the grid. You'll still need batteries, unless you expect planes, cars, parks, non-new age houses/cities, etc. to all have this wireless power.

And if you're talking about transmitting blanket wireless over entire cities...

1. It's tremendously inefficient. Physics will only allow it to be made so efficient, and that's still tremendously inefficient.

2. How will you keep track of who gets what energy? Oh yea, that's right, it's practically free, so there will be no worries.

3. Laptops and the like are getting much faster/more energy efficient. Even if this comes out tomorrow, it still won't be widely available for at least a decade. In the meantime, battery life will get better, so the impact won't be as great. Plugging in a computer at night isn't that big a deal.

4. We still haven't gotten high speed wireless yet. Wireless internet (802.11b) has been around for what, close to 9 years and we still haven't gotten anywhere close to providing 'free' or 'truly fast' internet, and coverage is still highly lacking - and wireless internet is relatively free and physics isn't against it.

If we developed cold fusion, it might be plausible. Of course when we develop such a plentiful energy source, we'll probably have developed a more efficient mobile power source, like fuel cells or http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/10/1821208 capacitors. Sorry to rain on your flying car. It'll be neat for certain applications, but I doubt it'll be something that important for laptops.

Part of the problem is what you listed. Another part of the problem is that it's not too far from the truth. There are a number of fields that more or less throw your resume out if you don't have a degree/good school on it.

We've also completely neglected trades which are necessary and profitable (electricians, mechanics, plumbers, etc.)

By pushing children to go to college when they shouldn't, we wind up with far too many B.A. degrees because they're easy and they're what they know. This is bad for a large number of reasons.
1. The cost for engineering/science vs a BA is typically within 10% at a given school.
2. The jobs almost always pay 20-50% less.
3. There's an increasing supply of these majors, so job competition will be fierce.

We need more teachers and so forth, and I don't disparage a solid background in the arts at all. Few nations advance off art, they advance off engineering and science.

So yea, it'll be painful if we don't start advocating more technical degrees and majors. The space and aeronautics fields are especially bare, with average age around 50-55.

Hopefully we can create a new wave of interest in science and technology, similar to the space race.

it's a laptop.

It's got too many GPUs to be a laptop!

Oh wait...actually you're right. It can't be a laptop unless it comes with asbestos pants or its own carbonite chamber... sorry, my bad. Yea, it'd be completely ridiculous to build a 'laptop' like that.