I was wondering about this myself when I read the article. I live in the UK and while you very occasionally see the odd person sitting in the corner of a cafe o

I was wondering about this myself when I read the article. I live in the UK and while you very occasionally see the odd person sitting in the corner of a cafe on a laptop, it's nowhere near as common as it seems to be in the US. It's certainly pretty much exclusively a city thing - I know what short shrift I'd get if I walked into a cafe in my rural town, bought a £1.50 cup of coffee and whipped out my laptop to spend a couple of hours working. (The lack of wi-fi isn't an issue - people here heavily use those little 3G USB "dongles".) I really couldn't say why there's such a marked difference, though. Slightly bizarrely, last time I went in a McDonald's in some grim Manchester suburb they had large signs advertising free wi-fi. Don't we study and work hard so we get to work in places that aren't McDonald's?