If my boss only knows I'm working by observing the physical placement of my body then we have more serious issues to worry about than whether I'm using a laptop or a desktop.

Bosses are concerned about productivity, but it is really hard to measure. So they use physical presence as a proxy. The whole concept of working remotely pretty new (~10 years old?), so it is going to take some more time for people to think differently about what it really means to be working.

How about the evidence of actual work produced? The facetime model is seriously broken. It doesn't promote productivity, it actually decreases it when employees figure out how to falsify the results.

http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html should be required reading.

Preaching to the choir, I agree with you.

What I am saying is that gathering evidence of actual work produced takes a long time and is hard to do. It might take a couple months to figure out if someone who is only at his desk for 4 hours a day is doing good work on a problem, or merely lazy.