What you want, then, is a Coleco ADAM.
If you booted the ADAM up without a game cartridge, it loaded up its word processor, and you could print to the attached printer.
If you had a casette tape in the machine when it booted- it would run the casette.
And if you had a game cartridge in during boot time, you could play the game.
I guess it's good they're doing charity, but it's just so creepy.
The issue isn't equipment, it's storage and bandwith.
If you collect a small city's worth of data, you'll have quite a lot of images. Maybe only a terabyte, if you're lucky, but probably several terabytes. Now extend that to an entire state/province, or a small country. You'll quickly be racking up terabytes and pedabytes of data.
"No problem, storage is cheap." you might be thinking, but storage gets expensive as you increase the demands of the storage. All of this storage needs to be available immediately, so it can't be stored on near time storage devices, which might make it less expensive. And it must be stored in such a way that makes it redundant in case of hardware failure, so either using disk, or system level data replication.
And now that you've stored the data, you need to serve it to users. Pushing out a small amount of data to a user isn't a problem. 2 cents a gigabyte seems cheap. But if you need to serve a whole country worth of data, with tens or hundreds of thousands of users, you now hit bandwidth issues- bandwith caps, and overage costs. Getting a larger pipe to the user costs more money, and deals that seemed reasonable start to become very expensive very quickly.
You'd quickly start talking about needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to store the data, and then hundreds of thousands (or more) to serve it out.
Commercial organizations are not going to be inclined to put money towards something when they don't have to, and the burden on users would be incredibly high.
Is it still wrong?
It can take a while for the geocoder to pick up on issues.
Also, if you put a note on your area and link to it, I can take a look.
Addresses are particularly tricky for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with, but could make your head spin.
You're right that there is a need to make addresses easier to work with, but in 99% of cases, you can just draw the building and tag it with the address and all should be good.
When you say "the result doesn't change"- can you elaborate exactly what you mean?
Addresses are quite difficult to get right (no one gets them right, not even the guys with billions of dollars to spend).
You can get a lot of help with these kinds of issues on the mailing lists, help.osm.org, the IRC channel, or the web forums. And depending on where you are, you may even have a local group of mappers to help you. So you have a community to help you through any editing issues you might encounter.
If you look at OpenStreetMap's maps of North Korea in comparison to Google, you see that the OSM maps are of much higher quality, as well as being Free (unlike Google MapMaker):
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&lon=125.7375&lat=39.03865&zoom=12
Yep. It's a work-in-progress; if you know the local paths, go in and add them to the map!
But it's worth noting that partial coverage of rural footpaths is a lot more than TomTom ever has.
Essentially OSM works on the principle of "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". There are cases of vandalism in OSM, but they don't last very long; the community usually picks them up rapidly and reverts them.
We have one advantage over Wikipedia in that it's easier for us to determine what's right. On Wikipedia, if one contributor says "John Doe's contribution to scholarship was important" and another says "no it wasn't", you get an edit war. On OSM, if one mapper says "this road is called Market Street" and another says "this road is called Market Road", we just go and look at the street sign. The rule is "what's on the ground". (The one place where this breaks down is disputed territorial borders, such as Northern Cyprus and Kashmir, but there are procedures in place for that.)
No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.