A critical shortage

Recently we have run out of a critical supply. No, there's still enough oil for the moment, the electric grid is working fine, at least in my area of the world, and there's no shortage of food where distribution is not being deliberately sabotaged. We're short of IP addresses.
When the current familiar IP scheme that you're used to was invented in 1981, networked computers were kind of rare. It was though that the 4 billion addresses possible under the system could never possibly be used up, since networked computers were primarily owned by governments and major educational institutions. In the early days, addresses were handed out like candy, with groups getting a class A (everything starting with one particular number, like all addresses starting with 12".) all to themselves just because. In addition, the entire 127 block (from 127.0.0.1 to 127.255.255.255) were all allocated to "loopback" meaning "Don't actually use the network because it's right in this computer right here." You should only need one address for that.
Later, when more and more countries were going online, it became apparent that since there were 5 billion people in the world, who all wanted to go online, and only 4 billion possible addresses, that something would have to give. More justification had to be given to be assigned large blocks of addresses instead of small ones.
This was then made worse by devices, as well as individual people and servers, also wanting IP addresses for projects like an Internet-connected refrigerator. (The refrigerator can report its state to, say, the grocery store, so instead of you ordering milk, the refrigerator does it for you.)
By last year, justification had to be given to get any sort of IP address at all. Groups with large allocations were asked to give them back. This faired poorly -- generally the response was to come up with dumber and dumber schemes to "prove" why ownership of their entire allocation was "necessary." Some organizations did in fact give their blocks back, most notably Stanford University.
So next month, we run out completely. If you want to go online -- well, too bad, all slots are full. Now what?
Thankfully, this whole thing was seen well in advance, and a new specification, IPv6 was written in 1998. (version 5 was a beta that turned out to not be very useful.) IPv6 increased the address size by four times, which due to the way that computers stores numbers, exponentially increases the possible addresses. IPv6 has enough addresses to give every atom in the solar system, if not the visible universe, its own unique address. I won't say that running out is impossible -- I suppose that in the deep future we could develop some sort of teleportation and quantum entanglement technology that makes us have a galaxy-spanning empire of hexadecitellions of people, but it won't happen anytime soon unless we're REALLY stupid about how we allocate addresses.
To use IPv6, your operating system has to support it, your software has to support it, and your ISP has to support it. Generally the las step is the sticking point. My company offers browsing customers a hybrid stack, where you have an IPv6 address, but IPv4-only websites will see you as this one address that the ISP has reserved. That address is a node that understands both protocols, and can route between the two.
China is the most excited by this news, as when IPv4 was first written, most of China didn't have electricity, much less computers, and so they were allocated extremely few IP addresses. Since pretty much everyone in China wants to go online, they need to go IPv6, or it's just not going to happen.
Everyone should try to go to IPv6, but there are some transition costs, and I think we're going to have to struggle with it for quite a while, and the pain is higher because we waited so long.

Tommy Edison's questions for sighted people

Film critic Tommy Edison hasn't actually seen a single movie in his entire life, although he's heard lots of them, due to the fact that he is blind, and has been since he was born.   He also enjoys photography, thanks to assisting technology.

On his youtube channel, he recently asked a number of questions for sighted people. Though people have already provided him with answers, I also thought it would be a good idea to answer him as well.

Hello, I am Professor Preposterous. I am 33 years old, and have vision, albeit with somewhat severe nearsightedness. This means my vision is distorted past the range of my hands or so if I don't wear glasses.

How do you remember all those colors?

In general, I would say that there are millions of small variations on a small set of colors. A fashion designer might be able to tell the difference between "aquamarine" and "periwinkle," but to me both are just "blue." I can tell that they're a different shade of blue, but I don't see the point in differentiating further. To make a metaphor, I would compare colors to textures. A wooden object feels different to the touch than say, a plastic one, or a felt one, and if you pay a lot of attention, you might be able to tell if the wood is, say, pine, instead of spruce.

Color is actually due to the frequency of light that bounces off an object, light being an electromagnetic radiation that vision detects, the way that hearing detects compression waves in the air. There are seven basic ones:

1. Red: 700 - 635 nm
2. Orange: 635 - 590 nm
3. Yellow: 590 - 560nm
4. Green: 560 - 490nm
5. Blue: 490 - 450nm
6. Purple: 450 - 400nm

There's also black and white, which depend on if it is described with an additive color system (like a spotlight or a computer monitor) or a subtractive one (like paints). With additive systems, all the colors make white, and no colors make black. With a subtractive system, all the colors together makes black, and white has to be prepared separately. My computer monitor uses an additive system that can make basically every color there is from three: red, blue, and green.

Also, I would be very surprised if you were unable to provide me a similar level of detail about texture, or sound.

What's it like to be able to look at a room and know exactly where everything is? My god, that's genius.

Extremely orienting. Except that vision only shows you where everything is in a room if the room is sorted first -- vision is blocked by the first object with color that it encounters, so if something is behind something else, a sighted person can only see the thing in front. Sight also only works forward -- we see what's behind us about as well as you do, which is to say not at all. For what's behind us, we have to rely on hearing, or perhaps mirrors.

While in theory, vision's distance is unlimited, closer things provide more detail than further away things, any obstacle blocks further sight, and some of the things vision tells us are just plain outright lies. For example, the sky is not actually a thing -- there's air over our heads, but vision tells us that it's a large dome-shaped object at a large distance away, maybe 20 miles. Or the horizon, where the sky and the ground seems to touch if there are no large objects blocking it, which appears to be about 8 miles away, but moves with us if we move.

So, how come you stop and look at a hot chick? Guys at a red light, they'll stop traffic!

Vision provides a lot of information at once. Sometimes this is kind of distracting, especially with our lower brain, the one we got from lizards, hijacking everything else to think up pickup lines until we realize that we've been staring and have lost all chance of relating to her normally.

How do you remember what things look like? I mean, there are so many things. Like cars. How do you know the particular make of a car? Or vegetables? Fruit? Food?

Things don't really change all that often. If I were to hand a random object off my desk to you, you would probably recognize it instantly, because it feels the same as the other ones that you've encountered before. Let's say that I hand you an apple. The moment it touches your hand, you'd probably recognize it. Vision is the same -- seeing an object gives us the general shape, the color information, and hints at the texture of the object. Having seen similar objects before, we recognize them.

If you were somehow able to touch and feel every car extensively, every time you passed them, I think you would start to recognize particular models after about a month. Every car of a particular year, make, and model is shaped exactly the same. The color is different due to auto paint, but the texture is the same and the shape is the same. We recognize them because we've seen them before.

The same with food. Apples have the same general shape as other apples. Bananas have the same shape as other bananas.

Fashion blows my mind. I mean, you choose to wear something that looks good rather than feels good?

As someone in the applied sciences, fashion doesn't work well with me either. But people who wear things that look good usually like the attention that they get for doing so enough that they're willing to put up with a surprising amount of discomfort.

What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?

On one hand, liberating. On the other, lonely. I was kind of surprised with the idea that you couldn't travel alone.

What about driving?

I learned to drive 17 years ago. When I first started, it was unbearable -- having to keep track of everything and do so many things at once took more brainpower than I had available. Over time, I got used to it as more and more things became habit and could be relegated to the unconscious, until I could drive and listen to the radio and muse about philosophy all at the same time. Cell phones are a bad idea though. And texting -- texting is just asking for trouble.

What's it like to walk around in the snow?

Snow doesn't support your weight and sinks when you step on it, with an annoying crunching sound. It's also super easy to get lost, the massive amount of reflected light gives sighted people a headache, it's wet, and it's cold. In my opinion snow can go die in a fire.

How do you not see something that happens right in front of your face?

Vision uses a huge amount of brainpower all by itself, so if you do it, your brain takes a lot of shortcuts. A sighted person can see something and not recognize it, or could be facing the wrong direction, because vision only works in front of you. Anything above or below, or behind, will just not be seen at all. If your sighted friend is facing the wrong way, his vision is just not going to help.

How do you lose sight of something? I mean, like you drop money on the floor and lose it?

Sight only works one layer deep, as it were. If the money goes under or behind something, sight will tell us that nothing's there. If money falls into the sofa, and we look at the sofa, we'll only see the sofa, not the money. Sometimes moving around can give us new information, like putting our head to the floor before looking at the sofa (oh hey, there's that quarter!)

How do you lose your car in a parking lot?

Unfortunately, cars are not all that unique. One particular make, year, and model of car, in a particular color, is as specific as it gets. There's at least three cars in any particular lot that exactly match the description of my car, so I'll walk to one and....this is somebody else's car. Damn it!

How do you miss the exit while driving? Wouldn't that be blatantly obvious?

With distractions, usually. You have to look at quite a lot of things very quickly, and the recognition step of vision sometimes comes too late due to the speed. Okay, avoid that car, check the rear view mirror, check the side, see the sign, avoid that other car, wait, that sign was indicating my exit. Damn!

Thanks for the questions, Tommy. Tommy maintains both a channel about his experiences with blindness and how he deals with it, and his reviews of movies.

Pirate Drone

The Pirate Ba has had an ongoing arms race with the media companies that produce the content that they are distributing. The servers are seized by court order, and blocked at the ISP level. To get around this, a new, utterly insane plan has been brought to bear. The new plan is to build servers that operate in aerial drones, reaching the internet through radio link, and periodically alnding to change batteries and other maintenence. To take the drone offline, it wouldn't take a police action. It would require an air force. Due to the current state of international law, the air force would have to be the air force of the local nation (Sweden), or else it's an act of war. Should the authorities convince the Swedish air Force to attack the drones, the drones could quite easily fly to Finland while the planes are taking off. Should the Finnish Air Force then deploy, then the drones would fly to Russia, since Russia doesn't care about electronic piracy. Authorities would have to jam the radio link, which is harder than it sounds.

The No Shut Up Gun

Ever been in a business meeting with one guy who just loves the sound of his own voice? Every culture that has business meetings has at least one of this guy, and it gets on everybody's nerves. Most societies chalk it up as a social problem and leave it at that, but Japan thought differently, and came up with a technological solution. The device is a gun-like device that, when the trigger is pulled, reflects all speech back to the speaker after a very short delay. This effect is very jarring, and while it could be worked around if you REALLY want to talk, it's enough to convince the average Japanese person to shut up, at which point you can put the gun down and continue the meeting. So the next time Yoshi won't shut the hell up about his new condo for seven minutes straight, suddenly you can whip out the gun, reflect his yammering back at him, and continue the meeting, as it'll only take a few milliseconds for him to realize what a doofus he sounds like. The effect is apparent to anyone who's had to work with a PA system or a shoddy cell phone. Hearing your voice after a short delay makes your brain not entirely sure if you actually finished what you've said, so you start getting confused, and after a minute or two of mumbling, the average person just gives up on speech entirely. The effect can be completely countered by plugging your ears, or just pushing on through anyway, as your brain can learn to adapt. Of course, if the gun doesn't silence a chronically disruptive person, the average company will likely resort to more extreme measures, like making the disruptive person leave.

It begins

So Apple now has a personal assistant with AI characteristics. People have been messing with it, and sometimes, it goes very very wrong:

Fruitfly Network

An interesting way of solving a wireless network problem was found today in fruit fly brains, reports Discovery News.
See, bug brains and wireless networks have a common problem. "Who's the leader?" To an individual brain cell or network node, it doesn't matter if it's the leader or not, so long as it definitely knows who's in charge. The bug solution has been applied to networks, for a saving of cpu power dedicated to routing.
In bug brains, neurons first see if there are any leaders near them. If so, they decline to become a leader -- someone's beaten them to it, why bother? If they don't find a leader, then this section of brain is leaderless, and they announce to their immediate neighbors that they are the leader. This tends to organize the leadership cells evenly through the fly's brain in a very efficient pattern.
To do this for wireless network, you only need two dedicated signals. One for "Any leaders around here?" One for "Yes, I am the leader." When a node turns on, it sends the first signal. If it doesn't hear the second one, then it puts out the second signal and sets itself to leadership mode. This isn't terribly difficult to set up even in hardware alone, so routers can route more efficiently....for cheap.

Mindreading

Neurology has advanced to the point where an EEG can now be used to answer yes or no questions, reports Discovery news. And this could be used for good or evil.
For good, it can be used to communicate with vegetative people. If they have enough brainpower left to understand you, you can put them in an EEG and ask questions. They're not conscious enough to answer you, but their brain activates in particular patterns when imagining answering the question, which we can now read. And this proves that people who have been unconscious for years can still recover: their brain still works.
For evil, I imagine that this may be used for coercive interviewing. The evil spy, government, or whoever, crams you into an EEG and starts answering questions of you. And you don't really have to answer him with words, your own brain will give you away. (Unless, of course, you've decided to rehearse your lies ahead of time.)

Fiber upgrade

Most telecom in the united states was built in the 19th century for telegraphs, and later telephones. A massive network of copper wire enables Americans to call anywhere in the country, and getting a new telephone line is trivial even in rather rural regions. (It may be difficult far out in Alaska due to the remoteness...it's hard to get anything there, really.) This is the backbone of our internet access too now.
However, in much of the rest of the world, the telecom infrastructure was completely destroyed by wars. World War 2 basically burned the vast majority of Europe, and coastal Asia, completely to the ground, and everything was rebuilt from scratch. With much of these regions managing to maintain a high population density, it was profitable to rebuild this infrastructure with what was then the best technology available. And a difference shows.
In America, a $40/mo broadband connection willl give you maybe 1mb (megabit) per second, but a compare this to, say, a Swedish connection gives you 4mb per second for 25 euros ($32 USD?), and people are outraged because they think they should have 6mb/s. And that they should only have to pay 20 euros instead.
Part of the difference is population density. The denser people live, the more people can be connected with less wire, and the more profitable it is to serve them. Sweden's people mostly live in the southern portion of their country, where it's cheap to keep them connected, while America's population is deeply scattered across the entire continent, and the four largest cities are practically at opposite extremes of the country. (New York, America's most populous city, is practically in the northeast corner of the continental United States, and Los Angeles, the second most populous, is practically in the southwestern corner.) South Korea has a great telecom system....because it has a huge population in a smallish area. Koreans get on the Internet for super cheap because it's not too expensive for companies to provide this for them.
I think that the cost might go down quite a lot if we replaced a lot of our old copper installations with fiber optic. Fiber optic cables are mirrored glass strands that can transmit information by shining colored light down its length, and the light bounces down the strand to the destination. By using many colors, outrageous bandwidth can be achieved. Fiber optic is also very cheap once installed, as it requires very little maintenance. Glass, unlike copper, doesn't corrode.
I think this upgrade to our infrastructure would make Internet access cheaper and faster, but I don't see it happening on the grounds that people tend not to like to fix things that aren't broken.

Pneumatic Net

I just read an interesting proposal of adding to, or replacing, the internet with a network of pneumatic tubes to allow it to handle any physical object. This will require some explanation.
Before personal computers were common, large organizations like banks typically had a pneumatic network for exchanging paperwork. One would roll up the relevant paper and put it into a tube, and then put the tube into a slot. A vacuum would then pull this tube to its destination. One could exchange anything that fit into that tube through the network. So while the most common use was paperwork, one could also send keys, a packet of potato chips, or really anything that could be fit into the little canister.
Computers did away with pneumatic networks for the most part because of the difficulty involved. Setting it up was difficult. A preposterously complex network of tubes had to be built in the building, you had to have a dedicated routing room, because the vacuum only went one way, and you had to have really powerful pumps to abruptly suck the air out of any particular tube. So when personal computers became common, most organizations ran screaming from pneumatic systems. After all, the routing room had to sort who got what canister by hand.
I don't see a worldwide pneumatic system coming about without some serious automation of identifying and routing, because the internet has billions of nodes. The routing room, wherever on earth we put it, would have to be a nightmarish maze of pipes with many many OCR readers and supercomputers and robot claws for identifying the tube, putting it in the correct destination, and sending it on its way. No human being could ever hope to keep up. Hence the sheer insanity of this idea.

Entangled Tablet

So lately I've seen searches in the analytics for a "Quantum Entanglement NIC." This isn't possible under current technology, but it gives me an excellent idea.
A Quantum Entanglement network interface card would be useful because it would be linked to another card, and the two cards would act as if physically touching, even if separated by miles, astronomical units, or even lightyears. Literally instantaneous and uninterceptable communication. If it had a slot for a RJ-45 or wireless connection on top of that, so much the better. If it didn't, well, there's enough add-on slots in the desktop computer's motherboard to have a traditional network interface card.
Anyway, my idea is that we have an internet tablet (think like an i-Pad), and it has a quantum entanglement NIC connection to your desktop computer. The tablet will not run its own software, but instead be a mobile peripheral to your desktop machine. It is a terminal that fits in your briefcase, backpack, or other carrying device. It probably doesn't fit into a pocket or purse, but they're working on those. You would have all the features of your desktop machine, like high speed internet, your data, games, and so on, in a portable and useful form. The only thing the tablet wouldn't do well is type, unless your brought some sort of keyboard attachment.
You could have one entanglement tablet per quantum NIC installed, up to as many expansion slots as your computer has. This further expands the usefulness of computers if they have multi-user operating systems installed, and most these days are, for security and remote access's sake. One computer could be shared by four or five people, who access it through their tablets.
If you're not prone to losing physical objects, this would be good for security, too. It is literally not possible to intercept a quantum entanglement. There is no signal to snoop. However, if you do lose the tablet, you've basically given your computer over to whoever takes it, at least until you shut it down and remove the entanglement card. That would be scary.
Now, the current obstacles to this are in entanglement itself. For all its promises, quantum entanglement is a very fragile phenomenon. Entangled particles are difficult to keep entangled. If you disturb them, the entanglement is lost. If you read or write to the connection, it typically breaks immediately after. We're not even sure that a permanent entanglement is possible in theory. We're not even sure if that instantaneous effect works over long distances, or if it's limited to the speed of light like everything else. The current world record for entangled particles brought them 16km apart before the connection was lost. If you want a NIC, it's going to have to read or write so much more than than 1 bit before failing.

Space Internet

People love the internet. Especially astronauts. You can get all kinds of practical information, keep in touch with family, and there are countless amusements for the boring parts. Just one problem: It's hard to get off-planet. It's really hard in high earth orbit, and past about the moon or so, just plain outright impossible. TCP/IP, the backbone of the internet, would literally time out before signals could reach, say, Mars, even when Mars is at its closest. To say nothing of the return trip. My Mars base is ruined!
NASA does have a solution that they call DTN, which they use in the space station and other orbital places. DTN has a much much much longer timeout. If you're patient, you could run signals as far as you need to. And this gives me an idea.
A DTN over radio link connects a caching computer to the Internet...by downloading all the pages it can get a hold of, transferring email, and uploading new pages and transmissions (such as, say, blog posts), and storing this. It would transmit once per day. Space stations or other planets now receive the internet via the caching computer. Admittedly, every page in it is, on average, a day old, but it is as it appeared on Earth yesterday, and it would work at area network speeds (100Mbs is cheap, and 10,000 Mbs is...available.)
This way, people in space can look up things on wikipedia, or write blog posts, or upload the Mars vacation photographs to their blog. From their perspective, the Internet just doesn't update very often, but it still works. And back on Earth, you might get notification late, but you will get it. It's the best I can think of without, you know, altering the speed of light.

Newsspeaker

I hear that Bunnie's Chumby device is quite popular. It's a small, portable computer that can report on preprogrammed feeds of information, so you can always know what's on twitter, or in the news, or how your favorite stock is doing. While you're on the subway. Or at the dentist's. Or at work. (Warning: Do actual work while at work. Checking twitter or whatever all day will get you fired.) It's portable, and can get its Internet connection from any wireless connection, which are more and more common these days.
There are some times when you might want the information, but looking at it is a bad idea. Like, while you're driving. Taking your eyes off the road for even a second is a terrible idea, even if your stocks are tanking, your best friend is having a tempest-like breakup, or the news announced that we're now at war with the entire rest of the earth. As important as these things may be, they're not more important than not colliding with another car at 100KPH.
So, I propose either an addition to the chumby, or a separate device, that connects to a bluetooth receiver in your ear and reads out, in the best synthesized voice that it can manage, a summary of events as they are brought to the device's attention. It would be no more distracting than a radio, which are standard in cars and haven't proven too severe a distraction. It wouldn't be very harsh on the device's CPU, either, due to big advances in speech synthesis. It will sound like a droning robot, which would probably get very old, very fast.
Bonus points if speech transcription software is running at the same time, so you could verbally address the thing. Even if to say, "Computer, shut up." Operating the thing while not being distracted is paramount.

Mindphone

One of the weirder things about cell phones is that you have a huge number of people inexplicably talking to themselves in public. As phones shrink, it becomes less and less apparent that they're using a device to speak to another person, and looks a lot more like a crazy person babbling to themselves. This is strange.
I'm imagining an implanted device, that controls like a phone, but can be operated by thinking. Imagining a number at the phone would make it dial, and imagining talking to it would modulate speech into the connection. So you could "talk," but without talking.
Probably too invasive to actually build, but it would help people with vocal chord paralysis, and allow people to make phone calls without, you know, endlessly talking to themselves in public.
I'd also like to see this applied to computer interfaces, where it could first type from your thoughts. Then cursor from your thoughts. Then replace the monitor with directly injecting to your "mind's eye." And in the end, I compute while walking down the street, with no one the wiser.

New Entanglement Developments

Quantum Entanglement holds some big promises. It is the one thing that can claim, at least in theory, to exceed the speed of light. You have two atoms that are, statewise, exact mirror images of each other. If one is "up," the other is "down." It would have many applications if it weren't so totally fragile.
Discovery News now reports that researchers have maintained a quantum entanglement across a distance of 16 kilometers, about 9.94 miles to imperial measurement users. An impressive distance, but nowhere near the distances that I'd like to use it for.
This is good news for those hoping to build quantum computers -- the more stable entanglements will be necessary to entangle the multiple bits required to make quantum computers useful. This is only slightly good news on the communication front -- currently attempting to read or write to the entanglement collapses it. The best we can measure is that there is still indeed an entanglement. But I predict this will improve with increasing technology.

Networked Finance

American finance is in bad shape. The whole world's finance is in bad shape, but occasionally to a lesser extent. The finance can be represented as numbers, and thus, we can enlist the support of computers.
One thing computers are very good at is taking a large quantity of numbers, and preparing visual charts to allow a quick understanding of the big picture. I have a financial program that, if I input all of my transactions, will quickly tell me a number of very important things about my finance:
* How much money do I have, total?
* Where am I getting my money?
* What am I spending it on?
* Are there things I'm buying that I could stand to buy less of?
* Will I have enough capacity in case of an emergency? (which would cost a known amount of money)
Okay, but having to look up and enter the records is time consuming. But Also, this program was capable of receiving the input from database files, which I could download from my bank, thus having my bank do my entry for me. Same with my credit card. I would only need to do a quick correlation to show how this new data fit the picture, and it would be entered. The program also knows a common European bank-communication protocol, which doesn't help me much because American banks do not use that.
So...what if there was a common financial communication protocol that all banks, credit cards, and brokerages could communicate with? A simple unified program could obtain my information (strongly authenticated, of course, because I don't want just anyone to have access to my financial information), crunch the numbers, and report on trends, patterns, and points of interest.
After all, many financial concerns are just a matter of math. What will I owe in taxes? The government's regulations may change from year to year, but there is a formula, one the computer will easily be able to compute. Can I afford a vacation? (Vacation is projected to cost $X, we have $Y saved up and $Z income, if Y+Z is greater than X, then technically yes, but I think I'll hold off until Z is greater than X.) What if I retired? (Income would reduce, at my age to 0.)
The program could, over time, even learn suspicious patterns (a change in credit card spending may suggest that your card has been stolen or cloned), or suggest things in order to achieve a goal, like buying a house. (You can afford a house costing $X if you have an income of $Y and savings of $Z, with a W year mortgage.)
I would like to see it as an open source program so that it could be run on many different platforms.

Control it with your mind

I think the trend in communication is towards concealment of technology. Same abilities, less footprint. Electrical wires are hidden in my walls, powering my devices. Plumbing, also hidden in the walls, brings me water and takes it away again. And phones are a little box that lets me talk to people that are thousands of miles away.
Back in the day, I remember, phones were larger. The size of my head, practically. The trend has been for smaller and smaller phones. I currently have a mobile phone about the size of two of my phlanges, which is way smaller than was seen as even possible when I was born.
Discovery is reporting that phones and remote controls may soon be replaced with a small unobtrusive hat that you wear and impose your will on your living room by your thoughts. It's another EEG project.
Or possibly more in the future. We may have cybernetic implants that let us think our way through a phone call, so you can reach the office by closing your eyes and concentrating. No more speaking aloud, which used to be necessary but will now just make you look like a tool. And controlling the TV? It already knows what you want to see and has tuned itself to the right station.
Okay, maybe no implants. Drunk calling is trouble enough on cell-phones, I don't wanna wake up tomorrow to find that I called Amenijad on my brain-implant and insulted him for several hours and now have a phone bill that costs more than a house.
But the possibilities are endless and amazing.

LapTerminal

In a world with increased bandwidth everywhere, what if our many laptop computers, which are expensive and easily damaged, were replaced with portable terminals that had only a display, keyboard, and wireless connection?
Your terminal would connect to the internet, hook back to your main PC, which you would then operate from afar...wirelessly! It would have only a bare minimum of CPU and memory, and would be useful only for such connections, but could connect from any internet connection, wired or wireless, and it it broke, it would be cheap to replace.
It would by necessity be more complex than a traditional TTY terminal, due to needing to do TCP/IP, and either a forwarding protocol like Go2mypc for Windows users, or X-Forwarding for UNIX ones, but beyond that it would shift almost all the computation expense to the desktop machine, that was sitting idle in the first place. Depending on how it works, it may be extremely cheap, due to specialized and easy to manufacture chips.
On the downside of this, it would use a lot of bandwidth, and may require encryption lest someone snoop the traffic to learn people's passwords and finances. Configuration would confuse the average user. I can easily imagine rent-a-machine services renting CPU cycles to this kind of machine, too.
I can also imagine it cheapening the perceived value of computers. Game go badly? Smash your terminal with a baseball bat. Wife's mad that you're doing spreadsheets instead of taking out the trash? Into the pool it goes. I can imagine at some point the main desktop machine gets trashed instead and I wind up with a "It cost how much now?!?!?!?!" call.
Also, since it'll need independent CPU and memory to even handle a TCP/IP connection with encryption, it probably won't be cheaper than existing netbooks. ...damnit.

Speech Recogition

There are programs out there that allow you to control your computer by dictating into a microphone. That's awesome. You can also use this to dictate lengths of text, saving keyboardists gajillions of keystrokes. As computers get smaller, it's possible that portable computer will need to use this technology, because the computer itself will be smaller than is practical to install a keyboard to. I already own a device one quarter the size of my keyboard, intended for embedded use in, say, a factory to measure probes. This is the good news.
The bad news is that the technology is both expensive, and never exactly sure of what you say. You. Have. To. Talk. Like. This. For. It. To. Understand. You. It eliminates the less likely expressions. "Has he got, uh, a flight to Hamburg" is more likely than "Izzy god hat fight meat barge." It has to remove stammers (such as "uh" and "hmm" and the like.) and deal with some irregularities of pronunciation.
For instance on that, ask an English speaker to say "prime minister." They will usually say "pri minister." The common "m" sound smears together. One of the best speech comprehension tools was invented by a Chinese man who learned English very late in his life, because he had to learn these intricate rules himself, and had more an intellectual than instinctual understanding. It would be nice if I could remember this intrepid researcher's name, or where I read this from.
In any case, some day there will be a computer the size of your fingernail that you operate by talking to, and it will report back by speaking with a mechanical voice (speech synthesis is very sophisticated at this point), causing a massive increase in people who seem to be talking to themselves in public.

Quantum Entanglement Network

As an initial disclaimer, physicists have basically outright said that what this project proposes is impossible, on the grounds that no signal can be sent by this means. I'm not sure how much credence to give it, since a) they never include any actual math, and b) I probably wouldn't understand the math anyway. (In fact, most of it just states "well it violates relativity, therefore no.")
Quantum Entanglement is when two atoms are linked, and at all times maintain opposite spin values. (Atom's have a property called "spin," and the two states are arbitrarily called "up" and "down." For computer networking purposes, "up" is "1" and "down" is "0.") They manage to do this even if separated by considerable distance, in violation of relativity. (Relativity asserts that the speed of light, c, is the maximum possible speed for any thing, signal, or event.) Hypothetically, one can read the value of an atom's spin, at the cost of swapping the atom to the opposite state.
I'm seeing a network box with an RJ-45 jack, and an atom entangled with another box. They are then synchronized to read their respective atoms at a periodic rate, both at exactly the same time. There are two spin states, and my teachings in logic teaches that NOT NOT A is equal to A, therefore nullifying the effect of the read.
I'm not sure how writing to the atom would work, but reading it and discarding its state may be one way to do it.
Anyway, I can see a sci-fi galactic empire operating with these. Star ships each have an entanglement box somewhere in their internal network, linked to one in a big closet in the capital of the galactic empire. In the capital closet, the entanglement boxes are networked to both each other and to the national internet, allowing communication throughout the empire. Other nodes would connect to other planet's internets, thereby establishing the galacta-net.
Since quantum entanglement is instantaneous, all of the galactic empire can respond with a ping time of at most 2000ms. (And this assumes from the far side of one planet, to the far side of the capital planet.) The FTL allows the commerce and communication needed to maintain the galactic civilization. (So yes, when I sell three tons of nanocomputers, their credit card payment goes through, and I pay my taxes, and so on.)
As a secondary advantage, quantum entangled communications would be untraceable. Earthly military forces could decide not to bother with encryption, since it's literally impossible for the enemy to intercept the message: it's not there to intercept. Unless they steal the entanglement box itself, and any good soldier would make a point of destroying it if it came to that. A definite advantage over radio and such.
Perhaps this is a good basis in sci-fi, where one must bend certain rules to have an exciting narrative. I shall try to read up why this wouldn't actually work.