The bad news is our fair-use rights, civil liberties, and personal privacy are under relentless attack, with no help in sight. But you don't need me to wail about all this, so I shall move on to my...

Fearless Prediction

Small mobile devices are the future of computing. Someday a mobile phone will also be a full-fledged PC that does everything a desktop computer can do today. Because personal computing will become a service, with the processing power, data storage, and system administration all handled by service providers. Reliable voice-recognition technologies will be the tipping point, because (obviously) trying to do complex tasks on a phone keypad is nuts. About as much fun as Web-surfing or watching movies on a two-inch screen.

What about that two-inch screen, you ask? No one can write letters and parse spreadsheets and create horrid PowerPoint slide shows on a tiny telephone screen. Duh, the phones of the future will have holographic projectors.

So the world will be even fuller of babbling idiots on telephones bumping blindly into everything, and normal people like you and me who enjoy peace and quiet are going to go on slapping-faces-and-breaking-phones rampages. Some will hail us as liberators. Some will call us just plain nuts.

Resources

• "June is Busting Out All Over", classic Rodgers & Hammerstein song from the musical Carousel. The all-time great joyous song.

This article originally appeared on Enterprise Networking Planet, a JupiterWeb site.

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