Floid: storage and memory technology have traditionally lagged behind advancements in processing technology. Lately this has not been the case, with harddisks & sundry increasing (measured by Mbytes/$, roughly) about 2,000 times in capacity in the 11 years I've been using computers (which is, hey, 2^11th - nearly Moore's there). The problem is advances in *both* solid state memory size and advancement in battery/power-consumption technology (whose equivalent to Moore's law is, IIRC, around 1.2x per year).

As for single sign on, I can imagine nothing worse for the Internet, and I can say I would dedicate a fair portion of my time developing tools for circumventing such technologies and/or making them useless and ineffective should they ever arrive. *shrugs* We're forced to live in societies of unremitting greed and increasing fascism - I don't mind deferring my anarchist/socialist utopist views to the Internet where nobody really gets hurt by them (as would probably not be the case with such views finding actualization with the current crop of humans), but I *will* be permitted to have and experience them in some form as long as I'm alive. Many people on the 'net feel the same, and I really don't hold out much hope for a technological solution.

Secondly, there is no entity, not IBM, not the government, and certainly not Microsoft, who deserves to be trusted with that kind of information. Nobody is above abusing that degree of power, and fortunately humanity seemed to have the common sense to recognize this with Passport.

Thirdly, no blackhat is below trying to get that degree of power. Whatever OS it runs on would instantly become the most studied and found to be completely full of holes - I love OpenBSD more than my (or your) mother but even I wouldn't put it up to the task.

On the subject of alternative fuels: GM's R&D budget for hydrogen fuel cells is, again IIRC, around $1 billion/year. This is a huge investment even for them. Count on it happening in the next decade. There's still the small problem of obtaining hydrogen with less energy than is released by using it, but it's a matter of 'we don't have any current implementation', not 'we don't know of any method'.

On the subject of Holy Shit lists: to my old one add the following - Doom III's dynamic shadow and specular-bumpmapping technologies. Having read up on them sufficiently (and learned a good bit more through a friend at id), regardless of whether Doom III is a good game or not said technology will become the de facto standard for all mainstream games in two to three years at most. I'm barely an intermediate-level OpenGL programmer, but even I can immediately appreciate the brilliance of Carmack's Reverse, and say, "whoa, this changes everything."