On another tech note, the speed at which stuff travels across the internet is just getting faster and faster.

Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center used fiber-optic cables to transfer 6.7 gigabytes of data -- the equivalent of two DVD movies -- across 6,800 miles in less than a minute.

...

"Imagine ... being able to download two full-length, two-hour movies within a minute," Cottrell said. "That changes the whole idea of how media is distributed."

Yeah, I'm still waiting for pay-per-view TV via the internet. Looks like it's not that far away.

And I wasn't aware of this particular footnote:

On average, the amount of information that can be transferred over the Internet has doubled every year since 1984, scientists said. That trend is expected to continue.

Guess I'm out of it. That seems pretty remarkable, outstripping analogous advances in processing power. The bottleneck for most users is still their connection to the internet. Hopefully there'll be some significant advances in this area as well, like widely-available, low-cost T1 ethernet connections.