> I thought that was fibreglass...

For very low production volumes it could be, but for any car that 
everyone has heard of it will be moulded plastic. Note that high 
strength plastics are usually glass-filled, so in a way they are the 
same as fibre-glass. It's just the glass particles are tiny so that it 
doesn't affect the appearance, and more importantly the plastic can go 
through the injection moulding machine. Things like your phone casing 
and your monitor case/stand are likely to be glass filled plastic, it's 
a very cheap way to get a lot of strength and toughness.

> What I did see, that was quite interesting, was a guy who "studies
> nature" to try to look for clever ideas that we can copy. One of his
> suggestions was to create colour by diffraction rather than using
> chemical dyes. Chemicals degrade in the Sun, but a grating doesn't
> suddenly change size just because you hit it with a ton of UV...

Presumably you'd need a layer of protection on top of the diffraction 
grating anyway to prevent damage, so I struggle to see any advantage 
than just putting a UV protective coating on top of a normal 
plastic/paint (like cars have for example).

> My understanding was that displays aren't increasing their ppi rating
> because 100% of all Windows software assumes a fixed 72ppi, and if you
> increased the dot pitch everything would become too tiny to see.

I think that 100% figure has been coming down and will continue to do 
so. Once people get devices like the new Samsung Windows 8 laptop/tablet 
(3200x1800 13") software vendors will be forced to comply. Anyway, even 
if Windows software doesn't change people use Android and iOS which 
works fine at very high ppi.

> Fibre to the house is a simple concept. Why didn't they do this before?
> Oh, yes, that's right - because fibre is so astronomically expensive
> that nobody can afford it...

And why is it now possible to make it so much cheaper than before? 
Perhaps because there have been new manufacturing processes invented and 
developed and new materials? But wait, nothing has changed since the 
industrial revolution!

> Tangential, but... one of the 3D technologies I saw on Tomorrow's World
> involved scanning a laser across a corrugated screen. It also involved
> using "a supercomputer" to control the motors scanning the laser; I'm
> guessing today it would be less of a problem. But who really wants to
> look at spinning monochrome wireframes?

I think I posted this before, but a friend from University set this up:

http://lightblueoptics.com/videos/holographic-laser-projection-technology/

Given that he appears to have won several times in the IOCCC recently 
(tangental, but a full PC emulator capable of running DOS games in under 
4KB of C source?!) I guess it didn't come to much :-)

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