Here is a listing of various ideas I've had. Most of them are neat, some of them are crazy and the rest are just plain unlikely to occur for one reason or another. These are just blurbs so I remember and have some claim to fame, but if you really want more information you're better off contacting me directly.

At the moment there is a rampant problem with fraud and Point of Sale transactions. These problems include card cloning, repeating transactions among others. Both debit and credit cards are affected. The root problem is that the consumer is expected to trust the terminal presented to them. It is well known that there is only weak security when dealing with untrusted hardware. The solution, a fraud proof system, involves providing the user with a minimum of trusted hardware such that they can be ensured of both the value of the transaction, the identity of the payment server and the security between them. All it requires is one microprocessor, a multidigit seven segment LCD display and a button.

When programming I often find myself wishing that the standard or defacto library contained some useful feature, such as basic graph operations. Now these features are not necessarily common, but they are not uncommon and have well known solutions. Yet even though the solutions are well known the implementations are continually recreated.

What I want is a single library which contains all the well known solutions to problems. More so than that, I desire this library to be multi-level. What I mean by this is that it will contain low level functionality (such as simple collections), medium level functionality (graphs and graph operations) as well as high level functionality. All these various levels should be visible at the same time. Also, the higher level functionalities of the library should be implemented in terms of the exposed lower levels.

Such a system with an appropriate language behind it should be able to raise programming out of its current low level of abstraction to ever increasing heights as operations of greater complexity become part of the library.

There are many situations where there is sufficient noise to require earplugs. There are also many situations where you should wear earplugs, but the loss of spacial awareness is just too expensive. What the world needs is an earplug which reduces the volume of the world and ensures that the maximum noise is kept below the safe limit.

I would imagine that this might have a non-linear reduction in amplitude with a maximum. Perhaps it could even amplify quiet sounds. If most or all sounds have a decrease in amplitude it might even be possible to not require a battery.

Terribly boring people who think UML will save us all had some thoughts about coding to a contract. Furthermore with some tool magic and a bit of bondage in the language you can even have an automated process take the contract and produce automatic test cases. This is a tedious process. I think it isn't without merit though, it's just that all the hard work is done by the programmer and not the computer.

I propose, instead, that you have an automated process which takes a function and produces a contract which can be reviewed by the programmer. Now this requires that all the code is built bottom up and that most or all the library functions to either have source available or have appropriate contracts produced.