Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones. The gap between 1st and 3rd world countries will widen as a result - take a modern computer into backwoods Africa and it's a paperweight.

Google succeed in forcing the mobile providers to be commodity data pipes. They scream blue murder, try to cartel up, but Google breaks the cartel and several big names are forced out of the market.

Ebooks defeat paper books. All high street bookstores go bust. Rampant book piracy throws the copyright war into overdrive. Despite international treaties and draconian law, the pirates win.

Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel: lower demand, lower profit, vendors go bust, less availability, monopoly prices, lower desirability. The gasoline economy is brittle because it has high fixed costs, a complex supply chain, and its power source isn't fungible. As with film versus digital cameras, the result is an exponential crash in the desirability of gasoline cars, with mass conversion to battery-electric and collapse of the oil industry. Government greenhouse warming policies will continue to be useless, but they'll be eclipsed by events. The big panic will be the overstraining electricity grid. Residential grids were not specced to fuel everybody's car at once.

Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.

A habitable (to some life, not necessarily to human life) extra-solar Earth like planet is discovered by 2020.

* Still no fusion power.

* Microsoft sells large parts of itself in order to be able to focus on its core competencies (just like IBM did)

* Someone will make an actually usable e-book reader.

* During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.

* Brazil will become a real powerhouse.

* Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.

* Still no Duke Nukem Forever.

* 'Minimal Techno' will finally die / go out of fashion.

* Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.

* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.

* Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).

* Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.

That's what I could come up with off the top of my head. Feel free to disagree / rant / do name calling, this is not a serious thread anyway.

There is a world of difference between the ad hominem fallacy and an insult. The ad hominem fallacy is bad reasoning. But insults are the spice of life and cathartic for the soul.

Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!

Winston Churchill: And if I were your husband I would drink it!