About telephones, , for the first time, more Americans lived in wireless-only households (about 20 percent) than lived in homes with only a wired telephone (about 17 percent).

The data was from the last half of last year. With the recession and overall growth of wireless generally, the wireless-only crowd has probably grown sizably in the past year.

One day, I think the most ultimately screwed-up business user will the one who has only a cellular phone--no wireline--and depends on cloud-based applications, no local backups or applications to use the backed-up data. You can't do any work because the networks are down? Whoops!

Modern networks are amazing things, but they are also massively interconnected and even fragile. My advice: Don't put anything you don't have another way to access into the cloud, unless it's something you can live without, at least for a few hours or days.

Also, don't rely on a wireless handset or wireless Internet to always work in all circumstances. Nothing is perfect, as the San Jose cable cuts proved, but .