Can the Block Erupter be used for anything besides coin mining? Did the creators of the Block Erupter USB device have the foresight to make it capable of any other function besides mining coins?

I'd hate to think that now that Bitcoin is becoming impossible to mine efficiently, these are going to end up on the heap of truly useless technology.

Y'know?

Or perhaps is it still useful to mine non-Bitcoin coins?
They'll be useless.

But the name pretty much says it all: Application Specific Integrated Circuit.

That's why FPGA's (field-programmable gate array) were such a huge success. You'd have a circuit that you could program! While much slower the possibilities are practically endless.