Whenever a machine is connected to the Internet, it gets a public IP address (typically assigned by the ISP), and this public IP address is not identical to your machine's IP address.
In PowerShell 3.0, there is a new and extremely useful cmdlet called Invoke-WebRequest that you can use to contact web servers and download data. Here is a simple one-liner that tells you your current public IP address:
(Invoke-WebRequest 'http://myip.dnsomatic.com' -UseBasicParsing).Content
Note that you may need to add the -Proxy and –ProxyCredential parameters if you have a proxy server in place.
