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AT&T still offers good dial up here in the states for $22/month. Free if you are a uverse customer.
http://att.prodigy.net/openPhone/index.html

I keep a little usb modem in my laptop bag for those "when all else fails" times. Its slow but its better then nothing.

IBM ported OS/2 to PPC as well, but it actually came with a x86 DOS VM... and it even ran Win-OS2! They put a lot of effort into that dead end port for nothing. http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/os2ppc/index.html

The way I remember it, Microsoft supported OS/2 from the beginning; see here for screen shots of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel for OS/2.

Yup. I seem to remember seeing that. The other big "supported" application on OS/2 was Microsoft Mail (anyone else remember that one? Try not to shudder too hard....). At least it beat trying to run it under DOS/Windows.

And Microsoft promised to support OS/2 after it sold 2 million copies.

Never happened.

Could you provide us with some sort of reference to support this?

The way I remember it, Microsoft supported OS/2 from the beginning; see here for screen shots of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel for OS/2.

At the time, Microsoft had an OS/2 group, and a Windows group, and both groups were trying to get people to write apps for their respective systems. Microsoft was telling people that if their computers had 2MB of RAM or less, they should run Windows, but if they had more than that, they should run OS/2, because it was the future.

Then, in 1990, Windows 3.0 shipped, and it was a runaway smash success; at that time Microsoft decided to throw their weight behind Windows. They cut their famous deal with IBM, where IBM would keep the OS/2 business and support the OS/2 customers, and Microsoft would go its own way with Windows. From that point on, I am not aware of any promises from Microsoft with respect to OS/2: Microsoft was pushing Windows with both hands.

So, if you know something I don't, please provide a link so I can read up on it. Thanks.

steveha

Off topic, but I'll reply anyway.

I have used "effect" as both a noun and a verb for the majority of my life, in both the written and spoken word. I am not alone. I am aware of the affect/effect distinction that is made in scholarly circles, and occasionally use it, but I more often fall back on the simple rule that effect can be both a noun and a verb.

"The effects of an earthquake can effect large numbers of people."

This sentence makes sense to me. It makes sense to others. I use "effect" in this way. I am not the only one. The only time this has ever become a problem is when I use it in the written word and even then only by people who insist I do things "correctly". The "correct" form however, offers no justification for itself other than its own inertia. Whither evolution?

To deny that effect is a verb is to deny the usage of the word in the written and spoken english of millions of people. People speak this way. They write this way too. Why is it wrong? Some people seem to think it is right and proper to correct improper usage of english. These same people of course hold the definition of proper english to be the form which they speak and write. Waving around Oxford dictionaries and the opinions of scholars who have been dead for eighty years apparently constitutes a stronger position than speaking and writing in the same way as millions of other people.

So be it. I can't change the way that I speak or write as easily as others can find "errors" in my dialect or my composition. It's essentially an uphill struggle against people who refuse to accept change, and stand haughtily by their own version of things. For those interested in other opinions, I'll link to a piece on Issac Asimov and Richard Feynman on spelling and grammar reform. It's interesting reading for people whose minds are still open.

http://pages.prodigy.net/daleharris/pos.htm It doesn't run on Linux, but it does run under dosemu or any other dos emulator. It's not open source either, but it is free (as in beer). We've used it for several years and it works great. We used a Cuecat with it for a while, but eventually upgraded to a real barcode scanner. For a small business as a trial program, it should be ideal. Eventually, assuming you don't run the business into the ground, you'll want a real POS system that works with a real accounting system.

We are probably never going to have an (earth based) computer that is able to compute 10^60 diffierent possibilities, given that the earth has less atoms and electrons than that (http://pages.prodigy.net/jhonig/bignum/qaearth.html). Assuming that each of the computed possibilities is expressed(stored/presisted) by at least 1 electron. Its probably at least a few orders of magnitude more now..

Perhaps quantum computing may change that?

Yes it is typical human behavior. We like more those who are consistent and commited. Mr. Cialdini has nicely put it.

only when you use the same encryption scheme. In some cases you can prove that encrypting twice it is equivelent to encrypting once with a different key. In other cases, especially when encryption and decrytion are similar processes, it does weaken the encryption. However if you use different encryption methods the encryption/decryption of 1 method is practically orthogonal to the other method. This does not increase the security as much as you would think, as if you can break the encryption using twice as many "encryption layers" only doubles the amount of work to do, while doubling your overhead in encryption, leaving the ratio of your overhead to their effort of breaking it unchanged.

Ignoring mathematical breakthroughs which render a particular encryption method practically useless, it would be better to use a longer key where, in many situations, each _bit_ you add to the key doubles the hardness of breaking the problem, leading to each extension of the key length moving the overhead/effort to break ration further in your faviour (with an 8k key, assuming a resonable crack, where you only need to check the sqrt of the number of keys (2^4k keys) - this leads to a 10^1000 year breaking time (this assumes 10^200 calcuations/year - way more than theoretically possable).

using 8 1k keys leads to 2x2^512 keys to check (or about 8x10^150 computations)

i know which calculation i would rather have protecting my sensitive data.

an upper bound on the plausible calculation limit (within the scope of this universe) is about 10^100 calculations - the rough number of atoms in the universe ( 10^81 ) times the number of seconds the universe is expected to be in existence (10^18 seconds in 100 billion years)

baring a mathematical breakthrough there are certain encryption methods which are statistically secure for someone with access to the entire plausible computation power which could exist within this universe

IIRC only 16-bit Windows apps were supported (Win95 was released a couple of years before that.)

Mind if I call bullshit on your history? OS/2 2.0 was released in 1992, which already included Win16 support.

OS/2 3.0 (AKA OS/2 Warp) also predates Win95, published in 1994. More info than anyone would care to know can be found at http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/os2warp/i ndex.html

Just take a look at professional athletes. They're bigger, stronger, and faster than even just two generations ago.

This has more to do with conditioning (and steroids) than genetics. If you spent the time that professional athletes do working out you could achieve some 'bigger, stronger, faster' results as well. Even 20 years ago, professional baseball players weren't lifting the weights like they do now. Take a look at the '86 Mets and tell me that weight lifting was big. Daryl Strawberry had 27 HRs that year - those were huge numbers. Now if you don't break 40 or 50 it's not even a blip on the radar.

With internal drive and/or talent you could possibly be (or could have been) a professional athlete too. I will say though that some sports require different builds to compete. You aren't going to play professional football (american football) or basketball if you are 5'5" 130lbs. You could certainly play a less contact sport like baseball or possibly soccer.

We're starting to see more and more offspring of atheletes following in the footsteps of their parents.

Bringing up a child within the family of professional sports can result in the child being more adapted to the sport, although it's definitely not a guarantee. Plenty of kids of professional athletes didn't get to the bigs and I think it's more difficult than you think. I can only think of a couple off the top of my head in football and baseball. I can't think of maybe one in basketball. I personally knew a guy in college who's dad played in the NFL however he didn't even play college ball.

And to top it off, they make more money and have more prospects for reproducing.

A few make tons of money. A long career in sports is uncommon. At 35 in almost all sports you are a has-been, but only if you make it that long. If you do you deserve the big bucks otherwise I hope you saved your pennies because it's going to be a long 20-30 until you get social security.

As for reproducing, anthropologically women want a mate that can take care of their offspring. If that person is a cab driver or an NFL quarterback it doesn't matter. There is no direct correlation between the number of children a person can have with how many they choose to have. Professional sports figures simply have the public's attention and therefore give the appearance of more opportunities.

http://pages.prodigy.net/unohu/brainwaves.htm
Watching television does alter people's brain waves.
http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/photo.html
There is also evidence that television may cause seizures in some epileptics.
The most probable way for television to affect people's brains is through the eyes. The eyes convert the frequencies that hit it into electrical signals. The strongest frequency would be 60 Hz. but 30 Hz is present and so are its harmonics.
The other possibility is acoustic. Most TVs emit audio at 15 kHz. Most of us can't hear it past a certain age but it's there anyway.
Television also radiates a lot of EM signals. You really have to sit near the set to get much of those but some people do sit too near.
So, we know that television does have neurological effects on some people. It seems plusible that television might cause neurological disorders.

Before thinking about building your own electric car, think a lot about what you need to do with it.

• Do you do most of your driving locally, or do you commute 50 miles to work?
• Would a scooter that can go 35mph be good enough,
• or an electric bike that can go ~20mph?
• Do you live somewhere that it rains a lot, so you really need a closed car, or do you live in California where it's dry 9 months of the year and only heavily rainy for two months, or do you have to deal with snow in the winter?
• Could you do half or most of your driving on an electric scooter/bike/etc. and use a gasoline car the rest of the time?
• How good are you with machinery, welding, steering mechanisms, etc.? Most cars that are cheap enough for you to junk the engine are also going to need body work, including suspensions that can carry the battery weight.

The conversion cars I saw there mostly used about 15-20 batteries if they used lead-acid or 10-15 if they used more expensive NiMH, so you're looking at at least $1500 in batteries, plus motors and anything else you need.

OS/2 was not a microkernel. There *was* a microkernel-based version of OS/2: OS/2 for PowerPC. However, it was never actually sold (there was no real hardware to run it on).

OS/2 was very much a monolithic kernel that borrowed heavily from IBM's mainframe OS experience (Reference). However, it suffered heavily from its 16-bit heritage (OS/2 1.x was targeted at 80286 processors). It was a modular kernel, but it used 16-bit protected-mode drivers for items such as network adapters (NDIS 2.0) and file system drivers.

In fact, it was OS/2's monolithic nature and 16-bit origins that made OS/2 for PowerPC such a difficult undertaking. Unfortunately, for OS/2 to be a realistic operating system moving forward, you really would have needed a major rewrite like that, just to get rid of the 286 heritage. However, with the lack of momentum behind OS/2 and the failure of PREP/CHRP that just wasn't possible.

IBM did ship the PPC version of OS/2 in Dec '95. Here is a page of someone running it. http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/os2ppc/in dex.html

Hell yeah I remember Prodigy. My dad and I would sit on there for hours playing MadMaze. In fact, you can still play MadMaze. Those horrid graphics...

We were on there once during a lightning storm and our modem caught some extra juice and it melted the buzzer. Thank god it didn't waste the PC. That 286 was like $2400. I must have been about 7 years old at that time.

The real question is, could it run OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition?

See an OS/2 fan's review of OS/2 Power PC edition at this website.

Stop thinking what are the odds it would happen on earth and start thinking what are the odds of it happening at all.

How Many Stars Are There? ~ 5 x 10 ^ 22 (http://pages.prodigy.net/jhonig/bignum/quniver3.h tml)

Ok well how many of them have planets that could support life? I am going to guess 1 in 100,000.

So even if the odds where not good you get to roll those dice 5 * 10 ^ 17 times.

Just to give you an idea how evolution produces complexity: Their are programmable CPU's where you get to change what gates operate at will. Now someone decided to try and evolve something that could tell a 5Mhz signal from a 50Mhz signal with one of these. He ended up with a device that worked on that device but not anything else. It turns out he evolved something that used the specific makeup of that chip to induce a current on another part of the chip which was not working across chips. Now this is not something he had ever thought and it was really complex behavior but it showed up fast because undirected evolution will try anything.

The basic idea of evolution is you start from almost nothing a cell that can reproduce in a world without disease or predators and you will end up with complex life. This has been shown to work though direct experiments. Evolution produces complexity. It works by adding hacks on top of hacks such as the human tail which is tiny in most people because losing abilities happen fast in evolution but only if they are harmful. And the tiny amount of bone in that tail is not really harmful so we keep it. As an ID person why do we still have some DNA that makes gills? I mean really there is not point to it so a good designer would have just skipped over it right?

PS: Life does not need DNA, mitochondria, or even a cell wall. All it really needs is a few tiny bits of RNA. Life is the ability to eat and reproduce and as such it can work with vary simple origins.

First Google hit looking for firefox ie skin. HAND

http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/timeline. html

OS/2 Warp 3.0 October 1994
OS/2 Warp Connect May 1995
OS/2 Warp 4.0 September 1996

There's a web-based remake you can play if you have Internet Explorer:

http://pages.prodigy.net/rdbrownmsb/MadMaze2/

Yeah eventually the maps started to sort of "overlap" as though certain parts were on top of each other. It was enough of a headache to begin with, that's where I quit as well.

That's Warp 3.0, release about 6 months before Windows 95.

The ironic thing is that it has a *lot* in common with many Linux desktops I've seen (and used)... That is one area that Microsoft almost always beat OS/2 in: polish. Windows was like an Jaguar, and OS/2 was like a dump truck. One was pretty and stalled if it went through a puddle, one was indestructable, but *ugly*. It's amazing how such analogies can be applied from top to bottom...

From the ChurchStreet's FAQ.

10) Can the reconstruction software be purchased?

Not unless you are a qualifying intelligence agency. Our digitizing techniques and proprietary software cannot be purchased at this time unless your team is a high level governmental intelligence team. For others, ChurchStreet offers the reconstruction as a service, not as a product to be purchased.

Qualifying intelligence agencies should call ChurchStreet directly to get more information about our Reconstruction Software Suite.

This is just a simple(?) exercise in matching edges and colors at those edges to each other in all the piecess. This is how a standard jigsaw puzzle is assembled in 'meatspace'. ChurchStreet's software likely does this all inside the computer after the document shreds have been scanned in.

These guys are in the best postion to write/adapt such software and make it available to the public at large--not just government intelligence organizations.

P.S. For secure document destruction, burn it--it is the only way to be sure the document cannot be reconstructed. This applies to assorted forms of computer related information storage and processing--just toss the hard drives, CD-ROMs, floppy disks, RAM chips, memory sticks, motherboards, CRTs, etc., into the nearest (approved) incinerator and be done with it. It's an environmental/safety nightmare but the data in the destroyed media is now gone for good.

Want to give the ChurchStreet boys an 'impossible job?' Do the following:

1) Print up a document in English using a monospaced font.

2) Cross cut the document so that each character is in its own square 'cell' and is completly surrounded on all four sides by whitespace.

3) Hire ChurchStreet to reconstitute this document and send them the 'confetti'.

They won't be able to reconstruct the document because all the pieces are edgewise topologically identical to each other. The best they can do is use all the 'letters' and reconstruct all the words in the document. If they accomplish that, then they have to put them into the right order. If the document had 58 words on it, there would be so many message combinations that you could easily assign each one to every atom in the universe.

If their 'proprietary' document reconstruction techniques take into consideration the texture, grain, and thickness of the paper then they would stand a fighting to good chance of reconstituting such a 'challange document'. :)

Senator Feinstein, is that you?

While it is true that NTFS was written from scratch. My point is that they borrowed heavily from their work on OS/2. What the two are similar in is the work that Microsoft contributed to OS/2 and learned from, which were then refined and redesigned for Windows NT. This is evident when seeing what aspects Microsoft worked on (which were well done in NT) and what IBM did (which were often less thought out in NT).

My point about converting HPFS to NTFS was that they are similar enough to make it possible. It is easy to convert from a basic filesystem (FAT) upwards. When you move down, though, its much harder because so much information is lost. The two filesystems share a number of design goals (see here) making it relatively easy to convert over without losing any information.

If you search for articles on OS/2 history, you will find many aspects where the two borrowed from each other. OS/2's original presentation manager was based on Window's 2.0's (press release) and the API was close.

They shipped copies of it for a long time, in fact.

Here is the launch announcement. Microsoft shipped versions 1.0-1.3, but did not ship beyond that point as the MS/IBM divorce happened around then, culminating with IBM OS/2 2.0.

HEre are some screenshots. Note that the WLO libraries were apparently included in a product called the "Microsoft OS/2 Software Migration Kit". If one were to have a copy of Microsoft Systems Journal November 1990 -- Vol 5 No 6 then one would have record of this product, which has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. ;-)

I had a shrinkwrapped copy in my hands when I worked at MicroWarehouse in 1989-91, so I know it existed then. We had about 40 of them. They weren't selling well.

People with clue about this are rare in these parts, it appears. It doesn't seem that long ago to me.

They shipped copies of it for a long time, in fact.

Here is the launch announcement. Microsoft shipped versions 1.0-1.3, but did not ship beyond that point as the MS/IBM divorce happened around then, culminating with IBM OS/2 2.0.

HEre are some screenshots. Note that the WLO libraries were apparently included in a product called the "Microsoft OS/2 Software Migration Kit". If one were to have a copy of Microsoft Systems Journal November 1990 -- Vol 5 No 6 then one would have record of this product, which has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. ;-)

I had a shrinkwrapped copy in my hands when I worked at MicroWarehouse in 1989-91, so I know it existed then. We had about 40 of them. They weren't selling well.

People with clue about this are rare in these parts, it appears. It doesn't seem that long ago to me.

IE Theme.

IE Firefox Theme

You can also get older themes to work with newer versions somehow, but I can't remember, I think there was an article on it on i-hacked.com

This turned up on Google :)

This was before the split between Microsoft and IBM. SOM and COM are very similar...

Yet another "innovation" from Microsoft that was based upon suspiciously similar innovations from other companies...

Ever seen a peacock at the zoo? What you seem to be focusing on is the color and design of the tail, instead of the structure and form of it.

Here's a picture of a peacock with the tail down. Notice how long it is. This is extremely counter-survival because it adds a lot of weight to the end of the bird, which makes flying much, much more difficult (I tried to get a picture of a peacock flying, but nothing turned up on GIS). People who have studied peacocks all agree about this, including Darwin.

Darwin once said something to the effect of "The sight of a peocock makes me sick" because he could not explain why they evolved to have an apendage. He later discovered what the grandparent post was talking about. Peahens find big, exhuberant tails sexy, and are more inclined to mate with males who have them. It goes to show that it's more important to mate than to stay alive.

Mercury in your flu shot. . .
--Mercury in vaccines

Food. . .
Back in 1991, the first Food Pyramid Guide was slated for release in the U.S. This was delayed because of the outcry from various sectors in agriculture. The guide was re-designed by politicians and released the following year.

"When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. [. . .]

"Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour -- including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats -- at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the "revised" Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramid's base."

-Luise Light, Ed.D former USDA architect of the original version of the Food Pyramid.

--1992 Food Pyramid corrupted by USDA and Agricultural interestes

Cell Phone EM. . .

This one is a huge subject, with many studies I might reference. Anybody who wants to learn about it can do so quite easily these days. This article is a reasonably well-written piece I chose for it's capacity to communicate the basic elements of how microwave EM can affect human physiology and psychology. It is not the final word on this subject by any means. Further investigation is up to you.

Television. . .

Television has a powerful impact on the way the brain functions. Nobody argues the fact. Here is one quote which sums it up neatly. . .

"High levels of chaotic brain activity are present during challenging tasks like reading, writing, and working mathematical equations in your head. They are not present while watching TV. Levels of brain activity are measured by an electroencenograph (EEG) machine. While watching television, the brain appears to slow to a halt, registering low alpha wave readings on the EEG. This is caused by the radiant light produced by cathode ray technology within the television set. Even if you're reading text on a television screen the brain registers low levels of activity. Once again, regardless of the content being presented, television essentially turns off your nervous system."

--Article found here

Here is a larger data base of information on this subject.

So. . .

I know my first pos

speech recog - ibm os/2 (w3 or w4? can't recall) had this as an OS built-in while mac was still at system 7.2, which had no speech recog

Old Mac users everywhere are laughing at this statement. Most obviously, *there was never a System 7.2*.

The Macintosh operating system went from 7.1.x (the last I remember being 7.1.2, I think) to 7.5 This was in about 1994. Voice recognition was available for machines in 1993.

Compare against this OS/2 timeline that has VoiceType being added in OS/2 Warp 4.0.

That was in September of 1996.

Compare against a MacOS timeline

...attract attention it is an old advertising trick "Tie things to sex and people will pay more attention to it."

Exactly. Like this plainly looks like a uterus to me. But I must be crazy, because no REAL man would have a stylized logo of a uterus on his truck.

You could go one step further and get the IE theme as well.

Microsoft largely wrote OS/2 1.x according to IBM's specifications. IBM was responsible for writing OS/2 2.x. This includes the entire Workplace Shell, which started life as a shell for 1.x, actually: I saw it demo'ed in 1998 running on 1.x. This was an early demo: even window resize did not work! :)

Guess what, that's 2^64 bits.

Fortunately, no one is trying to address individual bits -- you'll need 8 Seagates put together to make your point stand better.

And then you need to count the on-line harddrives, rather than the manufactured ones. And then you need to convince me, that it makes sense to talk about all of the drives together -- do we need to be able to address any byte of this combined device without some sort of segmentation (like hostname:/filesystem)? We never tried that with 32-bit filesystems, when it was still possible, and we don't try it with 64-bit filesystems, while it is possible.

The jump from 32 to 64 is not complete yet, despite the actual difference between 2^64 and 2^32 being much smaller than that between 2^128 and 2^64...

According to this page, the number of atoms in the Universe is estimated between 10^78 to 10^81, you'll need to turn an awful lot of them into storage to build a device in need of 128-bit address.

OS/2 2.0 didn't take over the world - unfortunately. But it certainly showed what a 386-based PC could do with an operating system not designed for a machine two or three generations older.

Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?

http://pages.prodigy.net/zzxc/ieskin/

You say:
"All digital artworks can be represented as one big binary number (typically with a lot more digits than a googol)."

Note that there aren't even a googol of atoms in the universe (10^81 is a current estimate), so the artwork has far, far, fewer than a googol of atoms, let alone digits in its binary image representation.

Check it out yourself.

No it doesn't: http://pages.prodigy.net/rodney.broome/terramain.h tm

And its done by someone with a new technology to get people talking about it. Look at all the debates and forum chatter that got sparked off by intels "Bluetooth is dead". "C is dead", "CISC is dead"....
,"Apple is dead".
When technologies really do die, its when noone gives a damn about them, and so noone will be writing a story about it.

I know that everyone is going to read the parent post and think what a funny and great idea it is. Well, it's not. A nice wooden Telephone Pole is the way to go here. It'll be heavier and will get your point across in much less swings, provided the person using it can wield it properly.

Keep in mind the Swiss have mandatory gun ownership, and have more guns per capita than the US, however gun related crime is extremely rare in Switzerland.

Fact sheet about swiss gun regulations:

http://pages.prodigy.net/vanhooser/swiss_fact_sh ee t.htm
(/. breaks up the link a bit)

I probably shouldn't be responding to such a blatant troll, but you have hit upon a vein in many of the ignorant's rants.

http://pages.prodigy.net/gaglenn/lawoffice/coffee/ truth.html tells about the McDonalds coffee case. The fact is that McDonalds had many complaints about its dangerously hot coffee and did nothing about it. The "stupid people" (well, in this case "person") opened her coffee in a stopped car and received 3rd degree burns for it.

It is a standard of US law to control products which are damaging to their consumers and have a high addiction rate. But, what the tobacco companies were sued for was consistently and knowingly lying about the damage their products caused. You may be a bit young to remember this, but the US recently impeached a President because he lied about a personal problem. Logic insists that we be allowed to sue those who lie in a way that actively damages a huge number of people.

"Anti-gun nuts", who think of themselves as "parents of slaughtered children", are not suing the gun manufacturers because their kids were shot. They are asking the US government to mandate simple, cheap and effective safety controls. These protections are just like the safety features now mandatory in cars, childrens toys, medicines, and packaged foods.

The only real difference in today's political climate is that 6-digit slashdot fanboys are allowed to shoot their mouths off in public.

Electric autos date to the beginning of auto manufacture, they have been around since the 1830s.

Electric Street car lines were, quite famously, schemed out of existence by General Motors throughout the 20th century.

The fact is that personal, hyper-mobility, fueled by ICE is a product of the hubris of Pro-Over-Consumption Capitalism*. The personal ICE auto is a serious problem (environmental, resource dedication, sprawl, land-use, etc etc) and History will see the 20th century's affection for the Auto with very scournfull eyes... we are making mistakes today (and in hear history/future) that are going to cost us all very dearly in times to come.

*My pet idea is that American Plutocrats had to warp the West into mindless consumers -- and sell them the idea that it is their right to consume -- in order to drive the the needless creation of material wealth, in order to "destroy" Communism. This ethos, that it is a Human Right to have everything one pleases -- at any cost -- will, in time run us into the ground. A counter meme needs to be born that will snap people out of the wage-slavery/consume-us-all-to-death loop... unfortunately, it looks like the rest of the planet is about to try and emulate the "Success" of NAmerica/Western Eurpoe... its going to be fun to watch as we realize there isnt enough $WHATEVER to go around. Bottom Line: America has convinced the world's people that their ConsumerRich Lifestyle(TM) is the lifestyle to want. What is the planet going to do when it realizes they *ONLY* live in poverty *because* America lives as it does? Happiness cannot be bought. Not everyone can live like NAmericans --wait for the fireworks when everyone realizes this.

yet still remaining portable

yeah right!