Theres plenty of cheap "hybrid" bikes (think mountain bike with thinner road tires) out there with flat bars that work great in the city. Or you can just pick up an old mountain bike off craigslist/thriftstore and put road tires on it.

The problem is most consumers get fat tire mountain bikes with dual suspension for the same reason they get SUVs, they think they're getting more for their money. Why get a small, light bike with thin tires, when for the same price you get a mean all terrain machine that'll be sure to impress the ladies.

If there were side by side road tests, people would pick the road/hybrid hands down; and then go and buy the fat tire mountain bike or the single speed cruiser anyway based on looks alone, never to ride again.

Believe me, most drivers in the US do identify cyclists. They identify them as "One of those poor people/hipsters/weirdos is riding in the road like he's a car." And then promptly lay on the horn screaming obscenities while frothing at the mouth. In all my life I'd never seen road rage until I started using the "shared use" lane. And no, I don't wear a helmet or fancy shoes and would not like any mandates requiring either.

Except "The American Dream" would have to change first.

The goal of most people is the big house in the 'burbs (cause that's the cheapest) with a big lawn and 2 cars and multiple "toys". Anything less is seen as being "poor" and "unsuccessful".

Never mind that once out there, you have no choice but to drive everywhere. Never mind that your choices for food are limited to the processed crap in a frozen box (due to the cost of that big home and all those vehicles and your shrinking wages). Never mind the stress and worry caused by your increasing inability to keep up with your debt.

Here we are in 2012 and there's still a stigma attached to public transit. And of course we all know riding bikes is for hipsters and kids.

Thanks, greed, you gave (some of) us a great run, but now we're all screwed.

I think you mean "Announce Chuck Norris is aware of the asteroid, and watch it break itself to pieces out of pure respect."

You forgot the qualifier of "eventually". Also acceptable would be "maybe". There's plenty of good shows I've found on netflix that won't see the light of day on BBCA.

Like Star Trek: TNG? Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? Battlestar Galactica? Gordon Ramsay cursing at people?

Add in that it's only available with a giant expensive bundle of crap cable/sat subscription, and is not even HD for most providers. And then the biggest insult, having to watch the few good shows cut down and defaced with horribly targeted ads.

I would gladly pay to access an iplayer app on my roku. Not quite the $18/month that UK residents do, but make it $10 and I'm there...

Except more and more people want that touch control (with bluetooth keyboard/mouse/gamepad as needed) and with easy ways to put the image on any screen you want (Wi-Di, etc.) What's left?

I would love to detach my display from my macbook and use it as a tablet, and dock it when I need the keyboard. Granted, thats not shirt pocket size, but with multi-core Ghz smartphones already in production, how long until the desktop is truly dead for 90% of the population? I know several people already that don't even have one, not even a laptop. Everything they need is available in their phone or tablet.

Which was the whole point of the public option. You can pay some 3rd party for-profit corporation that you have zero say with, or you can hop on the public option where you and other citizens have a say in how it's run. But no, that's evil socialism... We can't have our government providing basic services for our citizens, that'd make too much sense. From what I can tell, anything that doesn't make the richest citizens even richer is now socialism.

Stupid shortsighted corporate greed and personal "I got mine, screw the rest of you" greed will be our downfall.

Piracy isn't a solution, though. The (exaggerated) point made by Cap'n DB Emmanuel is valid. If no one pays, no more (overly-hyped/produced/shitty) content.

The main problem is this idea that cord-cutter = pirate. I cut the cable cord because I didn't want to pay for a ton of ads and crappy channels I don't watch. But instead of piracy, I moved to the netflix+hulu+espn3 on my xbox. I pay a fair price to see the content I want, when I want. I'm not happy about the ads on hulu, but it's infinitely better than cable/sat where just under half of the "content" is advertising. And to get the equivalent functionality from cable would cost 3-4 times as much.

Soon, every "premium" channel will be selling it's own subscription available on whatever device we want. I'd pay for HBO Go right now, but not while it requires a cable package. HBO wants to get paid, and if they can cut out the middlemen, they will. The cable/sat providers won't give us à la carte, but the content providers eventually will.

Nutrition info is on everything, it hasn't helped. It's on bottled water. It's at the counter at burger king. We all know for a fact that drinking large amounts of sugar water is incredibly bad for us, yet we still do it. If education has failed, and the healthcare industry has failed (MDs are just pill dispensers now) then all we have left is legislation. And for those who scream "personal responsibility!", the unhealthier we all get, the higher the cost of health care for everyone. It's not about big scary government control of your life, it's about regulation of harmful substances.

Even if they do "open the lines", they still own the lines. They'll still fear accountability and still mandate throttling/packet inspection.

The only way to get around this is if these new players lay their own lines or come up with a wifi/sat service that actually works. But then those still need to connect to backbones owned by someone else. And eventually the media corporations will lobby hard enough to get all their dirty work done upstream.

As for competition and price gouging, just look at the current cell providers to see where it's all going. Contracts, high monthly rates, fees out the wazoo and being nickel and dimed to death for every little bit that traverses their network. Not concerned? Two words for you: "Canadian Data."

Or possibly more lobbying of the Democrats is required because Republicans are "Corporate Profits First" by nature...

My T-Mobile plan is $20/month less than it would have been if I had gone the subsidized phone contract route. As far as I know, they are the only ones doing it, and the last time I was in a store, they were pushing it heavily.

I feel the pain. Which is why I was one of the few people to elect to not telecommute when it was offered. Now I get to go to the office and enjoy the peace and quiet and actually get some stuff done without having to get in at 3am. Strangely all the annoying people chose to "work" from home...

Same here. I originally got a zune because at the time (2006) it was that or the ipod if you wanted a large capacity player. Yes I know there were other devices, but the device and interface design were crap on all of them. I didn't care for the ipod; it looked awful and the interface was primitive at best (at the time), so I got a black 30GB zune. Loved the hell out of it and genuinely missed it after it died in a fire. I tried the touch model and it was ok, but the HD was perfect in form and function. The all black 16GB still gets my top vote as sexiest hardware ever. I always found the software to be good and intuitive and pretty, without being a resource hog. Only issue I ever had was that it was Windows only.

But, sadly, my HD doesn't make calls. so it gathers dust mostly; while my android phone (thats not locked in to anything), is well used.

This is it exactly. Every time I hear a climate change debate raging, I look out the window and contemplate the ring of brown foulness circling the valley I live in and wonder why we're not talking about that. Forget what rainfall in the Sudan will be in 25 years, we need to get the mainstream focus on what burning fossil fuels is doing to us right now.