Yeah, "ill fated" indeed. How about "amazingly resilient and long lived" instead? These two missions have been amazing, lasting well beyond what they could have possibly hoped for at launch.

Hmm - totally not my experience in Portland. For $19/month (subsidized by my employer) I have a 15-25 minute door to door commute by MAX. It costs $5/day to park near the office and about 15 minutes to drive in through morning traffic past 3 school zones. So on my fourth work day of the month I'm ahead. With Portland it all depends on 1) understanding the system and how to use Google Transit and 2) living someplace near a MAX stop. We paid a bit more for our house and sold one car - basically a wash over the long haul.

Exactly. I have an eight year old. He has access to his own account on our Mac and (at least partial) internet access via the Wii. Mac OSX comes with a variety of parental controls, some of which are enabled on his account. I've explained what the controls are, what they do, and why - about 20% of which he probably understands. I've not limited the Wii with the understanding that if he misuses it (buys games without permission) that it can be locked down. The idea is to let him run till he pushes the limits - then expand them in a rational way. If he wants to exceed the boundaries he knows that he can ask. I'm setting up a couple of old computers with linux and we're planning to explore that together. Basically, until he's ready to wander around town on his own he's not ready to wander the Internet without some filtering.