One surprisingly bike-friendly city is Phoenix, which offers several hundred miles of off-road bike paths. And there may be only one train line, but it does go to the airport.

Something tells me that even if there were snow removal on the bikeways, they're going to be deserted in the winter. And when it rains. Not exactly my idea of a commuter traffic reliever.

"If a Scotsman commits rape in France, he may be tried in England."

No true Scotsman would commit rape in France.

"how do I get to be a multinational corporation so I can tell local authorities to fuck off too?"

France is free to make it illegal for its citizens to use Google. This would be the kind of money pit bureacrats love, like British TV licensing.

Let Paris implement its own Grand mur de la France, behind which it can spend what it takes on a search engine with a Forget Me feature.

My point is that Sri Lanka does not have Albuquerque's ideal ballooning wind pattern, so the envisioned usage for broadband distribution is going to be even more problematic.

You're going to blow up a planet of dyslexics?

""Crappy power" is normal. Manufacturers need to design for that. "

Get a UPS.

First, you have to be really lucky to find a place that has directly opposig winds at different nearby altitudes. This is what makes Albuquerque such a favorite place for ballooning.

Then...what happens to your broadband signal as the balloon changes altitude while whiffling all over the place trying to keep station?

Especially because those were the days when any error in a Windows app would cause Windows itself to terminate by "dumping to DOS." You would never know what caused the termination, since there was no longer a Windows environment in which to display the message, just that cryptic little blinking C:>.

Had I thought to buy a share of Apple when that happened instead of beating my head on the desk like everyone else, I would be a brazillionaire now.

But now imagine if all your computer interaction before Win 3.1 had been on the command line?

The hapless Segway would have been hero technology had it first been marketed to those handicapped who can stand but not walk. It would be intermediate tech between fully mobile and chairs, which take you out of the eye-contact world of the normally upright.

In the same way, Glass could have been introduced as a niche product for stock traders and surgeons who need some HUD information in their peripheral vision while performing a task that they want others to look in on. Instead of sneering at Glass, hipsters would be vying to get their hands on "surgeon glasses" to impress their dates.

Lower cost option for Comic Store Guy: An iPhone in his shirt pocket, with just the lens peeking out.

You're describing a special purpose vehicle, the kind which is often customized for some job. If we move away from the everybody-owns-a-car model, the first type of vehicle to be affected will be the commuter jellybeans you take to work every day. If you can set up a standing order for a rental to be available at time X every morning at your home address, and if you could fire up an app at work to call a car for 30 minutes from now, a lot of people would gladly move from ownership to a subscription rental model. All idle cars could be kept at the community solar farm, charging away until calls come in, absorbing the midday generation surge; at night they would sit at the same place, giving back any extra charge to the Smart Grid for the evening's local usage.