Excellent idea! I definitely will use it. It's a great contrast to Kurzweil and other techno-utopians. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestion, but the amount of reading I can assign them is limited. I've been thinking of another David Brin story/excerpt, The Smartest Mob. I agree he's a great writer.

What I think was meant by the OP's clumsy remarks about "kids, women, and underrepresented groups" is that App Inventor has proven successful at attracting members of underrepresented groups. Some successful outreach programs based on App Inventor include:

• The Technovation Challenge (high school girls from low-income families)
• Youth APPLab (African-American children and teens)
• Youth Radio's Mobile App Lab (Oakland-based young people)

The claim isn't that members of these groups can't learn traditional CS, just that they've generally chosen not to.

That's a stupid comparison. The two products fill different niches. Both Open Office and Google Docs are standard tools at Google, where I work*, and they're used for different tasks. If I need to do complex editing on a document that nobody else will modify, I use Open Office. If I want to have a shared doc that doesn't require fancy features, I use Google Docs. For other tasks, I use other tools, like emacs. Comparing OO and Google Docs makes no sense. *I do not speak for Google.

limited driving range

The 120+ mile range of the gen 2 EV1 (and 4 hour charge time) is admittedly not good for road trips, but it's perfectly good for most commutes.

poor acceleration

You have obviously never driven an EV1. VROOOOOOM!

costlier maintenance

Electric cars are much simpler than ICE cars, so aside from the inevitable glitches of v1.0 of anything, there are far fewer points of failure in an EV. The EV1 doesn't even have a transmission. Admittedly, batteries are expensive and have a finite lifetime, but the same is true for many car parts that EVs lack. It isn't obvious to me that the total maintenance cost should be higher.

weaker car

If by weaker you mean less safe, the EV1 has good stats there. If you mean less power, all I can say is try one and see (but hurry up, before GM crushes them all). VROOOOOM!

If there were a market there, or even one that could be easily developed, the major car manufacturers would have pounced on it (esp. those that are desperate for growth).

Unfortunately, that's not true. First, there is a market. Despite putting essentially no effort (some might say negative effort) into promoting the EV1, GM has always had a long waiting list for the car. They simply never produced enough to meet demand. Now, despite having drivers who like the cars well enough to extend the leases and assume all maintenance costs, or buy them outright, they are taking the cars back and crushing them.

Second, from the perspective of short-term profitablity, it may make sense for car makers to avoid selling EVs even though there is a market for them, since, by selling EVs, they are competing against their own (profitable) product line. On the assumption that someone who does not buy an EV will by an IC car, the most profitable thing to do is not sell EVs until forced to do so by regulation or competition. This does not even require an active conspiracy, just a small enough number of car makers, each doing what maximizes short-term profits. The American car makers have been doing the very minimum to conform to California law, and give every appearance of sabotaging their own efforts, to create the false impression that there is no demand. The Japanese manufacturers, rather than whining, are selling the cars. Does this remind anyone of the 1980s?

What we have instead is a handful of companies that have made pretty damn impressive efforts...but they are all ultimate failures because there are not enough buyers.

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist: that's what they want you to think. We will probably never know what the actual demand for the EV1 was, since GM is not about to tell us how long the waiting lists were, but reports from would-be buyers suggests that the demand was high, and one survey suggests that as many of 33% of California car buyers are interested in buying EVs.