Completely agreed. Clicked Palm's "learn more" link and just about fell over laughing when I got a pretty page that said "Thinking ahead is a beautiful thing. Coming soon." That smacks of a subtle revolt of marketing drones told to hype vaporware.

Palm's banking on the goodwill that adheres to its name while signaling a complete change in direction. Typical. Palm had an identity crisis for nearly a decade, with dozens of hardware licensees and more than 100% turnover of its technical staff. Forget about your favorite PalmOS apps. They won't run on a modern OS and most were written by shops way too small to work with major carriers. Whether or not thinking forward is beautiful, time's run out for the Palm legacy.

Which just goes to show that the author didn't do his research on O'Neill colonies. O'Neill was a physicist, he knew the issues and addressed them (two cylinders tethered together, the agricultural ring, etc image here).

Actually, the author mentions all this. Besides, O'Neil was a particle physicist, not a rigid-body dynamicist, and even the mighty experts screw up now and then, as Explorer 1's flat spin illustrates.

And, of course, they do have constant dynamical control.

My original point exactly (though "do" is a pretty strong word for something that was never built). Living in an O'Neill colony would be like living in a tall building that depended on a complicated Rube Goldberg assembly of weights, chains and computer controllers to keep it balanced on a sharp point. I'd rather live somewhere that didn't collapse at the first glitch.