So what then? People in cities decided they'd rather walk and people in the suburbs decided they'd rather drive? The two-wheeled device was supposed to transport people at the rate of 12.5-miles an hour, using little gyroscopic sensors to sense the body's most subtle leans and turns. It was so easy! Mall cops would ride like the wind! Anyone could use it! Except George Bush. 

So what went wrong? No one could conquer the task of redesigning roadways? No one could get over how idiotic the thing looked? Who knows. Point is, it went from modern-day Model T to modern-day Edsel in just a few years. Steve Kemper captured the whole ordeal in his book, Code Name Ginger. Quite the scintillating read.  

Only about 30,000 were sold, and most of them are probably in Connecticut garages gathering dust next to all your still-in-the-box Bar Mitzvah gifts. Here the Segway's inventor, Dean Kamen, talks about some of the reasons why he thinks the thing bellyflopped:

Anna Jane Grossman has joined us for a few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

The deal with Starz that gives Netflix (and us) streaming access to newer movies apparently arched a lot of eyebrows, and even Netflix admitted it's gonna have to start getting permission directly for studios—probably paying more for the movies. It's also gotta fight the entrenched window system, the strange path a movie follows from theatrical release to DVD to HBO to cable, which is how movie studios continue to pull profits out of a movie long after it leaves the big screen.

BusinessWeek makes it clear it's not gonna be easy. But that just means I'll be watching fewer movies. [BW]

This is apparently an unaired clip fromThe Real World/Road Rules Challenge and the gal teaching everyone the implant-detection trick supposedly had one of her implants bust at some point. Youch! While I feel sorry for her, this is still one party trick that I can't wait to try out. [Jezebel]

We should mention, the clip comes from an unconfirmed source, but everything about the system is reminiscent to Natal to us—we should say, Natal running a title in early beta. The control scheme seems simultaneously intuitive and awkward in what we're assuming is a proof-of-concept, the user repositioning their view by moving the screen with their hand.

Still, while the verdict may be out on how well Natal will handle first person shooters, it's pretty darn cool to see a player control a complex game without a controller between them and the screen. And if you were playing an FPS involving the manipulation of a variety of objects beyond mere guns (imagine grabbing a key, crowbar or, heck, even a flower) what's now just a novelty could become something much more compelling.

The Coast Guard evacuated the crewman from a unnamed US Navy Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine. The submarine was cruising through an undisclosed location off the the coast of Washington, on September 29, 2009. They called the Coast Guard at 5:50PM, and the Jayhawk helicopter intercepted the submarine at 7:12PM, picking up the crewman, and moving him to the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon.

I'm talking on my Bluetooth
making deals and shit
no cords (?) are clashing
so my hands are free to knit.

Sold. [Obamapacman]

If you want to rap along to what these boys are calling "a Mac fanboy's anthem about Apple culture and products," here are the words:

(Shortayyy) Ahh shit!
Get your laptops ready, it's about to go down
Everybody on YouTube, watch the f***in screen
But stay on this muthaf***in page
We runnin this - let's go

I'm on a Mac, I'm on a Mac
Everybody look at me
Cause I'm clickin on a Mac
I'm on a Mac, I'm on a Mac
Take a good hard look at the muthaf***in Mac!

I'm on a Mac, muthaf***a, take a look at me,
Straight iPhone'in hard, got the 3G
Bumpin iTunes, CoverFlow to be exact
You can't stop me muthaf***a, cause I'm on a Mac!
Eat a virus bro
I'm on a Mac Pro
We rockin 8 cores hard
Watch the screen go
I got my SuperDrive
And my mighty mice-es
I'm pluggin girls
You at work, pluggin in devices
I'm on a tandem fixie
And a 64-bit
Friends are jealous
Cause Parallels can run their sh*t
But this ain't P.C.,
this is real as it gets
I'm on a Mac, mutherf***er
don't you ever forget!
I'm on a Mac and,
it's runnin fast and,
I bought a neopreen green scuba sleve sham
I'm the king of the Jobs, on a Mac for real
If you're on a PC, then you're not C.E.O.

Get the f*** up, this Mac is real!
F*** a Zune, I'm on a Mac, motherf***a!
F*** right click, multi-touch, motherf***a!
I'm on iChat with my boys, motherf***a!
These turtlenecks ain't cheap, motherf***a!
Hey, y'all, now I'm an Apple whiz
I never need to learn what a driver is
Gonna say goodbye to all viruses
Like a Nano in pink, anything is possible!
Yeah, never thought I'd be on a Mac
It's like a streamlined good-for-you crack
Wozniiiaaaaak, look at me ooohhhh

I'm on a Mac, I'm on a Mac
Take a good hard look at the muthaf***in Mac!

Yeah, this is almost amusing enough to make me want to order a muthaf****in Mac despite it not being the best time to shop for those. [Thanks, Peter!]

There are a lot of questions posed by this video. Is the excavator stranded? Is this just a group of people making the best of a messy, annoying situation? Or was it placed there intentionally, as a part of some kind of perennial South Carolinian tradition; a sacred coming of age ritual known in the local dialect as gittin'r done? Lastly, when can I try this?

Search as I may, I can find no answers. Just more questions. [Break]

Not a lot of details are available on the little guy's performance, other than that it seems to be number four in a series and that it got a surprising 9.6 from the Russian judge. [Robot Dreams via Bot Junkie]

Geeeeeenius. [Star Wars Blog]

And if the answer is yes, do you sext—send naked pictures of yourself or receive them from other people—often? Or did you just sext once? Perhaps you prefer other remote sex practices, like video sex? Sex chat? Maybe classic phone sex? What about beeper sex?

Here's my answer: I started having phone sex when I was 16. Yes, my then-girlfriend-later-wife-laterer-ex-wife and I were very precocious, and we didn't have enough with sneaking to dark corners to do very naughty things in high school. Then we moved into email sex, then chat sex. Phone sex was my favorite, however, and I only tried video sex a couple of times, much later, when the technology was good enough (good as in "Macs with cameras built in and iChat AV"). The last time I tried video sex it definitely won over my phone sex experiences. Sext, on the other side, has never been very exciting. Exciting, yes, but more like a preamble of the real thing.

Whatever your favorite remote sex practice is, don't watch this video first or you will lost all your sexual appettite. Or maybe you will get it. It can go either way, really.

Write your answers in the comments. [Video via Obsolete]

If you're unfamiliar with the Ambilight technology, it's a backlight system in some Phillips televisions where the color of the screen is transmitted to LEDs behind the television set, so that the background lighting matches the color on the screen. Fans of the technology claim it reduces eyes strain and enhances the theater experience.

DIYer Fun3 wanted to recreate the effect on his television. His solution was to wire an Arduino to a series of LED strips and and control the color by a USB cable hooked up to his HTPC. Check out the video below to see it in action.

Check out his site for schematics, code, and a ton of tips and tricks for calibrating your LEDs to your home theater. If you've experimented with back lighting your home theater—color changing or otherwise—let's hear about it in the comments.

Some of the shots look like they're close, but all I can think about is how fucked we are when the Terminator thing goes down and all we have are sparklers. Videos like this make me think the liberal middle class (me) should think again about the NRA and shotguns. [Pasqualy]

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire was, as I recall, the only thing people watched on TV in 2000. The one-liners were usable in so many situations. Is that your final answer? Do you want to phone a friend? How did we say these things before this show began? We must have had a really good system of grunts and gestures.

Regis Philbin, man. What a hot piece of manmeat. Yum. But you know what really used to get me off? The fact that, after shelling out thousands of pennies for the PS1 version of the game, Reege had no qualms about reminding me that I was not a REAL millionaire.

"We have it in the company vault, but that's as far as it goes," he says. Do you think that ABC still has a million dollars in the company vault? It'd be worth what now...like $300,000? Philbie continues: "You're only a pretend millionaire. Do you see the difference?" Ooh baby. A man putting me down? I'm getting all sweaty just thinking about it. I mean, I was all, "I won! I'm rich!" and then Regis was all, "No you're not! " and I was all, "Oh right, I have two maxed-out credit cards and have had nothing but Annie's Mac and Cheese for the last week. And I am living at my dad's and fighting with my brother about bathroom time. But please, Regis: Tell me a bit more about how pathetic I am. Hold on—wait, first let me get a drink. Waiter? Tap water, please. Neat. Now Regis, please go on. I'm glad we had this talk."

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

According to the YouTube credits, the script for this tale was a group effort by Comics & Cartoons, a 4chan community, but nevermind the script, I don't think the story would've been the same without the fantastic imitation of Raw Shark. [Thanks, Matt!]