In your timeline post, you mentioned that Gryphon and MegaZone probably caught wind of Vision early on through mecha-spotter blogs. If HL was just going to reboot, are there any "modern" technologies that you would extrapolate into the HL era, specifically technologies that didn't exist in the 90's? Blogs? P2P file sharing? MP3 players? Tivo?

I know it's kind of goofy to expect people with implanted cybernetics to still be carrying about 10GB iPods, but between 1991 and 2000 cultures have shiifted, modern technologies have changed how writers view the future. My best example of what I'm getting at comes from a Neal Stephenson interview from a couple of years back; the interviewer (reporter?) asked him if he still thought data havens, ala the one in Cryptonomicon, were a good idea. Stephenson said that given that people have iPods and flash memory cards nearing 1GB, one localized data haven was kind of redundant, any secret information that needed to be preserved would likely already circulating amongst people.

It's kind of a nitpicky thing, but when you mentioned blogs, I got curious. So, in short, much like the ironic Pump-Up sneakers, are there any consumer gadgets you like now that didn't exist in 1991 and might they find their way into HL?