Anyone who knows me knows about my not-so-well-hidden penchant for Segways. The self-balancing personal transportation device is, for me, half retro-futurist fantasy and half ridiculous human tragedy. Regardless of how you feel, for something that tech-prophet Steve Jobs predicted would be “as big a deal as the PC,” the Segway has fallen pretty spectacularly short of the hype. The only people who seem to really use the Segway are tourists and law enforcement and it doesn’t like that will change any time soon.
Except maybe in China, where these pictures show Chinese military police training on combat Segways in anti-terrorism drills for the upcoming summer Olympics.


For more about Segways, read the “Segway Wikipedia page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway and for more about this, read Kevin Kelly’s “Street Use blog”:http://www.kk.org/streetuse/archives/2008/07/guns_on_segways.php.