You're kidding-right, Mac?

Not about your not being able to connect to the NKC Library's printer-I believe that-but that other thing. I mean, actually taking a printer along with you? Who'd do that in this day and age? Really, when you think about it, printers are so twentieth-century. So what if you can't commit something before your very eyes to paper right at that very moment? Just save it to your hard drive or bookmark the webpage it's on, then if you still feel the need to help boost the stock price of the inkjet/laser toner manufacturers once you get home, have at it.

Dollars to doughnuts says that's what virtually all Wi-Fi users are doing now. And I'll lay odds that outside of a few curious geeks like you and me, not enough people will miss being able to use that library printer to justify their fixing the connection if it is broken, or maintaining it for very long if it isn't.

Still, your suggestion does have a rather romantic appeal to it. Sort of takes me back a decade or so to the days of my first laptop, and the outrageously expensive mobile printer I bought myself as a birthday present to complement it. I left home with it a grand total of twice in all that time. But, of course, it's not actually making use of a capability like mobile printing that's important. It's knowing that you can, even if today's desktop printers aren't much bigger or heavier than yesteryear's portables, and...gee, you know, I'll bet that this little desktop inkjet I use nowadays, if I folded the tray up, just might fit into that old tote bag of mine.