You never think about it, and yet every time you attach a photo or a Word document, or practically anything else to an email message, you’re using it.

It was created by Nathaniel Borenstein, a computer researcher who, 20 years ago, worked for Bellcore, the research arm of the Baby Bell telephone companies. At the time, no one really gave much thought to the idea that email could or even should comprise any more than basic text messages, and when attachments were involved, incompatible formats caused the kind of headaches that we would consider unacceptable today. Curiously obsessed with the evolution of email, Borenstein teamed up with Ned Freed, a fellow Internet pioneer, to write the MIME standard that is the backbone of email attachments today, supporting more than 1,300 types of files and enabling billions of email users to ignore any worries about compatibility among email programs.

The first message containing a MIME-encoded attachment was sent on March 11, 1992, and today the standard is used something like a trillion times a day. And no, he didn’t get rich (but he did once turn down a job offer from Steve Jobs). He’s now the chief scientist of Mimecast, a cloud-based email outsourcing company that just happens to riff on the name of the standard he helped create. I got a chance to talk to him by phone a few weeks ago. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

AllThingsD: Nathaniel, no one really thinks about MIME, but everyone uses it. Tell me how it happened. The story goes, you thought that one day you’d like to use email to receive photos of your grandkids. Is that true?

Borenstein: I can’t say it was my primary motivation, but it was an easy way to explain what I was thinking of. Email had been around since 1965 on time-sharing systems, and then moved to the fledgling Arpanet. Then more and more people outside the English-speaking world started to come up with a lot of incompatible ways to encode their email. At the same time, people wanted to send around files occasionally. The only way that was really safe to do it was to package up a file with a program called UUencode, which had multiple versions that weren’t always compatible. There were all these ad hoc things that people were doing for these complementary needs. In 1980, I was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon, and I was put in charge of maintaining an email program. It was just a job at first. Then we got some Unix machines. I thought I could do a better job by rewriting the email program. And I was also in charge of running an email system. It became sort of a hobby. Then, later, after I finished my dissertation, my adviser asked me to write what he described as the world’s best email programs. Suddenly my career was my hobby.

So what was it you were asked to work on?

It was Carnegie Mellon’s Andrew Project, which was intended to envision the next generation of computing environments for campuses. What was really interesting then was that it had very advanced — for that time — multimedia capabilities. And so we had a chance to make multimedia work. There were a few programs with multimedia that came before, but we had the chance to get it into people’s hands. And then something interesting happened. Steve Jobs came to visit. This was in the days that he was running NeXT. [Jobs founded NeXT after leaving Apple in 1985, and ran it until he sold it to Apple in 1996. -Ed.] He came to the campus, and a light went off in his mind when he saw the mail system. He had not completely gotten email until he saw what we could do with it, and so he tried to hire our entire team. And he got none of us. None of us wanted to go to work for NeXT.

Why was that? Was it about Steve, or about NeXT?

I’m not sure we all had the same reasons. In my case, it was that I had heard from other people that working for him was difficult. I have enormous respect for him, because he was one of the captains of our industry. But I had a feeling that if you went to work for him and you had a disagreement with him, you lost. It was that simple.

And let me guess: He built email into the NeXT operating system anyway?

His team built NeXTMail, which looked a lot like Andrew did. In fact, if you use Apple’s Mail.app on the Mac, you’re using something that looked a lot like Andrew did. But he did something interesting. He created a way for people to send files around. And so you had two communities of users on NeXT and on Andrew who couldn’t send files to each other. So after I left Carnegie Mellon, I went to work for Bellcore, which was the research arm of the Baby Bell phone companies. My job was as a researcher, and my mandate was to work on things that would encourage the use of bandwidth. I thought I was done working on mail. Then I started noticing these problems with compatibility, plus I had an idea for something I called active messages. And Bellcore was a very heterogeneous computing environment. There were all these Unix hackers, and each person had their favorite email program — I counted more than 20 in use. And I wanted them all to be able to read these active messages. So what I did was start patching them all. That led to something I called Metamail, which would be triggered by a header in the email that would then call on any one of a number of other programs. So if you received a JPG image in Atomic Mail, which was one of the programs in use at the time, it would display the JPG in Atomic Mail.

So this led to the MIME standard how?

Metamail was already in use when the work that led to MIME started up. I got involved with some efforts at IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force]. I got introduced to Einar Stefferud, and he became a mentor of mine, and introduced me to Ned Freed, who became my co-author on MIME. I was worried about email and multimedia compatibility, and Ned was working on email gateways — the problems of translating messages between different email realms — because we weren’t all running SMTP back then. Stef thought we should work together. Now, Bellcore had allowed me to take Metamail and contribute it to the public domain, or what we would now call open source, and so anyone was allowed to modify it. So every time there was a new draft of the MIME standard, I could update to support the new standard. So when the first public draft of the MIME standard was ready, I was ready with Metamail, and it was just picked up at an incredible rate. I wrote it for Unix, and three days after the release, someone had already adapted it for Microsoft DOS. That’s what told me I had a hit on my hands.

What about MIME made it flexible?

One of the reasons I think we were successful with it was the fact that we had an incomplete vision. Yes, I was thinking about pictures of grandchildren someday — I am a grandfather now, by the way — but I knew that there would be things coming that I couldn’t forsee, and I didn’t want the system we designed to have to be completely redesigned in order to accommodate the new things. That is why the MIME type system is so open. You just go to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and register a new MIME type. The original supported 16 MIME types, and when I checked a few years ago, we were up to 1,309 different supported file types. When I tried to explain why I wanted it to be open-ended, I tried to explain things that you could, at the time, just barely imagine. I had two examples — one was smell. I thought that one day you might be able to send files containing smells, and one day you might, but no one is really focused on it yet. The other was one I thought of almost as a joke. I proposed a MIME type for matter transport. I thought we could send matter around as an email attachment, and in a way, it came true. When you think about 3-D printing and the models for that, people are sending around schematics for 3-D objects that can then be printed. So open-ended is very good in a world where science fiction is quickly getting overtaken by reality.

You now work for a company called Mimecast. What do you do there?

The short tag line is that we do unified email services in the cloud. We take all the things that surround and administer your email, and everything except the basic core operation of it, we outsource to the core. We archive your email, we set policies about how and when it can be deleted. We do data-loss prevention. We do continuity and disaster recovery. Our BlackBerry users didn’t notice when the service went down last year. And I’m not the founder. A lot of people think I am, but I’m not. I just work for the company as its chief scientist. Once you get all those things in one place, there’s a lot of potential. You can do things that you couldn’t do before. I’ll give you just one example: Imagine you’re composing an email, and as you type, there’s a sidebar next to it. In the style of Google Instant, it becomes an implicit search query that searches both your email archive, but also, say, news stories. The point is that it might help you shape your message or change what you want to say in your email, who you want to say it to, or whether or not you want to say it at all. Having an email archive solves a very deep problem, which is organizational memory. Everyone wonders from time to time whether someone knows the answer to some question. The point is that the bigger an organization is, the more often it’s necessary to rediscover the same thing over and over. Having an email program that searches for things that might help you would go a long way toward solving this.

Here’s the Infographic on the history of MIME. Click to see it bigger:

Ahead of the dinner, Anderson stopped by my office to let me have a peek at his 10 predictions, and we talked them over a bit. All 10 are below, along with some comments from Anderson that emerged from our conversation.

Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”

What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”

As an example, he cites the collaboration between Nuance, the speech software company, and IBM, bringing the Watson computer of “Jeopardy” fame into the area of health care. “For the first time, the idea of evidence-based medicine won’t just be in a magazine article,” Anderson says. “A doctor will be able to pick up his phone and describe four symptoms, and find out what the likely diagnosis is, what the indications are. It’s fantastic.”

So here are those 10 predictions, with additional comments from Anderson:

1. TV becomes the new center of gravity in the tech universe. All the other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy. Microsoft’s attempt to integrate Kinect into TV is a strong if qualified success. Smart phone-TV integration software becomes a new category. Pad-TV integration becomes common.

“Apple will hustle to launch the next version of Apple TV, and it will be a roaring success and be seen as Tim Cook’s first great product success. But what it really will be is Steve’s last product.”

2. 2012 will see tectonic shifts in phone markets. “Nokia will fail to come back, which is pretty clear to everyone except the people in Finland.” Samsung, Anderson says, will retain its spot as the new global leader in mobile phones by volume, and will keep this crown despite the debut of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Meanwhile, Anderson says, Google will lose control over the Android operating system, mainly because unlicensed versions of Android will multiply in type and in installed base, especially in Asian countries. “It’s already a balkanized environment. Now Google loses control of the technology entirely. China is already running an unlicensed version of Android, and I think there will be more of that.”

Finally, the smartphone will finally emerge as the dominant category of wireless phone. “Why would you have anything else? And why would sellers of content and services want you to?” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a rich country or a poor country. This stuff is cheap.”

3. Clouds are for consumers, and for start-ups. Even as a large number of big companies move pilot projects onto external clouds, it will become clear that the real trend is for enterprise to stay away from clouds in all key areas, for reasons of both security and reliability.

“The cloud guys hate this because they want to sell to enterprises,” Anderson says. “But the security issues are becoming really intense. If you’re a CIO, it’s a terrible environment, and you’re a target, for sure, especially if you’re a company with a lot of intellectual property. I’m not implying that things like SAAS (software as a service) aren’t a big trend. But no one is going to put their valuable IP on the cloud.”

4. Security splits the tech world in two, finally getting attention from CEOs. Companies with real IP start to realize they have to “go big or go home” with their security response, and their spending on protecting their “crown jewels” rises dramatically.

5. Siri stuns the world. Siri, on Apple’s iPhone 4S, has sounded the arrival of Internet personal assistants, and the world will spend this year marveling at what Siri and its rivals can and cannot do — and what they can learn to do.

“I think we’ll see a bunch of these things,” Anderson says. “Siri will get much better. It will learn how you learn. We’ve never seen people have long-term relationships with machines before, but it will be a long-term relationship, and she will remember everything, but make good use of it. She will know you learn better by seeing than hearing, or that it takes three times to tell you something. All those things that you have to program today should be learnable. None of that has been done yet. That creates a real friendship. And I think we’re going to start seeing personal assistants not just for everyday life, but for professions like medicine or car repair. Instead of just having Siri be everything, there will be many Siris for different contexts.”

6. We enter the amazing world of Dave and HAL, as voice recognition comes of age. From hospital to car, mobile to home, Kinect to Siri, exercise to play, work to entertainment, remote control to direct action, from Microsoft to Apple, from Tellme to Nuance — the time has come for computers and humans to talk to each other. With lots of funny stories, big bloopers and amazing breakthroughs, humanity at the end of 2012 will be talking to machines in a normal voice, and it will not seem unusual, nor be the cause of unending frustration.

“The voice-recognition part is almost trivial,” Anderson says. “The important part is context-sensitive understanding. It used to be that all the researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to think that all you needed was more computing horsepower to do better at voice. It turned out that was wrong. It was right for a little while, but the real problem is context. And so, if you can build up that database where you can search it contextually for what to expect, that is where you get all the mileage.”

7. E-readers prosper, but pads continue to dominate what Anderson calls the “carry-along” market. Pads and tablets will come down in price and get closer to prices of e-readers. Meanwhile, Anderson says, Amazon’s Fire will move upmarket and evolve into a full-fledged tablet.

“If you look at the specs on the Fire, it’s a tablet, but it’s hobbled,” Anderson says. “So I think that this is part of the whole strategy: Come in and sell at a low price, and then later unveil a more complete tablet. Apple will stay ahead, though. A lot of people are asking me if Amazon will catch Apple, and the answer is no. The way it’s configured right now, there’s no way the Fire will catch up with the iPad.”

8. The consumption world explodes. Get ready for new devices, new content, new bundles, new connection techniques, new distribution channels, new aggregators, new tablets, new phones, new players, new self-published authors, new garage bands, new consumption models riding on social networks. There is nothing but high energy in the content consumer market. People are now ready to spend subscription money, and the publisher response will be huge. “It’s going to be a huge melee of stuff,” Anderson says. “We’ll invent more stuff to consume, and it will be very hard to figure out who the players are from week to week, and how they’re doing. They may not even know themselves.”

9. Governments and corporations focus on intellectual property as though it were their most prized asset. It is. This new global understanding leads to a reevaluation regarding giving critical IP away for nothing versus protecting it. The age of what Anderson calls “IP naïveté” is over, and the question of proper IP valuation is here.

What is IP naïveté? “When Jeff Immelt stood on the steps of the White House the day after he was named jobs czar, and handed the plans for GE’s most important jet-engine project to Hu Jintao in order to get the permission to be allowed to bid on maybe selling engines to China — that’s IP naïveté,” Anderson says. “Thinking that’s not going to come back and show up for sale in Houston from some Chinese company in about six months is IP naïveté.”

During 2012, he says, companies and countries will start valuing their intellectual property not for its replacement value, but for figures that are magnitudes larger. State-sponsored IP theft will shift from being considered a nuisance and more along the lines of an act of aggression.

10. Amazon gets it all. Between outdoing Wal-Mart online, to beating the booksellers and delivering groceries, and making new inroads in video streaming, Amazon will prove that one company can indeed have it all. Strong Kindle and Fire sales will only be icing on the cake.

While there are plenty of apps that simulate Warhol-esque pop art on the iPhone, a new app from the artist’s namesake museum takes things a step further, educating users on the true process used to create such images.

Like other filters, the Warhol D.I.Y. Pop app works with either a photo in one’s library or with an image taken from the iPhone. Unlike other apps and filters, though, the Warhol app takes users through the real-world tools and techniques used to create such images, mimicking the silkscreen process on the phone.

“If inspired by the existing Warhol-esque apps, it was only due to our disappointment in them,” museum communications manager Rick Armstrong told AllThingsD. “Without the human interaction and creativity the results are not very exciting. The fun educational opportunity to expose Warhol’s process along with user interaction and creativity was what interested and inspired the project for us.”

The app starts by allowing users to crop their photo. From there the app asks users to create a film positive of their image, then expose the silkscreen, create an underpainting and then pull a squegee over the top of the virtual silkscreen to finish the effect. With each step, more detail on how the real-world process works is only a click away. While much of the work on the iPhone is automated, it gives users a feel for the process they are emulating.

Tresa Varner, curator for The Warhol, said in a statement that she feels Warhol would have embraced and celebrated technology like the iPhone.

“He often said he wanted to be a machine,” Varner said in a statement. “In a 1960’s interview, Warhol was asked how he would meet the challenge of automation, and he replied, ‘By becoming part of it.’”

The Pittsburgh, Pa.-based museum teamed with nearby Carnegie Mellon University’s Professional Software Engineering Program to engineer the app, which took 14 months to create and is now available on the iPhone App Store. It is priced at $1.99, though it is being discounted to 99 cents for the launch.

In a note published on his Facebook profile, Agarwal said:

I am extremely inspired by the changes that Facebook has affected throughout the Internet ecosystem and how it has changed user expectations about great products. Our Platform has created a unique set of opportunities for building products on the foundations of the social graph. It will be the cornerstone of many future disruptions, some of which I hope to accelerate.

Agarwal’s projects have included Facebook newsfeed, search, ads, user commerce and services infrastructure. He said his last day would be Dec. 3.

Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu said via email, “After nearly five-and-a-half years, Aditya Agarwal has decided to leave the company. Aditya has been a key contributor since Facebook’s early days and while he’ll be greatly missed, we wish him all the best as he considers his next adventure.”

Agarwal did not specify what his next project will be. His wife, Ruchi Sanghvi, was Facebook’s first female engineer and left the company in August. (The two joined Facebook as a couple in mid-2005 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon.)

Agarwal is not Facebook’s only director of engineering; others with that title include Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and Robert Johnson.

Facebook has given employees the option to cash out some of their shares through secondary markets, and plus, early members of the team have at this point just been there a long time. Meanwhile Facebook has put new people, both hires and acqhires, in charge. As I wrote in a feature for GigaOM a few months ago:

Staying at a tech startup for more than four years–the default stock option vesting schedule–is a rare thing, but it seems notable that at 6-year-old Facebook, many early and influential employees have moved on, several of them recently. Facebook is an unusual employer, having been incredibly successful while steering clear of the public markets longer than expected. Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure.

Although it’s obviously hard to see your comrades leave, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive explanation for the stream of people leaving the company in an interview he gave about a year ago:

“We’re not pretending we’re building a company that hackers are going to want to work at forever,” Zuckerberg said, pointing to former employees like Steve Chen (who stayed at Facebook for only a short time before starting YouTube). Zuckerberg added his hope was to build a place where people could learn to build high-impact products–”a great hacker institution in the long term.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

BoomTown strives to bring readers the very best in internal memo decoding, and this one is just too good to pass up.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent a short memo to employees this afternoon about finally hiring someone to head the software giant’s lackluster digital efforts.

That someone, as this column reported earlier today before the official announcement, was former Yahoo (YHOO) tech star Qi Lu. He will become president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft (MSFT), right after the new year.

Thus, let us try to read between the lines:

What Steve wrote: From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 1:39 PM
To: Microsoft–All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: New Leader of Online Services Group

Search, advertising and online services are critical to Microsoft’s long-term strategy. To succeed, we need the right talent. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Qi Lu will join Microsoft as president of our Online Services Group. Qi will oversee all efforts in search, our online advertising platform, and all of our online information and communications services. Qi will join Microsoft on Jan. 5 and report to me.

Translation: Really, taking five months to pick someone to head Microsoft’s most critical arena for the future is not a long time. If you’re counting in dog years, that is! Woof!

But, I digress, we have a winner and, best of all, he’s from Yahoo, costing us $39.9 billion less than it would have cost to get Lu with the whole company.

What Steve wrote: Qi is one of the most respected technical minds in the industry. He comes to Microsoft after 10 years at Yahoo, where he most recently served as executive vice president of engineering for all of Yahoo’s search and advertising development efforts. Before joining Yahoo, Qi was a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. He has a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, and he holds 20 U.S. patents.

Translation: Did I mention that Lu is from Yahoo? Let me say it again: Yahoo. The YAHOO that refused to take our $31 a share offer. That Yahoo. The Yahoo where–at one time–engineers would never consider leaving the Jedi forces of Silicon Valley to join the Death Star.

Jerry Yang, I am your bother.

Also, did I mention 20 patents?

What Steve wrote: Qi’s combination of deep technical expertise, proven leadership capability and broad business knowledge is rare in our industry. There is no one better qualified to guide our work to reinvent search and online advertising.

Translation: By “reinvent,” I mean, stop the endless flow of cash out of Microsoft pockets, even as Google (GOOG) is minting money in the basement of that irksome Googleplex in the search business.

If Lu manages not to lose, say, $3.23 trillion dollars, I will consider it a job well done!

What Steve wrote: While I’m excited that Qi is joining Microsoft, I’m sorry to share the news that Brian McAndrews has decided to transition out of the company. Brian came to us with the acquisition of aQuantive in 2007. Since then, he has helped build a world-class business in online advertising that provides a solid foundation for future growth. I have great respect for the important contributions Brian has made to Microsoft, and I wish him the very best in the future.

Translation: OK, so I dragged my feet on this selection process long enough to make Brian feel really badly, given he wanted the job too.

But, he’s an “ad” guy and Microsoft’s track record with those who don’t consider pocket protectors the height of fashion is, shall we say, rocky.

But don’t feel bad for Brian–Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion last year, and he was CEO. You do the math.

Of course, it would be deeply ironic if Brian suddenly was in the running for the now-open Yahoo CEO job and I was facing him over the negotiating table over the search deal Microsoft has been salivating over, despite trying to seem only mildly interested.

Brian, honey, don’t take it personally that I went for the geek. It’s in my DNA.

What Steve wrote: On Monday at 4 p.m. Pacific Time, Qi will join me at Café RedWest for an Employee Town Hall. I encourage you to attend or to watch the webcast. If you have questions for Qi or me, please send them in advance to and we’ll try to answer as many as possible.

Steve

Translation: Free nachos and unintelligible discussions about algorithms for all!

So General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner says the company expects to have driverless cars on the road by 2018.

Now, I know the autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe SUV that GM developed with Carnegie Mellon University (pictured above) did win the Urban Challenge competition held last fall by the U.S. Defense Department’s research agency. And I know too that this is CES, an event founded on breathless pronouncements about the future of technology. But driverless cars on the road in another 10 years? Seems an irrationally exhuberant prognostication to me. But hey, when you’re the first auto executive ever to speak at the Consumer Electronics Show, you’ve got to come heavy, right?

And Wagoner came heavy, all right. He took the stage in a Chevy Volt, the gas/electric car GM debuted in Detroit last year. “The Volt is a powerful example of beauty and brains,” he said. “It looks on the outside and the technology under the hood is truly revolutionary. We’re now over a year into our production engineering for the Volt … and we’re moving as fast as we can to bring it to market.”

Wagoner went on to offer a brief overview of some new OnStar features–among them, “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown” and GM’s new collision-avoidance technology before moving on to flex-fuel vehicles. “There’s a huge opportunity to reduce the growth in oil consumption, oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Wagoner said. “And it lies in the fuel used by our cars and trucks. Ethanol offers tremendous potential here. … There are already many flex-fuel vehicles on the road right now that could be running on ethanol, if it were more readily available. … Now, if all of the flex-fuel vehicles that the major carmakers have already built–plus those that we’ll build over the next 10 years–were to run on ethanol, we could save 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually. … And that’s billion with a ‘B.’ “

And what of those autonomous vehicles Wagoner mentioned? Well, they’re still a ways off. But they’re coming (supposedly). And when (and if) they finally arrive, they’ll be God’s gift to terminal commuters. Said Wagoner, “Autonomous driving means that some day you’ll do your email, eat breakfast, read the newspaper–while commuting to work. Essentially, you could do all the things you do right now while commuting to work, except you could do them safely!”

So General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner says the company expects to have driverless cars on the road by 2018.

Now, I know the autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe SUV that GM developed with Carnegie Mellon University (pictured above) did win the Urban Challenge competition held last fall by the U.S. Defense Department’s research agency. And I know too that this is CES, an event founded on breathless pronouncements about the future of technology. But driverless cars on the road in another 10 years? Seems an irrationally exhuberant prognostication to me. But hey, when you’re the first auto executive ever to speak at the Consumer Electronics Show, you’ve got to come heavy, right?

And Wagoner came heavy, all right. He took the stage in a Chevy Volt, the gas/electric car GM debuted in Detroit last year. “The Volt is a powerful example of beauty and brains,” he said. “It looks on the outside and the technology under the hood is truly revolutionary. We’re now over a year into our production engineering for the Volt … and we’re moving as fast as we can to bring it to market.”

Wagoner went on to offer a brief overview of some new OnStar features–among them, “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown” and GM’s new collision-avoidance technology before moving on to flex-fuel vehicles. “There’s a huge opportunity to reduce the growth in oil consumption, oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Wagoner said. “And it lies in the fuel used by our cars and trucks. Ethanol offers tremendous potential here. … There are already many flex-fuel vehicles on the road right now that could be running on ethanol, if it were more readily available. … Now, if all of the flex-fuel vehicles that the major carmakers have already built–plus those that we’ll build over the next 10 years–were to run on ethanol, we could save 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually. … And that’s billion with a ‘B.’ “

And what of those autonomous vehicles Wagoner mentioned? Well, they’re still a ways off. But they’re coming (supposedly). And when (and if) they finally arrive, they’ll be God’s gift to terminal commuters. Said Wagoner, “Autonomous driving means that some day you’ll do your email, eat breakfast, read the newspaper–while commuting to work. Essentially, you could do all the things you do right now while commuting to work, except you could do them safely!”