Several years ago Specialized tested the commuter-bike idea in the United States with a European-inspired Globikeoyager, a bike that came with a rack, chain guards, lights and fenders -- the sorts of accessories that racing cyclists abhor as encumbrances.
Most of his life, Reagan conceded, he had seen international organizations like the United Nations as an encumbrance, as "debating societies" and hotbeds of hostility toward America.
It also realizes that those of us who choose to be mobile require as little encumbrance as possible, thus the love of converged devices.
In Reagan's administrations, scorn for treaties and international organizations as an encumbrance on American power was rife, but not dominant.
"He makes it quite plain that he views older faculty members as an encumbrance," said Richard C. Hatch, 63, a chemistry professor who has been on the faculty since 1962.
Although, for much of his premiership, Mr Brown seemed to regard it as an encumbrance he reluctantly inherited from his gung-ho predecessor, he has recently made a better fist of explaining Britain's bloody deployment in Helmand.
English labour leaders found they could make many practical advances by cooperating with the Liberal Party and, regarding Marx's rhetoric as an encumbrance, resented his charge that they had "sold themselves" to the Liberals.
The greatest obstacle to this state of perfection is, of course, the poor, whose demands upon the state have always been seen as an encumbrance to its sublime mechanism.
Unlike Fischerspooner, they don't seem to regard writing songs as an encumbrance: singer Jake Shears may be wearing a troubling pair of trousers that begin about six inches below his navel, but he also has a fantastic falsetto voice.
