After all these years of sending emails with very long line wrapping it's interesting that I finally *get it* about why that's an incredibly rude practice.   I haven't ever owned a cell phone, but thinking about getting one (and reading via a short-width text screen) all of a sudden makes me realize (how in long multiply threaded email histories) that makes it much harder to follow (by only having intermittent > every n lines.   In my defense the long lines try to insure that code I paste (even java code with HorriblyLongMethodAndClassNames) won't be wrapped when viewed on the other end.

The thing is, line length is just one instance of many (encoding, line ending char(s), il/legal chars in filenames, etc...) that cause a huge class of computer "failures".   Mostly these things aren't too hard to solve once they're identified (of course there are exceptions), but finding out "where" they are in a complex case can be non-trivial.