Word: gadget
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...debate about whether or not the Internet is the "fastest growing mass medium in history" is absurd. Personally, I'd settle for being the second fastest growing mass medium in history. No one argues that web penetration has been faster than another little gadget known as the telephone. The telephone took five decades to reach 90% penetration. Mass mediums don't go away. That's why they're called mass mediums...
...slippery-slope argument. On cloning, I'm in favor of ending it now before we have three grandmothers at Thanksgiving dinner, all faintly resembling Martha Stewart. On privacy, you don't have to be Ray Bradbury to be concerned that soon every membrane will be permeable by some gadget recording, taping, filming or just watching you. Coloradans are no doubt pleased that the state plans to start using three-dimensional "face recognition" photos for driver's licenses in order to prevent identity-theft crimes. Yet states sometimes sell their databases to anyone who can afford to pay for them...
...WONDER Move over, Palm, there's a new boy in town. It's called Cyberboy, and it's the e-gadget to end all e-gadgets. For $349 you get a full-fledged PDA with a built-in digital camera, a webcam, an MP3 player, an FM radio and a voice recorder--all in a case the size of a cigar box. Cyberboy is made in Taiwan, but it will be available in the U.S. within the month. For more information, check out www.cmcia.com...
...BRAIN Where does James Bond keep the keys to his Aston Martin? Chances are they're dangling from a remarkable (and at $14, unusually inexpensive) gadget called the Merconnet Magic-I Keychain Databank. About the size and shape of an anchovy, the Magic-I holds 120 names and phone numbers, plus a calendar and an alarm clock (with times for 100 cities worldwide). You don't even need cables to upload data to it--it reads the information straight off your monitor screen. Aston Martin sold separately...
...office this morning after dropping my son off at school, I passed store after store with special Father's Day promotions. I saw pictures of handsome Dads with just a dusting of gray in their closely-cropped hair, holding a small child in one hand and some wonderful gadget in the other. I admit I did feel a frisson of excitement. But this was not sentiment about the enduring role of fathers in our lives, but the pervasive tickle of modern capitalism, where in order to enhance the desire for more and more objects, we have to create more...