Word: pet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wasn't so much the occasion, which was ostensibly AIBO's second birthday party. Nor was it the AIBO pet tricks contest I'd been drafted to help judge, though that was certainly amusing. No, the real reason AIBO became more of a viable mass-market proposition that day was a piece of software that will be released for the mechanical mutt this August. It's called AIBO Messenger, and it has the capacity to be a killer app - that all-important single piece of software that consumers desire so much they have to rush out and get the machine...
...right, this bundle of canine circuits is going to start reading your mail out loud and doing web searches for you. The process will be as voice-controlled as any face-to-face interaction: you talk to him, he talks back. In theory, it sounds like the perfect pet trick for curious technophobes; a way into the Internet without pressing a key. Using a wireless link to your PC, AIBO downloads your new mail as it comes in and uses his hard drive and a special Sony memory stick to convert the text to voice. He even recognizes certain words...
...From Paris to Greenwich Village to mod London, Southern befriended some of the greatest writers, artists, and musicians of the day, spending hours sharing their pet indulgences. His status as a cooler-than-cool pop-culture icon was solidified by his appearance (shades and all) in the pantheon of heroes that populate the cover of the "Sgt. Pepper" album. Hill emphasizes that Southern created the "grand guy" persona to deal with an innate shyness; Southern's collaborator Nelson Lyon is quoted as saying that as Southern grew older, he became a victim of his alter ego, "trapped in the cliches...
...this keeps up, food targeted to women may need its own aisle in the supermarket, alongside dairy, paper products and pet supplies. Clearly, some female shoppers respond to food designed with their nutritional needs in mind. But do they really need to buy special oatmeal just because they were born with an extra X chromosome instead of a Y? "Somehow as a gender we've done fine for thousands of years without our own breakfast cereal," says Alice Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University...
...forged car and motorcycle plates. Children, too, are in on the game. In the northeastern city of Changchun, vendors loiter near school grounds, enticing students who want to please parents with proof of academic success. A fake class-monitor certificate, which normally goes to an obedient teacher's pet, sells for just 12. That's lunch money, even in China?and it sure beats studying...