Word: tooled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Everyone has a dream, and Tim Leatherman's dream was simple: he wanted a single tool that was both a knife and a pair of pliers. In 1983, after years of tinkering, he created a distinctively double-jointed multitool that looks like two Swiss Army knives caught in the act of mating; in addition to a knife and pliers, it had a dozen other doodads on it to boot. Since then it has become a cult classic, with 25 million units sold; Sunday night's Oscar presenters got them in their gift baskets. And, yes, Leatherman is his real name...
Measured by the sheer number of doohickeys on board, these tools are about equal. They also weigh about the same, and locking mechanisms are standard across the board, so the blades won't close by accident and sever a finger. But look more closely, and you will see trade-offs. The SwissTool has a metal-saw blade, great for prison breaks, but it lacks scissors--a deal breaker in my book. The Leatherman has the most balanced selection, but it lacks the useful miniruler that's etched into the casings of the Swiss-Tool and the PowerLock...
There are trade-offs in design too. The PowerLock is built around a pair of gears that give you extra leverage when you're plying your pliers; they also give the whole tool a deliciously smooth unfolding action--it's the only one you can actually flip open one-handed. (The gears also give the tool a complicated look I find irresistible.) On the downside, the PowerLock has its blades positioned along its inside edges, so you have to unfold it into pliers mode to use them. Awkward...
...Yahoo also offer more powerful editing tools that let you click and drag images and text onto your home page. These programs let you see your page in wysiwyg (for "what you see is what you get") as you're working on it. Both the AOL tool, Easy Designer, and the Yahoo editing application, PageBuilder, are easy to figure out. But because the site-building tools are on the Net rather than on your hard drive, editing tends to be a little herky-jerky...
...encourages and praises it, a government that publicly arrests militants but clandestinely releases them, a government that claims to want peace and yet organizes violent uprisings to upset the peace process, a government which uses every means at its disposal to enhance terrorism while publicly disavowing terror as a tool for its cause. History has shown time and time again that the PA cannot be relied upon to stop terror; instead, many of the terrorist groups targeting Israel, notably the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, come from Arafat’s legions and admit to being under his control. But most...