Stories by Mike Elgan

The Planet of the Apes series of sci-fi thrillers in the late 1960s and early '70s depicted a world in which intelligent apes are the dominant species and humans have been subordinated.

I have a love-hate relationship with Google+. Because I love it and use it so much, I really hate its current limitations.

Everyone wants what Microsoft's got, namely control of the most widely used computing platform. Or, more accurately, everyone wants the billions and billions of dollars that flow in from the dominance of desktop computing.

Eric Schmidt is out at Google. Larry Page is in. I miss Eric already.

The digital revolution has created an unexpected challenge: How do you get work done when a world of amusements is always just a click away?

As Friday's earthquake in Japan demonstrates, natural disasters happen. And when they do, the first two things to go down are electricity and telephone services.

Search the Internet for a time machine and you may end up with an empty wallet and painful injuries, if the movie Napoleon Dynamite is accurate.

My iPhone rang yesterday evening. It was my 22-year-old son calling from his iPhone to ask me how to do something on iTunes. It was a pretty unremarkable call, and the kind of conversation we used to have when he lived at home, except that he was on the other side of the world in Mumbai, India.

Imagine sitting down at a public PC, surfing the Web, visiting Facebook, checking your online bank account and buying something on Amazon.com -- all without entering passwords or credit card information.

We love our gadgets. But they treat us with an indifference that sometimes feels like contempt. They're like cats.

In the 1949 novel 1984, George Orwell imagined a brilliant but depressing future in which the government, a.k.a. "Big Brother," broadcast propaganda while simultaneously watching every citizen via ubiquitous "telescreens" in every home and in public places. Video feeds are monitored by the "Thought Police," who are constantly on the lookout for facial expressions and body language that reveal "thought crimes." They wanted to know what you were thinking.

I believe that someday most buildings, vehicles and devices will be solar-powered. And that includes our personal gadgets -- phones, laptops and digital cameras.

Only 30 million people have used Facebook Places, one report finds. If that sounds impressive, consider that it represents just six per cent of Facebook users. And that's not the number who use it. That's the number who have tried it.

HP released its Slate 500 tablet this week. Immediately, everyone started comparing it with Apple's iPad. But the two devices have nothing significant in common. They are in entirely different device categories and can even be thought of as opposites.

Conventional wisdom says people don't wear wristwatches anymore -- especially young people. The story goes that because we now have cell phones, we no longer need to lash anything to our wrists.