"Scissors count, but the knife does not."

Now that we've defined what a gadget is, let's identify the top 100 gadgets of all time. Or, let the fighting begin by having one magazine -- Mobile PC -- identify the top 100 gadgets of all time. Most of them are either electronic or goofy novelties (like the Ronco egg-scrambler): the list is dripping with bias toward things the listmakers remember from their own lives. So, lest you get steamed at the absence of the catapult -- or whatever -- you might want to read "all time" as all the time that youngish guys have personally experienced. But they do throw in some old stuff to try to make it look a little "all time": the sextant and the abacus get slotted in at 59 and 60. Yet somehow Etch-a-Sketch and Speak-and-Spell are greater! Numerous different laptops make the list -- I lost count -- and the Apple Powerbook 100 comes in at first place.

The taser is number 79. (No other guns make the list!) Did you know a University of Wisconsin professor is testing tasers on pigs?

Over the past three years, more than 70 people in North America have died after being shocked by Tasers, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. But John Webster questions whether Tasers were really the cause of death.

Many of those people were high on drugs, namely cocaine, argued the emeritus professor of biomedical engineering.

"If you Taser someone with a cocaine overdose, and they die, did they die of the Taser?" Webster said. "I know that many people make it to the emergency room and then die. In my opinion, they were not electrocuted by the Taser. They were high on drugs."

He'll use about 10 anesthetized pigs to help settle the question of whether Tasers alone can send a subject into the deadly state of ventricular fibrillation. A Taser gun ejects darts with a 50,000-volt electrical charge that is designed to briefly immobilize people.

Some of the pigs will be shot with the Taser. Some will get cocaine or another drug. And some will get both the drug and the Taser shot. Webster and his students will measure the effect on the pig's heart.

"The question I'm trying to answer is, can Tasers electrocute subjects?" Webster said. "My hypothesis is, no." He did leave open the possibility that an "emaciated person" who is hit by a Taser whose darts hit directly on and around the heart could die of the shot.

The study is funded with a two-year, $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

It seems to me that people high on cocaine are especially likely to get into the kind of situation where they do get shot with Tasers. If you know the Taser-cocaine combination is deadly, isn't there still a problem?