If it passes through you no problem - swallow another

If it passes through you, no problem - swallow another."Such systems would be invaluable to doctors, he said.Professor Negroponte also foresees telephone handsets becoming smarter. "Phones should be built smart enough to know if there's nobody there. And if there is someone there, they should be able to answer them, like a good butler, and find out who is calling and why, and only then decide whether to get our attention."But there are still some giant steps to be made for the average user of computers, he admitted. "If you want a really futuristic product for 10 years hence, you'll have computers that you eat, one per day.

[They] will contain devices and sensors which will record all your anatomical measurements, what's going on inside you, and relay them to a black box that you wear on your belt. "We will have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of embedded chips around us, all intercommunicating," he predicted.Professor Negroponte, author of the book Being Digital, espouses the view that anything that can be expressed as computer "bits" - including words, images and sound - will eventually be transmitted in that form across the world, speeding deals and cutting costs.As computers shrink and become pervasive over the next decade, the sort of information they can access will grow, he forecast. But if you think about it, an intelligent doorknob would be a really useful thing."You would not need keys: it could identify you by your fingerprints, and perhaps confirm your identity by asking a question, `What's your mother's maiden name?' for example."The smart doorknob could also accept parcel deliveries - and perhaps sign digitally for them; "and maybe it could let the dog out, and then let it back in while keeping out the other nine dogs following it", he said.The technology required to do that is already sufficiently miniaturised, he said, and could pervade our world. Professor Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, made his predictions when addressing an audience in London yesterday. He said: "You may wonder about how computing could possibly affect something like a doorknob. Mr Justice Parker made an order for pounds 70,000 legal costs against Stock and Aitken.. TALKING DOORKNOBS, ingestible computers and telephones that do not ring if there is nobody to answer them are the shape of new technology in the next 10 years, according to an Internet guru. He said they had turned down the chance to be co-owners of PAL Productions.

He insisted they were entitled only to payments for production work and songwriting and that these payments were made. The dispute centred on their in-house record label, PAL Productions, owned by Mr Waterman and set up in 1986.Mr Stock and Mr Aitken said Mr Waterman had no right unilaterally to assign to others the copyrights of songs by Minogue, Donovan and Rick Astley.Mr Waterman denied there was any agreement giving Mr Stock and Mr Aitken a continuing interest in the recordings. On the fifth day of a High Court hearing in London, songwriters and musicians Michael Stock and Matthew Aitken dropped their claim for hundreds of thousands of pounds against Peter Waterman. The three men, responsible for a string of hits including Kylie Minogue's number one "I Should Be So Lucky", separated in the early 1990s.Mr Stock and Mr Aitken had claimed that Mr Waterman parted with ownership or control of the rights in recordings without their consent, in breach of a 1985 oral agreement that the three would share the profits in all their work together. A DISPUTE over copyright between the former members of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, who created hits for Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan in the 1980s, was settled yesterday. But it's too little, too late to ever turn this into a success story.Dominic Cavendish. Mirren hits notes of dark comedy in Ruth's seen-it-all-before put-downs, suggesting the age-old cycle of envy, pride and regret that attend the spectacle of a star pupil rising.

And Duff's Lisa matures, sharpening her character's conflicted sense of enthusiasm and suffocation. For most of the first half, Mirren has little to do but put her hands on her hips and roll her eyes.There are moments when it comes together, and the two performances seem to fire off each other. And, it feels as though you could write a book in the time it takes for Duff's Lisa to shed her irritatingly gauche, easily impressionable manner, get into print, and grow addicted to the authority that following in her teacher's footsteps brings.Ruth seems improbably patient with this process, given that Margulies casts her as a catty, imperious type. There's plenty of time to admire Ruth's book-lined, boho Greenwich Village apartment during an inauspicious beginning, when the author struggles to open a window. And, to be fair, the last 15 minutes, in which recriminatory questions about the point at which influence ends and plagiarism begins are openly bandied about, have a palpable heat. But, oh, the wait. Reconfiguring the story as the bitter culmination of an intellectual friendship between two women, Ruth (Mirren), an ageing, childless author, and Lisa (Anne-Marie Duff), her ambitious protege, who pilfers the former's youthful experience for her first novel, could have made for an absorbing drama. Margulies was apparently inspired by the 1993 controversy that surrounded the American novelist David Leavitt's appropriation of a chapter from Stephen Spender's autobiography.

AFTER THE fiasco of Antony and Cleopatra at the National last year, it would be a pleasure to report that Helen Mirren had found a sturdier vehicle upon which to parade stage talents often put in the shade by her television success. But alas, New York author Donald Margulies' two-hander about the perils of writing fiction based on real life is so creaky that it is upstaged by a fine performance it never earns. Many of the biggest names in British art have contributed and it will be a unique event." The exhibition is at the Lincoln Centre, 18 Lincoln's Inn Fields on 28 and 29 November.. On the underside of one shoe is written "Just do it", a slogan used for Nike trainers - while the artist's name is written on the other The piece was completed this year. Other works have been provided by Matthew Radford and Peter Howson, the war artist.Andrew Hollingsworth, at the charity headquarters, says the night shelter will cost pounds 3.5m in total, but only pounds 680,000 more needs to be raised.Emma Underhill, an artist and one of the organisers, said: "We have been delighted with the response and never imagined when we began this that we'd have 70 pieces. Prince Charles followed with a lithograph of some cypress trees entitled Greek Landscape in Summer. Emin's work, My Beautiful Legs, is a 1995 silk screen which, to the relief of the auction managers, "has no bits attached, or fluids".