As he rose to his feet from a knuckle-dragging crouch, primitive
cave man wrapped his newly evolved opposable thumbs around the
handy tools of his time -- a club or spear -- and instantly his
life got easier. Two million years later, we have ascended from
the apes to the apps. With a fierce, prehensile hold on the
bedrock tool of our time, 21st century man wraps his life around
a most modern convenience -- the smartphone -- and begins his
day, thumbs flying.  These portals in the palm of our hands are
passports to a nearly friction-free online world, where long
lines are banished with a few keystrokes, where Bach and the
Beatles (and Wiki bios about both) wait to be summoned from our
pockets, and where global positioning satellites descend from
the Cloud with maps that get us where we're going. That kind of
convenience was the inevitable destination of the technological
revolution all along. The upheaval has reordered our lives
around easier, faster and more impersonal ways of doing almost
everything. We've b