Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, in theaters December 22, begins with the question: What would happen if kids could make their parents disappear? Jimmy gets his wish but doesn't like it. But he is a boy scientist, and fashions all manner of outlandish inventions to defeat aliens, rescue his parents, and generally save the planet from evil. Reality isn't there yet, but it's close. A comparison.

Maybe you first tune in the station driving past some lobster-roll shack just outside Bangor, Maine. You know the music isn't coming from the local FM radio tower a few miles away. Instead, it's being digitally compressed and uplinked from a massive command center in Washington, D.C., bouncing off a pair of Boeing satellites in geostationary orbit high above the equator, and finding its way to a sleek little shark-fin antenna mounted on the trunk. The technology is at best a compelling afterthought, because after the fourth or fifth song, you realize the music speaks to you.

The music industry is taking the first small, yet irrevocable, step toward changing how you listen to and share digital music. After years of teeth-gnashing and spitting in the wind, all the major record labels have finally gotten serious about their digital music initiatives, namely by entering into agreements to sell the best stuff from their top artists, including new releases, on the Internet. In fact, the services may be up and running by early fall.

Strolling down the streets of Ybor City, a popular tourist area in Tampa, a well-dressed couple stops by an open doorway to watch a master cigar maker roll one the old-fashioned way. What they don't know is that someone is watching them too: the Tampa police. They've done nothing wrong, but a police officer sitting a few blocks away snaps close-up pictures of their faces anyway, using one of several dozen remote-control cameras mounted on poles overhead. The officer's computer then compares their faces with a database of wanted criminals to see if there's a match.

Remember the Erector Set, those interlocking nuts, bolts, and metal strips that kids used to build things with? Well, the Nobel-prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto does. "One of the disasters of modern life," he recently told startled listeners on BBC radio, is that it has been "displaced by Lego."

You can almost feel the bipolar sense of anticipation and dread building: Microsoft is about to release a major new version of Windows, the operating system software that makes most of our computers run -- or halt, depending on the operating system's whim. We'll be getting lots of new housekeeping functions in Windows XP, some "enhanced reliability," and probably an improved Internet browser, depending on the U.S. Justice Department's capriciousness.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not a photographer. I don't even particularly like taking pictures. But as an editor covering digital cameras, I've dutifully learned about the new image sensor technologies as they've arrived, noted the debut of more and more film-camera-type features, and monitored the narrowing gap in quality between the digital and film-based worlds. All the while secretly thanking God that all you really had to know about buying a digital camera was its resolutionhow many pixels on its sensor.

Strolling New York City's famed Fifth Avenue and nearby garment district, we crossed the portals of a new type of store, into a brand new world. The new retailers were computer stores, which we recognized as the herald of an oncoming revolution.

The most unusual aspect of a new headlight system being developed at DaimlerChrysler: Oncoming drivers can't see them. Well, sort of.

The system, recently demonstrated on a Jeep Grand Cherokee, combines conventional headlamps with invisible infrared lights. The result is a dramatically clearer picture of the road ahead.

It works like this: Two laser headlamps on the front of the vehicle illuminate the road with infrared light, then a digital camera records the reflected image. The image is projected in black and white to an LCD screen behind the instrument cluster.