Word: minitel
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...example of state-led adoption of new technology--France Telecom introduced prepaid telecartes that rendered coins in phone booths obsolete. Applications quickly blossomed as the association of Carte Bleue debit cards ordered their banks to fight fraud by issuing only chip-embedded cards, and as France Telecom issued the Minitel with smart-card readers to enable online purchase of everything from opera tickets to train reservations--well before anyone had heard of the Internet...
...MINITEL MINI-STROKE A French psychiatrist became temporarily blind in one eye and could barely speak--classic signs of a mini-stroke--after talking on the phone for an hour with the receiver tucked between his head and neck. Physicians believe the torqued position tore a neck artery that supplies blood to the brain. It's only one case, but the rest of us can learn from it. If you cradle the receiver, be sure to switch sides or transfer it to your hand from time to time. Better yet, try a headset...
France is usually cited as the glowing exception to the restrictive European pattern. In the early 1980s, the French government launched Minitel -- a small-screen unit with a keyboard that plugs into a normal telephone wall outlet to connect users with a wide variety of information services. Minitel is now a familiar object in many French homes, partly because of its reputation -- deserved -- as a commercial conduit for suppliers of both hard and soft porn. Despite that sleaze factor, Minitel set the standard during the 1980s as the world's first truly practical and inexpensive provider of interactive services...
...like the beetle, minitel is in danger of becoming outmoded. With monthly Minitel fees rising just as PC prices are starting to plummet, some users are turning to multimedia vehicles that can connect them with the Internet, or to more varied commercial services. France Telecom is struggling mightily to keep its Minitel lead, partly by forming strategic alliances with foreign communications groups (including AT&T, Sony, Motorola and Apple), but the French effort, like others in Europe, is burdened by the weight of the European Union's burgeoning bureaucracy, which is increasingly inserting barriers across the Continent's communications throughways...
...issue has been debated recently in the Swedish, Danish, Swiss, British, Thai and Cypriot parliaments. Germany last year stiffened antitrafficking laws, and Belgium is set to do likewise. France has cracked down on the use of its Minitel -- a widely distributed video-text telephone service -- for child- | prostitution ads. But police face a daunting task in stemming the sex trade. Many of the foreign-women victims, unable to speak the language of the country, are loath to file complaints for fear of being injured by pimps or deported by authorities. And faced with the difficulty of sorting out which women...