Law enforcement authorities served a warrant on the Gizmodo editor and seized his computer, setting off a First Amendment flap.
Instead we wrote it down carefully in our notes and it became a part of her hospital record, highlighted in red on the computer and set off with an exclamation point, permanently molding her medical life and also, in a way, our own.
An alert went out on the central police national computer, and it set off the alarm when the van entered the City.
But it is not hard to find reputable alarmists -- computer experts who say they will not fly or schedule surgery at the onset of the year 2000 or even an economist who predicts that the computer bug could set off a recession.
The hacking and subsequent release of thousands of e-mail messages and documents generated by climate researchers from a university computer server have set off an international dispute over the quality of research on global warming just as negotiators from 190-plus nations prepare to gather for talks in Copenhagen next week on a potential treaty to limit greenhouse gases.
In the 1990s biologists and computer scientists thus set off in parallel to explore evolvability (Wagner and Altenberg 1996; Gerhart and Kirschner 1997; Kirschner and Gerhart 1998).
When birds landed on the perches, they set off computer sound files with comments on the interdependency of birds, other animals and people.
But how could I ever give up that little burst of hope whenever a new game deals itself out, or the lightly adrenalized buzz of seeing the cards, when I've won, bounce in joyous cascades across the screen and set off computer solitaire's version of fireworks?
In 1982, Mr. Warnock and Mr. Geschke left the prestigious Xerox P.A.R.C., then known as the Palo Alto Research Center, to found Adobe and market their prized technology, a software language called Postscript that simplified computer printing and helped set off the explosion in desktop publishing.
David Byron, the man who developed the plastic gun technology for Red Eye, said that, as he envisions the production of military weaponry, each one would have a permanently embedded computer chip that would set off security alarms.
