WHAT do you get if you cross a USB drive and beer? A gadget that jumped the shark at the design stage.

Do you remember floppy disks? They were funny. They were squarish and slightly bendy and when you inserted them into your computer they would make a kind of farting sound, transfer three text documents to your hard drive and break. They had a little metal bit you could slide back and forth to make them break faster.

We'd like to argue that floppies have an old school charm, like vinyl, but they don't. They're just rubbish. To store anything proper, like an MP3, you'd need at least three of them, and back in the day before MP3s - when music was in WAV files twice the size of Kent - you'd have needed around 50. Our modern world may be a fearsome place, rife as it is with terrorists, sex offenders and wasps, but at least data storage has improved.

"We wouldn't even care that touching our past selves might create a black hole and drag everyone into oblivion. It'd be worth the risk"

If you'd have asked a mid-1990s dweller what would replace floppy disks, they would probably have picked CDs. They would have held up their East 17 single to demonstrate. But little could they have imagined that, by 2008, their precious shiny circle would be onto its third generational leap (past DVD and on to Blu-Ray) and the true successor would be a diminutive little widget called the USB drive.

We love USB drives. We'd like to go back in time to our younger selves, grab them by the lapels, stop them from idiotically spending £100 on a Zip Drive to steal music from the internet at university and shove a USB stick into their hand. We wouldn't care that the university PCs had no USB ports. We wouldn't even care that touching our past selves might create a black hole and drag everyone into oblivion. It'd be worth the risk.

Since becoming popular, USB drives have found themselves inserted into a broad range of novelties, disguising themselves as cuddly toys, keyrings, pens and lipsticks, and even being shoehorned into Swiss Army Knives - perfect for people who do their PowerPoint presentations on mountains.

One gadget, though, may have gone a step too far. It's a USB drive full of beer. It's easy to see how this was dreamed up. Who uses computers? That's right - men! And what do men like? That's right - beer! They can't get enough of it, the big dumb lunks. Clearly this device has two target markets in mind: teenagers who can whip it out at school and point at the precious beer inside, and people buying presents for men who they

If they really want to impress us, they should make a properly functioning floppy disk full of beer. In fact, they should make 50. We've got an East 17 song we need to copy for a friend.