Ten years ago, the squirt gun market was still largely the province of 29-cent plastic pistols that could barely douse an insect. Squirt guns weren't even tracked as a separate category by toy industry analysts. Today it is a $215-million-a-year business in the United States, and Larami owns 90% of it.
Err, as I remember it, 10 years ago Entertech was winning the watergun arms-race with a line of battery-powered auto-firing squirt guns; I miss those things! OK, the clips were too damn small and hard to fill, the guns tended to leak, and the electronics tended to rust and/or short out after a year or two, but man were they cool! I had their Tek-9 look-alike (a step above their handgun-style models) but what I really wanted were the M-16 or RPG monsters; couldn't afford them, though, on my middle school lunch money. The quick-fill "grenade" water-balloon pump that looked like a plunger-style detonation trigger was pretty cool, too.
Less than a year later, though, new laws required the barrels of gun-shaped toys to be brightly and unrealistically coloured (IIRC, this was after a several kids were gunned down by cops who apparently couldn't distinguish their water/Lazer Tag(TM) guns were the real deal), and the realistic Entertech weapons lost much of their appeal with bright red barrels.
Super-soakers arrived a year later and made waterguns fun again. Also, they worked better.
With satellite radio, one conglomo hires the equivalent staffing of a few radio stations, and reaches the whole hemisphere. No longer any need to buy up dozens of local stations to sell the latest and greatest homogenized pap handed down from program directors at HQ! Tastemakers love it!
Maybe, if this catches on in a big way, radio can get back to serving LOCAL communities, as it's really more suited than any other medium to do.
I know I'm not rushing out to put a sat reciever in my car, unless it's GPS. I don't like the notion of an even tinier (than the currently tiny) pool of people doling out what I shall hear (and neglecting to mention what might negatively impact their bottom line).
A few dozen iMac logic boards in iRack cases would make for a sweet CPU farm with low specific power consumption in a very small space.
droool...
-Isaac
It's all about decommoditizing/lock-in!
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Cool PC Cases
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· Score: 1
And that's the long and short of it. Pack the box full of closed-spec, licensed-use-only interfaces (USB, FireWire, etc), and guess which OSs *won't* run on it? The ones that aren't written by companies who pay royalties and sign NDAs. Witness the *REAL* attack on Open Source.
And now, thanks to the DMCA, reverse-engineering is illegal! Hurrah!
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Err, as I remember it, 10 years ago Entertech was winning the watergun arms-race with a line of battery-powered auto-firing squirt guns; I miss those things! OK, the clips were too damn small and hard to fill, the guns tended to leak, and the electronics tended to rust and/or short out after a year or two, but man were they cool! I had their Tek-9 look-alike (a step above their handgun-style models) but what I really wanted were the M-16 or RPG monsters; couldn't afford them, though, on my middle school lunch money. The quick-fill "grenade" water-balloon pump that looked like a plunger-style detonation trigger was pretty cool, too.
Less than a year later, though, new laws required the barrels of gun-shaped toys to be brightly and unrealistically coloured (IIRC, this was after a several kids were gunned down by cops who apparently couldn't distinguish their water/Lazer Tag(TM) guns were the real deal), and the realistic Entertech weapons lost much of their appeal with bright red barrels.
Super-soakers arrived a year later and made waterguns fun again. Also, they worked better.
-Isaac
With satellite radio, one conglomo hires the equivalent staffing of a few radio stations, and reaches the whole hemisphere. No longer any need to buy up dozens of local stations to sell the latest and greatest homogenized pap handed down from program directors at HQ! Tastemakers love it!
Maybe, if this catches on in a big way, radio can get back to serving LOCAL communities, as it's really more suited than any other medium to do.
I know I'm not rushing out to put a sat reciever in my car, unless it's GPS. I don't like the notion of an even tinier (than the currently tiny) pool of people doling out what I shall hear (and neglecting to mention what might negatively impact their bottom line).
-Isaac
droool...
-Isaac
And that's the long and short of it. Pack the box full of closed-spec, licensed-use-only interfaces (USB, FireWire, etc), and guess which OSs *won't* run on it? The ones that aren't written by companies who pay royalties and sign NDAs. Witness the *REAL* attack on Open Source.
And now, thanks to the DMCA, reverse-engineering is illegal! Hurrah!
I know that fragrance... smells like COLLUSION.
'nuff said.
-Isaac