Word: instants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bright spot in the disaster was the massive outpouring of support from across the country. In the weeks following the magnitude 8.0 quake, millions of Chinese contributed to relief efforts, either in cash donations or volunteer labor. Cars and trucks loaded with clothes, bottled water and instant noodles streamed into the disaster zone, where nearly 90,000 people had been killed and 5 million left homeless. The response was so overwhelming that authorities blocked roads and turned away volunteers because they threatened to overwhelm official rescue work. Over the following year, Chinese contributed some $9.5 billion to relief efforts...
...this year and shipped the whole stash to Sicily. Admittedly, Kim's was one of the gems, but cities large and small used to have video stores with all manner of movies that you could see right away. With Netflix, you surrender those basic American rights: impulse choice and instant gratification. You must cool your jets for two to four days, dependent as you are on both the skill of Netflix employees to put the correct movie in your envelope (sometimes they don't) and the speed of the U.S. Postal Service. By the time a video arrives...
...song payments or finite disk capacity. Last week the Swedish company behind Spotify's streaming music provider announced plans to release a free iPhone application that will let users listen to songs played directly off of its online service, with no need to download. That would give iPhone users instant access to any of Spotify's 6 million songs, without taking up precious memory space - way more than the maximum 7,000 tracks that a 32 GB iPhone can hold. Songs can also be temporarily stored, or cached, ready to play during those moments when Web connection drops, like when...
...Apple, it has yet to comment. The company has allowed other music-streaming applications, such as Pandora and Last.fm, onto the iPhone. But they work more like radio stations, without the control, choice and instant gratification that Spotify users enjoy - all the things that could make Apple reluctant to give the service space up against iTunes. To try to win over Apple, Spotify will no doubt argue that its service could drive people to download more songs from the iTunes Store and even increase sales of iPhones...
Waiting a while to get everything you want is - or anyhow was - a definition of maturity. Demanding satisfaction right this instant, on the other hand, is a defining behavior of seven-year-olds. The powerful appeal of the Web is not just the "community" it enables but its instantaneity: for better or worse, you can send a message now, get any question answered now, pick your airline seat now, buy anything you want right now. Cell phones and the Internet, together with FedEx and U.P.S., finally and fully satisfy the permanent child within each of us - the impulsive child with...