Word: plugged
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Earlier this year Whittle pulled the plug on two other once promising ventures: Special Report Network, a series of videos and magazines that was aimed at patients waiting in doctors' offices, and a publishing division that produced advertiser-sponsored books. To raise cash, the company is negotiating the sale to Wall Street's Goldman, Sachs of half the equity in its profit- making Channel One, the advertiser-backed TV news program currently being shown in 12,000 U.S. public schools. Also for sale is Whittle's 50% interest in the $55 million, Ivy Leagueish corporate headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee, which...
Unfortunately, American society seems to have evolved into a one-size-fits- all system. Schools can resemble factories: put the kids on the assembly line, plug in the right components and send 'em out the door. Everyone is supposed to go to college; there is virtually no other route to success. In other times and in other places, there have been alternatives: apprenticeships, settling a new land, starting a business out of the garage, going to sea. In a conformist society, it becomes necessary to medicate some people to make them...
...overlooked a more promising market: the millions of computer users who are already playing games, exchanging mail and entertaining themselves on the computer networks. Although a switched, broadband network could serve both computer users and television viewers, cable-TV operators in particular seem reluctant to allow computer owners to plug in. The cable operators, contends Michael Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public-interest group involved in electronic communications issues, "have a couch-potato vision of the future...
Once that switched, broadband network is built, it won't matter much what people plug into it -- TVs, PCs or some device that hasn't been invented. Like that of the telephone system before it, the power of the information highway will come from the new ways it allows people to connect, not with machines but with each other. And for that privilege, even the most stubborn couch potato might agree to get wired...
...week's end many marine biologists had been persuaded that the project was acceptable, and government approval seemed likely. The Scripps Institution, for its part, has set aside $2.9 million to study the experiment's effects on marine mammals and promises to pull the plug on the loudspeakers the minute the neighbors complain...