Word: set
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...time it took me to play a third of the 4-min. song, the whole tune (all 2.3 megabytes of it) was already neatly recorded and stored on my hard drive. While the sound quality is billed as "near CD," I couldn't tell the difference. I quickly set to work cherry picking our CD collection for my favorite songs. I can now play tunes from my own playlist, or randomly if I prefer. This is terrifically liberating, since it frees up my CD drive for other, uh, work...
...nearly every page on its own is alive with wit and observation and sparks of inspired nastiness, it's thrilling to pick it back up, for exquisite set pieces on the man who introduced "female butt cleavage" to network TV, on the four meanings (three of them ironic) of the term "your friend," on corporate travel (flying business class is "a protection racket--you pay extra, or you just might get roughed up in coach...
Andersen wisely sets his satire in the Tomorrowland of the year 2000, where he is free to imagine things that are two degrees beyond plausible. But, you soon realize, the culture's capacity for cheesiness is so vast that everything he imagines could, and probably will, happen. "Push TV," for instance, which can't be turned off: "Pressing the off button only switches the set to a low-power mode, during which advertising copy appears noiselessly on the screen." Or a network's "Seamlessness Initiative": the characters in each show connect to the characters on all the other shows...
...stretch to blame a talk show for a murder committed later by a guest. But the Amedures argued it was the show's recklessness that set the crime in motion. They contended that the producers should have screened the guests enough to know that Schmitz had a history of mental illness, and the show should have realized that the humiliation of being surprised by a gay crush on TV might send an emotionally fragile person like Schmitz over the edge. The jury agreed. (Schmitz is scheduled to be retried for the murder in August; a 1996 conviction was reversed...
...able to react to late-breaking news. Both the N.Y.S.E. and NASDAQ are also planning to extend trading hours, at least until 9 p.m. For now, the SEC can only counsel restraint; Levitt advises online traders to use limit orders, so they only get a stock at a set price, and avoid buying on margin...