Word: system
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...take advantage of that online explosion? The Net had been, until 1994, a largely commerce-free zone. It was created by the Defense Department to keep its network of computers communicating in case of nuclear attack. The system then evolved into a network over which university and government researchers could exchange messages and data across most computer platforms...
...supplicants; recently more than 400 people applied for four openings. "I had five interviews with five people on two different days, and this was for a temp job," says an ex-employee. Amazon detractors are easy to find. The company, like any growing society, has developed a caste system that embitters some in the lower orders. "I hated working there," says the ex-employee. "I was totally underutilized. My bosses were bad managers who just happened to sign on earlier than I did. There was this arrogance, like, 'I'm employee No. 117, and I'm going...
Lenk, who started eToys in 1996, pioneered a tricky business. No one else was selling toys online at the volume Lenk envisioned. "There's nothing that's easy," Lenk says. "The details are really hard." Everything--the software, the shipping procedures, the wrapping system--had to be invented on the fly, including the ingenious idea of streamlining the warehouse process by having pickers, packers, loaders, replenishers and order processors all wear different-colored hats. Lenk discovered the hard way that e-businesses couldn't simply duplicate existing retail operations, such as catalog companies, online. "You can't take the mail...
...American somewhere collects it. "We define ourselves by our stuff," says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association and a Syracuse University professor who specializes in the study of collectibles. In a democracy, with everyone theoretically equal, people want to be different. We don't have a caste system; we've never had a blood-line aristocracy. We've distinguished ourselves by our cars, by the clothes we wear, by the stuff we buy and sell. "I suppose you can lament all the consumerist tendencies in this, the materialism," say Thompson. "But it gives so much...
...James Tolbert has sued the school system to change those rules. And other home-school advocates have taken this issue to Michigan's legislature, where it has split the Republican Party. For Tolbert, it's an issue of basic fairness: "The state should provide these [athletic] benefits on a nondiscriminatory basis," says Stephen Safranek, the lawyer behind the Tolberts and six other families. "We all pay the same taxes...