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Old 05-30-2002, 12:57 AM   #11
Torrere
a real smartass
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 1,121
Neal Stephenson

I doubt it's just a 2 hour delay. First they have to watch it (your 2 hours), then they have to get home and upload it to their computers.

Then it will take a while to disseminate enough for it to be easy to download (aka widely available).

As for cultural invasion, you should all have read "In the Beginning was the Command Line " by Neal Stephenson. (If you haven't, you should also read Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snowcrash, etc... ). Shamelessly stealing a few paragraphs here, but you should read the entire thing:

"We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences."
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