In 2019? No, in 1953. Philip K. Dick, "Second Variety".

It's going to happen. It's basically already happened in some stores. IKEAfied Swedish clone brands have for years had their own in-house music channels for their stores, playing basically knockoff pop music.

I too want to be paid in perpetuity for work I did in the past. Sadly my lawyers aren't as well-connected as the entertainment industries'.

Such an unsolvable problem! Except that in many cultures it's been solved for a long time. You have two last names, one patrilineal, one matrilineal.

Hyphenated names go way back, and it's all about prestige. If the wife came from a prestigious family (too), they wanted to let the world know that these kids, they have connection to two prestige families. An example from my part of the world is the former defense minister Kristin Krohn-Devold. Other well known hyphenated prestige names in Norway are Rieber-Mohn, Tybring-Gjedde.

There's not an ever expanding list of hyphenations, that's an entirely imagined problem, and a bit of an "old man rants at cloud for not following tradition" thing. It's more common that the less prestigious name is quietly dropped, and you're back at an unhyphenated name. A fictional, but very plausible example is the main character of the Danish drama "Matador", who changes his name from Mads Skjern-Andersen to just Mads Skjern. I have many examples in my own family tree, of various distant cousins who got a prestige name of a non-paternal ancestor (it may be further back than the mom!) as middle name, and then just quietly dropped their patronym/last name so that the middle name was suddenly a last name.

"Literally hundreds of years", lol. We Europeans are extremely lucky compared to most other parts of the world. In the best places (Belgium, for some reason) you can get back to the 1600s on all lines, not just the paternal. It isn't just colonialism. Europe just kept much better track of its commoners than anywhere else. Japan first implemented a European-style census as part of the Meiji restoration in the 1870s, and it was only then they demanded everyone should have a last name.

Yes, exactly. Best Buy got Napster because they bought Roxio - the CD-Burning software company. LOL. "Roxio Toastt". Roxio was the first vulture to pick the bones of the original Napster, buying branding assets when the feds shut it down.

Invented virtualization.

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

To overcome the recent famine challenges, I have decided to

1. Acquire a plot suitable for growing potatoes

2. Reach out to neighbors to pool resources

3. Establish a secure bunker for storing emergency reserves of grain

4. Mapping out the foraging, hunting and fishing opportunities in the nearby hills

5. Cutting off and eating my remaining leg.

My Briefcase was like Dropbox for your 3.5" floppy disks. I think I upgraded to a Zip drive around that time. YIPPEE!

What I also think people don't appreciate, is how much work it is to use SNP data even for this. Figuring out how a 3-4 cousin-level match is related, is hard, and it's not easy to automate.

It's enough work that authoritarian goons are more likely to use it as a pretext for punishing whoever they'd like to punish, than to use it to actually find the "guilty" (even after their own standard).

"Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" isn't even a metaphor here - the company I currently work for runs a SAP which has been heavily customized by IBM.

That's like describing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a carpenter having problems with a few big nails! :-)

Some quibbles: IBM prevented 32-bit OS/2 for 80386 not from bad planning, but an internal struggle to keep 32-bit PCs from biting into the AS400 mini computer business, and there were internal wars for the board approvals.

This was the end of the line for Gates's frustration with IBM, as OS/2 took resources from projects he and Balmer were convinced would take off. Publicly claiming that upcoming Windows 3.0 would not be "Presentation Manager Lite", MS still death-marched developers to produce the release, while devs allotted to IBM sat on their hands or did code reviews for IBM managers. Win 3.0 Program Manager kicked ass on Presentation Manager, it was definitely not "lite" - and it ditched all the heavy-baggage of IBM SNA requirements.

"OS/2 NT" is a bit misleading. Late in the endgame of the IBM/MS relationship, Gates discovered that Dave Cutler was being cut away from DEC, with a recalibration of Prism and the future of Alpha. Cutler had begun a 64-bit microkernel evolution of his VMS system. OS/2 3.0 was on the boards, still dragging MS resources and tying up IP. Gates hired Cutler to build an alternative, skunk works kernel from his Prism design work, with the hope of porting the Windows System 32 layer with dependencies etc. When the last bitter contract work was delivered for IBM, Cutler and the Windows team ground out the hard work of delivering their kernel, TCP stack, and Windows 3.11 port —Windows NT.

Most of this stuff is well-covered in Carroll's "Big Blues" along with Zachary's "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT". I had a small part at the NT launch in Moscone Center, working for a ghost-writer on the Sybex NT book that launched at that event

Assume for a moment that there is such a thing as an objectively good album. Assume also that there's some luck involved in actually making one, not just skill. You have thousands of bands churning out albums.

Let's assume also that the critics are capable of recognizing an objectively good album at least better than chance.

Now picture a band making album after album, and they succeed in making an actually good one, that gets noticed by critics and called out as great. What are the odds that their next album will be as good?

Not great! If there's luck at all involved, it's very likely that their first album, which managed to get them on critics radar against thousands of rivals, was an outlier in terms of quality. They'll revert to the mean in album two.

That's enough to explain critics typically rating a second album lower. Even if they have widely varying ideals for what a good album sounds like.

For fans it's another matter. Fandom is a social phenomenon, it's never just about the music. It's also about the role the band plays in your life. Not just things like parasocial relationships, although that too, but think about it: If you find another artist that sounds just like artist you know and love, do you immediately jump ship? Of course not. Not even if it turns out that the other artist was "first" in making this style of music. There is such a thing as niches in music, once one is personally filled for you, say you've got all the happy party dance music you needed this month, you're not going to care if there's some objectively 1% better music out there.

So it's also understandable that fans rate second albums higher than critics. That just means they keep fulfilling the role they won in their listeners lives.