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The Roid by StanK Takeover Tech, NLC. Seems a crime the way they get away with it. Loopholes that the leopard skin wearing lawyers found and created the No Liability Corporations. Sure, they're "closely regulated" by the government, but still it's like some of these NLCs clamp innocent people's heads in a vice while they're picking their pockets. On top of that they flaunt what they do with their very name. Of course, Wall Street and the news media usually calls them T-Tech, so your average man, woman and child don't realize that they tend to really shaft a lot of people with the deals they conjure up. It took them nineteen months to work the deal that got them Polytekcom, but only twenty two days to split up all the assets, sell them off to other technical industries and put over half the workforce into the Limited Welfare program that the Elected Ones in Washington came up with a few years ago. Of course some of those technology savvy workers ended up with decent pay in decent professions. Others were so specialized they had to supplement their minimum wage pay they get while working at whatever untechnological job they could manage to find, which wasn't easy considering they were so "over-qualified" for almost anything other than what they were trained for. A few grouped together and attempted to make a go of some sort of business of their own. One group did create a method for changing the molecular structure on the tip of a drill bit to make it nearly as hard as diamonds, yet it wasn't bonded, it actually was part of the bit. They advertised their bits as lasting forever, which of course they really didn't, but they were guaranteed forever, so they got away with it. And they did last a long time with out resharpening. Eventually they figured out how to do the same thing to larger surfaces. That's what started the "heat-shieldless" space plane industry on a radically upward spiral and made the LA to New York flight of under an hour realistic and affordable. A couple others perfected a 3D "paper screen" video display. Paper thin with a brightness to handle anything from a broadcast program to a computer screen, it made 3D without special eye gear a reality. Sometimes you don't need a big corporation to come up with great ideas and bring them to market. Then there was the group of a dozen that formed a company called Robotitech. They worked on trying to create an android that was interactive, intelligent and easy to program. That never was quite achieved. They could make it look almost human, and get it to respond to a few commands but never got it to really come together and act anything close to humanlike. Only one thing could they ever get it to consistently do was watch people. They did manage to get the visual circuitry working fantastically. Their android would sit and just watch people, basically following them around with its "eyes" forever. But trying to get it to do anything else was turning into an impossibility. Other companies that started to build androids did much better than Robotitech and more quickly too. After months of attempting to improve their android, the Robotitech group, now down to just seven people, was ready to totally give up. While hashing out whether to or not, the group came up with the idea to try and market it just as it was and see if anyone might buy it. Maybe they could recoup some of their investments of time and money. They needed a name though, something that would stimulate a person to at least inquire about what the Robotitech android could do. Maybe it would be a passing fad, but maybe enough would sell to make it worthwhile. It had to be a name that people would immediately know how to say and yet would pique their interest, would make them laugh or chuckle, perhaps, and draw them to the product, causing the desire to have one to eclipse the logic that would tell them not to buy, it's foolish. Many ideas for names were kicked around and booted off the table. Finally a name popped up that all seven thought wrong, yet they couldn't get it out of their heads. They chuckled when they heard it. They smiled when they said it or even thought the name. After weeks of pretty much the same reactions within the group, they decided to market it. The newscasters joked about it, people laughed about it, but this strange name worked! People ended up buying it just so they could use that humorous name and tell their friends they had one. Yes, Robotitech came out making a small profit, which they never thought they would, not with a basically one dimensional android. The thousands that sold and the publicity they gained for themselves was all attributable to the name they finally came up with for a mostly useless product: |