Sir Howard's days as Sony prez said to be numbered Sir Howard Stringer may be out of his job as president of Sony, according to a report in the Nikkei Business Daily. Stringer, who will turn 70 next month, is said to be replaced by Sony's consumer products chief, Kazuo Hirai. Hirai joined Sony in 1984 on the music side of the business, but made his name with the company in its …
During the days when the US military had the draft, if your were a male between the ages of 18 and 35, permanent resident alien or citizen, you were subject to being drafted to feed the US war machine... For whatever reason, the draft boards took men at about 25, and worked down to as low as 18 when they ran out of 25-year-old cannon fodder.
The draft ran from at least the beginning of WWII, through Korea, to VietNam, and was teminated sometime after VietNam ended. I had a classmate who was a British subject who simply said that if the draft board called him, he would go to Canada or the UK for the duration. For that reason alone, he did not apply for US citizenship, and I haven't seen him since graduation from junior college.
It was quite common for young men to get college deferments until the end of the semester, but the sons of the 10% managed to come up with all sorts of reasons they couldn't serve, or they managed to get into National Guard units or Reserve units that were "full" if Daddy had some clout or enough money changed hands. Some of them, like Rush Limbaugh, managed to get medical exemptions for "unusual" medical problems... In Rush's case it was a "pilonidal cyst", which is nothing more than an ingrown hair on his butt, but that plus a "critical" job spinning records on his daddy's radio station kept him from seeing basic training as a grunt...
Fail, because Rush Limbaugh is one of the biggest
If you leave it long enough before doing anything about it, pilonidal cysts can get properly unpleasant and require the sort of surgery that wil have you sleeping face-down for a month. Not necessarily trivial, but also not the sort of thing that will cause long term problems... given how long the debacle in Vietnam lasted, there'd have been ample opportunity to have a bumcrack resection and pack him off for a tour when it had healed.
The strength of Sony traditional was good japaneese engineering and good japaneese leadership. The founder of Sony literally made his own audio tape, by gluing rust onto paper. Sony, in the past, tried to make good devices and many japanese colour TV sets from the 1960s still work today.
Today virtually no consumer would miss Sony if they just went away. They still have some interresting ideas in the professional field (like the Sony Anycast), but it doesn't feel like Consumers get "scaled down" professional equipment anymore. (Sony used to have quite a few products which were availiable in 2 versions, professional grade and consumer, sometimes with some cutbacks on the consumer version. One good example is Betamax which was, essentially, a scaled down version of U-Matic)
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