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The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is a fictional company from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the series, the SCC is responsible for the design and creation of a wide range of robots and labour-saving devices, such as lifts, automatic doors, ventilation systems, the infamous Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, digital watches (substituted by polyphonic ringtones, palmtops and computer operating systems in the 2005 radio series). It is not entirely clear why the SCC has not yet collapsed, since nothing they produce ever works properly or performs to expectations. When a person asks for a drink from the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, the dispenser probes the customer's taste sensors and pleasure receptors of the brain. Despite its sophisticated artificial intelligence, it always dispenses the same drink: a concoction that tastes "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea". The SCC invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities ("GPP") which imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Thus not only do doors open and close, but they thank their users for using them, or sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. Other examples of SCC's record with sentient technology include an armada of neurotic elevators, hyperactive ships' computers and perhaps most famously of all, Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin is a prototype for the GPP feature, and his depression and "terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side" are due to unresolved bugs in his software. Ironically, the SCC defines a robot as "your plastic pal who's fun to be with". The only profitable division of the company is its Complaints Department, which, according to the series, takes up all of the major landmasses on the first three planets in the Sirius Tau system. The theme song for the Complaints Department is Share and Enjoy, and has since become the theme apparent for the company as a whole. The main office building and headquarters for the company was originally built to represent this motto, but due to bad architecture it sank into the ground, killing its many attractive sales assistants. The downside to this is that the building now read, in the dialect of the planet it was on, "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig." Quote from the book: The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," ... Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came." Referring to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, their biggest problem is reported to be that "one is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all. In other words, their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
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