Word: apparatus
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...chief competition is the bulkier, higher-priced ($325 to $400) Taser, a ten-year-old apparatus that shoots two wire-trailing darts into its victims, then passes an electric current through the wires. The Taser dart shooter is favored by many police, who would rather keep their distance from violent drunks, drug users and mental patients. Taser says that more than 400 police departments have bought the devices...
...Gorbachev. Starting with the Central Committee secretaries who oversee the functions of the government ministries, the party structure mirrors the framework of the bureaucracy in every respect, reaching down to people's control committees, with some 10 million inspectors, who check on local management. In fact, the party apparatus extends even further, to the shop floor...
Such trends are disturbing to the security forces, the middle-level party hacks deep in the provinces, and the peasant bureaucrats who have run much of the government apparatus since 1949. They are still formidable forces. State security controls where people can live, where they can travel, even whether they may put on an art exhibition. Citizens who are arrested sometimes vanish for months on end. Party cadres and bureaucrats feel that their positions and prerogatives are threatened by the economic reforms. They resent the emergence of a new managerial technocracy and the promotion to positions of responsibility of intellectuals...
...beam might have to be held on precisely the same spot on a missile's skin for as long as seven seconds; during that time the missile might rise 20 miles. Because a ground- based laser could not send a beam around the curve of the earth, the generating apparatus would have to be carried aboard a fleet of satellites in low orbits. How many satellites would have to be sent aloft in order to keep some in range of Soviet missile-launching sites at all times is a subject of fierce debate among scientists; estimates have ranged from...
Excimer lasers, which use a different kind of chemical reaction, produce beams of short wavelengths that could destroy a missile by focusing on it for only a second or so. But the generating apparatus is so bulky that it could not be lifted into orbit; the laser stations would have to be placed on mountaintops to put them above the densest layers of the atmosphere. Even the thin upper layers would cause the beams to shimmer, however, owing to the same phenomenon that makes the light from stars appear to twinkle. The excimer laser beams would have to be bounced...