Word: besting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Washington insists it is watching not only bin Laden's cells but also dozens of other potentially dangerous groups from its special Counter Terrorism Center in Virginia. Though the best way to track these groups would be to infiltrate them, that poses a nearly insuperable problem. "Terrorist cells are frequently very small groups of people who are all related to each other," says a CIA defender. "You don't just suddenly make yourself a cousin of somebody...
Amazon.com and other retailers born on the Web did much better, hitting their delivery dates nearly 9 times out of 10. The best performers--seemingly against all odds--were the delivery guys. UPS hired 90,000 extra employees for the dotcom season and managed to keep more than 95% of its promises...
Some sites, of course, were better prepared than others. By bringing on enough servers to handle peak-load traffic, the best avoided "site busy" messages and snail-like downloads. They also kept puzzled shoppers from fleeing by providing an 800 number or offering real-time Instant Messaging chats with customer reps. And they avoided apoplectic rages by "integrating" their inventory systems so that what appears to be in stock on the website corresponds with what's actually on the shelves...
Instead the court told the legislature to decide how best to extend to gays the perks married people enjoy, such as state tax breaks. It gave lawmakers the option to grant gays marriage licenses, but didn't require that step. The Governor is leaning toward a less controversial alternative: authorization of the arrangement known antiseptically as domestic partnership...
...Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest living theoretical physicists. His classic work, A Brief History of Time, has sold close to 9 million copies and was made into a PBS series that he narrated through his voice synthesizer (he has ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease). He's best known for devising theories of the Big Bang and black holes based on Einstein's work. We e-mailed Hawking at his Cambridge lab earlier this year to convince him of the importance of explaining Einstein at the end of his century...