Word: duel
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Half a year later, the duel has turned nasty, with legal shrapnel accompanying this month's releases of the latest versions of competing browsers, Netscape's Navigator 3.0 and Microsoft's Explorer 3.0. Which one is better? It's hard to say, and this in itself is a victory for Microsoft, which released its first weak browser just a year ago. Many Microsoft-loathing high-tech cognoscenti say Navigator remains the better guide. But the new Explorer narrows that gap convincingly, and the average user won't notice much difference...
Price competition is an alien concept to the handful of firms that dominate the cereal industry. "Their rivalry is more akin to the choreographed grunts of televised wrestling than a cutthroat duel to the death," says John Connor, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. "The ultimate weapon, steep price cuts, is rarely used." That has kept profit margins high. Ronald Cotterill, director of the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Connecticut, estimates that cereal firms pocket an average of 17% of their sales as operating income, vs. 7% to 8% for the food industry...
Apparently not. As Kasparov suspected, his duel with Deep Blue indeed became an icon in musings on the meaning and dignity of human life. While the world monitored his narrow escape from a historic defeat--and at the same time marked the 50th birthday of the first real computer, ENIAC--he seemed to personify some kind of identity crisis that computers have induced in our species...
...President be denied satisfaction on account of his office? If the office allows him to testify about exposing himself to a former employee, surely he will not be denied the privilege of defending his wife's honor. In the old days, he would have challenged that villain to a duel. But in these gentler times, mano a mano would seem more appropriate...
Dispassion vs. passion, intellect vs. instinct, the implosive vs. the explosive style--as writer-director Michael Mann develops the duel between this cop and this robber in Heat, his film becomes a compassionate contemplation of the two most basic ways of being male and workaholic in modern America. It also becomes a critique of pure reason. For Neil is placing impossible demands on himself, on his associates, on a chance universe in which they inhabit one of the chancier corners. He can't prevent himself from falling in love (with Amy Brenneman's innocent bookstore clerk). He can't prevent...