Word: hatful
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Automatic speech recognition, the technology that enables computers to respond to spoken commands, is old hat to fictional electronic brains like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but still a primitive art in the real world. Computers are not yet discerning enough to cope with the ambiguities of spoken language or with a wide range of accents and tonal qualities. Making sense out of human discourse, says Dataquest Analyst Kenneth Lim, "is quite possibly the most difficult thing for a computer to do, other than actually thinking...
Shura, 37, a bearded artist in a faded sheepskin coat, a fur hat tipped to one side of his head. He beckoned toward a darkened doorway before speaking: "Lenin was the only one who thought about us; all the leaders who followed him were ambitious. That is why Brezhnev let us live our own lives; he lived a pretty nice one himself, eh? I have a friend who knows people in the Central Committee. He says that Gorbachev knows what he is about, that he is with it. Say, let's sneak off for a drink. Why huddle here discussing...
Volodya, 30, a small-town schoolteacher in a black jacket and black hat, riding a half-empty bus: "Real change means turning things upside down, and that will never happen. Lenin set the country in motion, and other drivers have stepped in to take his place, but they are all going down the same road and cannot change that. What does it concern the man in the street who is the latest General Secretary? It isn't we who choose them. So why get interested? When I was 20, I was involved in politics. Now I can take...
...what do you charge?" an advertising executive asked Kushner one morning. It was one of those soft San Francisco days--a day that makes a fellow feel like tossing his hat in the air--and Kushner had gone into it wearing his best three-piece blue suit ("Hey! When you're a humor consultant, you can use all the credibility you can get!"). The air in his conference room, however, was not as rosy as that outside. The executive, not a warm man it would seem, had conceded Kushner 30 minutes only after lengthy persuasion. He had already brushed aside...
...members estimate that the organized-crime bar consists of about 200 lawyers nationwide, with the most notorious numbering about 25 and based in Miami, New York, Chicago and Las Vegas. The burgeoning drug trade has spawned a new, younger group of organized-crime lawyers. "The image of the black-hat mouthpiece who can make witnesses disappear is completely out of date," says one Kaufman commission staff member. The new breed are sophisticated wheeler-dealers who help cocaine or heroin kingpins to conceal and invest their profits. They "see themselves as the Errol Flynns of their day, daring and bold," says...