Word: popularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tanen, a Paramount production boss in the '80s, called Hughes "the Steven Spielberg of youth comedy." Well, his movies were popular, with big grosses on spare budgets, but it's better to find literary analogues. In his facility for spinning the fullest comedy out of the frailest situation, he was the movies' version of playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The stay-at-home dad morphed into Mr. Mom; the annoying guy next to you became the Steve Martin-John Candy hit Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And as a portraitist of teen angst, he was a sunnier Salinger, a comedic S.E. Hinton. Anyway...
...Hamburg's sprawling harbor. The seaport city is one of the busiest ports in the world: nearly every car - new or used - passes through its docks on the way out of Germany. And this week, the police charged with patrolling the harbor released evidence showing that Germany's hugely popular cash-for-clunkers program may have some unintended beneficiaries: organized-crime groups and individuals who export the old cars to the Third World instead of crushing them into scrap. (Watch a video on how the cars-for-clunkers process works...
...program, which started in February, anyone who scraps a car that is at least nine years old can apply for a government subsidy of $3,600 toward the purchase of a new car. The German federal government has earmarked about $7 billion for the plan, which has been so popular that car sales in Germany could hit a 10-year high of 3.5 million vehicles this year...
Hackers slowed Twitter to a standstill early on Aug. 6, frustrating millions of users. For the culprits, all it took to snarl the popular social-networking site was one of the oldest tools in the Internet hacker handbook: the distributed denial-of-service attack (commonly shortened to DDoS), a method that has been used to crash some of the Web's largest sites, including Yahoo...
...repeal the ISA law. The law, under which detained persons can be held without trial for years under the act, was first enacted in 1948 to use against communist insurgents, but has always been abused. In September 2008, the ISA was resurrected to temporarily arrest a young journalist, a popular lawmaker and a blogger, sparking national outrage and prompting the opposition to annouce Saturday's protest a month ahead of the one year anniversary of the event...