Word: pre
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...artist and Yeoh the preeminent fighting femme. They played together in only one previous picture: Tai Chi Master in 1993, the busiest year of the Hong Kong Renaissance, when the colony's robust movies enthralled action fans around the globe, and the leading actors were worked as hard as pre-teen seamstresses in a Guangzhou garment factory. (Li and Yeoh each made five other films that year.) Now both 45, they have lost little of their agility and none of their screen luster. Their duel atop the Great Wall of China is a reunion of titans, an Old Timers...
...Chinese Ursidae living in martial-arts monasteries--yeah, we're covered. But present-day, nonmagical, human China? Kung Fu Panda is set in a pre-industrial China, like Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The new Mummy sequel, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, set in the 1940s, is about an undead 2,000-year-old Han emperor (Jet Li) and an army of terra-cotta warriors. The China that appears in American pop culture is about as modern as Arthurian England...
...Night of the Gun (Simon & Schuster; 389 pages), his arresting story of addiction and recovery, David Carr takes on these issues by trying to pre-empt them. Carr, an ex--crack addict turned media columnist for the New York Times, faces two problems in writing his story: he was so often high during the period in question that he's fuzzy on the facts, and he's writing in the post--James Frey era, when being fuzzy on the facts can land you in the hot seat on Oprah...
...Infrastructure is an ugly word - unless the bridge you take to work just collapsed. In politics, it has become a euphemism for pork-barrel spending. In the pre-Newt era of Democratic congressional dominance, it smacked of payoffs to big city machines and construction unions. That is one of the reasons Democratic candidates for President have soft-pedaled this basic governmental responsibility in the Reagan pendulum cycle. In the 2000 campaign, Al Gore proposed a new sort of infrastructure spending: a massive alternative-energy program - $15 billion a year for 10 years - to replace the country's dependence on fossil...
...scale of hacking round the world is notoriously difficult to estimate. By Jordan's own cautious assessment there are between 500 and 2000 hackers with the necessary skills to initiate a serious cyber attack and another 10,000 to 20,000 with the skills to use the pre-existing software to hack lower-grade security systems. And despite the sudden upswing in commercial cyber crime over the last 5 years, "The vast majority," he says, "are only interested in computer systems and the thrill and adventure of breaking into them...