Word: serveral
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...chat started quite uneventfully; as is to be expected, the questions were moderated and were mostly softballs. The problem, however, came when the heavy load of users trying to ask questions crashed the Internet relay chat server and forced CNN to restart...
Surprisingly, the server had not been set up to reserve any usernames, such as President_Clinton or Wolf_Blitzer, to specific computers. Anyone could take those names, without even a password, as long as no one else had them first. Since Clinton and Blitzer had been logged in from the beginning, this did not seem to be a problem--until one clever user wondered what would happen if the server crashed...
Christopher Petro, who works at an Internet startup in Manhattan and had been participating in the chat under the username of "wankel," decided to put this possibility to the test. As soon as the server had restarted after a crash, he tried switching his username to "President_Clinton." Since Clinton (or, rather, the person typing for the President) hadn't logged on yet, it worked, and for a few fleeting instants Petro had the bully pulpit all to himself...
Customers have commented on the change, said Jennie Follen, one of the newly-hired servers, who did not find out about the cafe's previous hiring policy until she started work last week as a server...
Well, maybe. By morning, the money was flooding in over the Internet--nearly a million dollars by the next night--and 12,000 people signed up to volunteer all over the country. Donations were coming in at such a furious pace that the campaign had to find a second server to handle the overflow. Israeli and Japanese television were on lines two and three. "My folks and supporters have never been as well treated as they have in the past 24 hours," joked McCain. "People have found our phone numbers that have been lost for years." Even Republican Party chief...