Word: shortcutting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Konami arcade game Gradius, a programmer found the game to be too difficult and programmed in a key sequence - up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A - that, if entered, gave the player a set of the game's power-ups. As word of the shortcut spread, other programmers aped his cheat, working the same sequence into their own games. The Konami code works in nearly 100 video games now, including Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution. (See the 50 best websites...
...Corps for botching flood protection, because Congress gave it "sovereign immunity" to protect its flood-protection projects from that sort of lawsuit. So the suit focused on a canal called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a classic Army Corps navigation boondoggle that was designed as a shortcut for ships to the Port of New Orleans - although ships rarely use it - and ended up instead as a shortcut for hurricanes. The plaintiffs argued that the so-called Mr. Go - which wasn't a flood-protection project, so theoretically it could be exempted from sovereign immunity - amplified and accelerated Katrina's surge...
...media may be dying, and career paths into journalism may be rapidly evaporating, but one Harvard Law School student may have found a shortcut from Langdell to the top of the Washington Post opinion page...
Ultimately, that is the right way to use geoengineering and to approach climate change. While geoengineering shouldn't be ignored, Levitt and Dubner's biggest mistake in their examination of the topic lay in being seduced by a clever-sounding, cheap and contrarian shortcut. Climate change, however, is one issue for which the conventional wisdom still works, even though it's costly - and even though conventional wisdom won't sell 3 million books...
...need for speed may enlist transcribers and fact checkers to expedite the process. But in the end, how quickly the book gets finished depends largely on the ghostwriter's drive to grind it out. "My friends used to joke about, I think it's Control plus F10 - [the computer shortcut that brings up] the word count," says Barbara Feinman Todd, who ghostwrote Hillary Clinton's 1996 best seller, It Takes a Village, among other books. Jenkins, meanwhile, recalls months of pumping out 40 pages a week for Armstrong's memoir. "You're a basket case afterward," she says...