Word: twilight
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Students' addiction to e-life is nothing new, of course, and few even notice their dependency--until, as during last Friday's three-hour eternity, they're forced to go cold turkey. Only in the twilight of an e-mail blackout does the owl of Minerva first take flight, so it's a good time to consider the consequences of our collective obsession with e-mail...
Similarly, advanced civilizations in the far future might be able to melt down stars and even entire galaxies to make gigantic campfires, or otherwise tilt the long-term odds in their favor. Life in the waning cosmic twilight might be jejune, but it could last a long time. Consider the marshaled resources of all the natural and artificial intelligences in the observable universe over the next, say, trillion years. Which would you bet on to prevail--that level of smarts or a claim, based on 19th century thermodynamics, that they're doomed...
...curious case of an American accused of spying in Moscow may reflect the blurring of lines in the post-Cold War twilight, but staging his arrest as a media event may be intended to send a clear message that the Yeltsin-era bonhomie between the erstwhile enemies is over. An American private citizen, identified by ABC News as retired Navy captain Edmond Pope, was arrested Thursday on charges of espionage, and is awaiting trial in the notorious Lefortovo prison. A Russian associate was arrested along with him, in a swoop on what Moscow's Federal Security Service (FSB) says...
...could not pick him out of a crowd. Prying eyes would slide right by the slight, spare figure with the bland, expressionless face. The perfect anonymity of a spy. He built a career on being a nonentity, the man you can't know, operating in the twilight world of cold war espionage, where power lies with the man who is a mystery to all but himself...
MicroStrategy's reversal stems from a practice endemic in dotcom-land--overstating revenues. In the Internet twilight zone, where profits rarely exist, evaluating complex revenue streams can turn more on esoteric judgments than on accounting canon. The right outcome can add billions to a company's stock-market value. "It's a dangerous and uncertain game," says Howard Schilit, president of the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, a forensic accounting firm that issued two early warnings on MicroStrategy. "You know your stock could be dead meat if results are a couple of cents short, so you may sit down...