Word: worded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Peace virus capped a series of outbreaks that began last December, when a seemingly harmless Christmas greeting appeared mysteriously on terminals connected to a worldwide network owned and operated by IBM. Users who followed the instructions on the screen and typed the word Christmas inadvertently triggered a virus-like self-replicating mechanism, sending an identical copy of the original program to every name on their personal electronic mailing lists. In a matter of days, clones of the tiny program had multiplied in such profusion that they clogged the 350,000-terminal network like so many hairs in a bathtub drain...
...viruses are so playful. One particularly vicious program deletes everything stored on the computer and prints the word GOTCHA! on the screen. Another takes the form of a game called "rck.video." It delights unsuspecting users with an animation featuring the singer Madonna before erasing the files on their disks. Then it chortles, "You're stupid to download a video about rock stars...
...phenomenon for which Giamatti alone is widely -- if incorrectly -- blamed. An old rule had been elaborated: with men on base, pitchers now had to "come to a single complete and discernible stop" in their windup before hurling the old apple homeward. Discernible? What kind of pointy-headed intellectual word was that? Not only could you look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say, but a lot of disgruntled fans...
Giamatti obviously means every word of this, but he is hardly the passive, pliable, accommodating technocrat that his self-description portrays. In truth, he has never abandoned teaching; he has moved his impressive pedagogical skills from the classroom into progressively larger arenas. Bart holds certain truths to be self-evident. Chief among these is his unfashionable conviction that individualism must cease when it threatens the legitimate, shared concerns of community. This belief is not a late-blooming flower of incipient dotage. As a fledgling professor during the 1960s, Giamatti bore the plumage of the counterculture. His clothes were rumpled...
...vote is not the final word on Congress' latest effort to respond to American fears about drug abuse. The Senate still must consider its own anti-drug legislation, and a conference will probably be needed to reconcile the different bills...