Word: amateur
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...reaction to the two terrorist attacks during the last week in December is puzzling. One of the attacks, against a CIA outpost in Afghanistan, succeeded; the other, on an airplane landing in Detroit, failed. The Undiebomber was an amateur who was thwarted, rather neatly, by his fellow passengers on the plane. The Afghanistan operation was quite the opposite--highly sophisticated and devastating, with vast implications for both the war in Afghanistan and future clandestine CIA operations. And yet the Undiebomber has provoked an avalanche of attention in our twittery media--and from Republicans like Dick Cheney who yearn...
When Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola came up with the idea for his movie Star Wreck, a parody of Star Trek, he knew that looking for conventional distribution would be futile. An amateur, science-fiction comedy with a miniscule budget - and in Finnish, to boot - would hardly be attractive to mainstream studios. So Vuorensola took matters into his own hands: he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base who contributed to the storyline, made props and even offered their acting skills. In return for the help, Vuorensola released Star Wreck in 2005 online for free...
...English grandmaster Nigel Short says that chess computers, which now regularly beat the top human players, are taking away some of the mystery of the game. He likens them to "chainsaws chopping down the Amazon." What do you make of that? I can see his point. Any amateur can look at top-level games, and instead of appreciating the mystery behind the moves they will simply look at the evaluation of the computer. I'm not afraid the computer will find all the ideas and leave no room for imagination...
Harvard researchers have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth with telescopes no larger than those used by amateur stargazers...
Zachory K. Berta, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who first spotted the hint of the planet among the data, said that the telescopes used in the project are "no more advanced than what a sophisticated amateur would have...