Word: code
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...great year for cracking codes, man's and nature's alike. The scientific high point of the year--if not of all intellectual history--was the decoding of human DNA, announced with much fanfare at the White House in late June by two scientists, J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins, whose agreement to share the credit and a podium was all the more remarkable because they can hardly stand to breathe the same air. Passions were no less intense on the Internet, where the music industry fought a rear-guard action against the forces--and free music--unleashed...
...long ago, few Rosemont students were considered college material. Reared in downtown Baltimore's roughest ZIP code, almost all of them live in poverty. The lucky ones could expect to take classes someday at a community college, but nearly two-thirds of students in this troubled district don't make it through high school. On standardized tests conducted three years ago, not a single Rosemont student read at grade level...
...While a freshman at Northeastern University, Shawn Fanning wrote the original code...
...where scientists once studied genetics--the structure and function of individual genes--they've now entered the age of genomics, in which they will study huge numbers of genes acting in concert. "The gene is like a piano key," says James Shreeve, author of an upcoming book, The Golden Code. "Up to this point, we've been going after notes. Now we have the keyboard. You had to have that level of detail to understand the music...
...someone without the good sense to know it was impossible. In mid-1999, the laid-back, 18-year-old Northeastern University dropout Shawn Fanning--nicknamed "Napster" for the nappy hair under his omnipresent baseball cap--holed up for days without sleep in his uncle's office, tapping out code for a music-swapping program. He didn't realize that the task was too hard, that people were too selfish to share, that big companies would shut him down. By the end of 2000, Napster had upended music's business model, survived a legal threat and found a sponsor in Bertelsmann...