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Nahamoo Manager of human language technologies, IBM Research
Michael Phillips CTO, ScanSoft   Richard Stern Computer science
professor and speech systems expert, Carnegie Mellon
Jason Pontin (jason_pontin@yahoo.com) was the editor of Acumen
Journal of Life Sciences.  VIEW|hot seat      - Mark Rahner
Once upon a time, politics by other means took the form of war
between state-sponsored armies. Then along came the creeping
tide of international terror, whose practitioners play by
different rules. Terrorists have little use for top-heavy chains
of command, cumbersome procurement procedures, and pesky
government oversight. They eschew conventional rules of
engagement and international codes like the Geneva Conventions.
Faced with such an agile enemy, beleaguered states are turning
to a force that operates under a similar lack of constraints:
private military contractors. Once the hired guns settle into
the trenches, though, it can be