If you are an Imperial soldier, you work jolly hard, before facing pitiless mid-term and year-end exams.

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She was, depending on your view, either the triumphant champion or the pitiless enforcer of rough, unfettered capitalism.

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But it is at least heartening to discover that natural selection, despite its pitiless motivations, has found a way to reward nurturing parents.

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If Steve Jobs was majestic and pitiless to his end users, he was incendiary to his competitors, famously pledging "thermonuclear war" on Google Android.

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They are pitiless and isolated, often situated in places that might be beautiful were they not so extreme, and defined by a kind of human deprivation particular to the industry.

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Still, it's an odd kind of a slog that manages to keep you partially engaged, even at its most esoteric or absurd, despite an endlessly excitable choir and Hans Zimmer's pitiless score.

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McLaughlin's coarsegrained script and David Buckley's pitiless score.

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Another round of the pitiless nebulizing machine, another night of waking Davis up every four hours so that the hose attached to the shoebox-sized device could deliver the misty medication that would restore his breath but rattle his fragile body.

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The logic is pitiless.

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It is fed in part by some of the familiar pejoratives associated with tech geekery (Denton as anti-social robot, for example), and also by his own publications, which, in the interest of his vaunted transparency, occasionally turn their pitiless gaze on the boss himself, for comic effect.

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