I believe that the Netherlands was originally called Holland by many outsiders due to the confusion that originally came from the Dutch language itself. As Hollands is one of the old terms used to describe the Dutch language. To make matters worse, things that were considered "Dutch", at least in old Dutch, were called Hollandse. These two issues most likely contributed to the confusion about Holland vs Netherlands.

Another issue is that the Netherlands, about 200 years ago or so, consisted of, at least in part (I don't recall if it was the entirety or not), of Belgium, and Belgium then was known as South Netherlands.

It would appear that there is a strong push to try and make Netherlands to be the official term and uniform term for the Netherlands and it's language, as the language is now known as "Nederlands" in Dutch, and the land is refered to as "Nederland."

I would definitely agree with that.

I remember one of my teachers telling us about a project he worked on where they needed to keep track of the people who were working on it. They came onto the bright idea of just giving everyone a cell phone. Simple, as the employees would be happy to have a cool new phone to use, and they could easily keep track of them.

There was, I believe, a service that you could call that would allow you to get GPS like service before GPS became popular. This service was also used by emergency service to determine where you were as well.

Although I could just be off my rocker.

Having multiple booleans in a single word definitely makes sense to keep the true == 1 convension. I suspect, however, that in a case like the voyager probe they would likely have had multiple copies of the same memory to prevent radiation problems.

However, as Dog-Cow pointed out, true is defined as !false, which means that any value, including -1, would be classified as true. So, in at least the cases where one were trying to go for software that could counteract possible hardware problems of that likeness it would be a safer idea to go with -1 instead of 1.

Would probably be even more expensive given the number of features implemented in Windows.
The voyager probe code was most likely entirely purpose written, which is much easier to manage than something like windows which is designed for third party programs and tries to allow for general purpose computing.
Although, there are a few things that could be done to improve some reliability, even in old c++. Although I'm sure there might be difficulties with platforms other than x86. Like using -1 instead of 1 as "true". Thereby having all 1's set instead of a single bit which, in theory, could change.
But in reality, there's probably more issue with programmer's bugs than hardware issues.
One major question that I have had is why has the standard library not been expanded over the years. Code reuse is one of the best ways to reduce working bugs in pretty much all code. Although that's probably a result of many patent and IP issues. :/

If this is a volunteer run gift store in a place that's reasonably prestigious, then it could potentially be the volunteer type themselves that are of the type that have a high likelyhood of stealing. I'm not saying that high society are more likely to steal, I'm more trying to point out that one situation isn't entirely convincing of an epedemic everywhere and with every person. All that can be gathered from your situation is that older, retired people interested in high culture possibly are likely to skim off the top. There is even a motive for these older retired people to steal as well, as they are retired, which typically implies they are on a fixed income, and they are interested in high culture, which means that they may not have the means to get to high society other than skimming off the top.

People may know, but Verizon certainly does not. http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

Of course there is such a thing as negative zero. Just check out one's compliment.

I find it interesting that it sounds like they're only talking about rocket thrusters that use some kind of chemical propellant. There are many types of thrusters that can get fuel from external sources. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ion_thruster https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_sail This means we don't have to bring as much fuel. Or can generate more thrust than simple chemical reactions alone. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) As some examples. Although, it would seem that the decrease in impulse of the renewable fuel sources would probably mean a longer journey than with chemical propellants. Which would mean more food weight. Which would only increase the problems they have with vitamine deterioration in the food they have on board. Vitamine C deteriorates fairly fast... maybe they should just bring a bunch of cats to eat, they generate their own.

I like how in Canada it's allowed to copy a friend's CD they lend to you, but you can't have your friend copy the CD and give it to you. http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml So, there are quite some differences between how the media is copied and who is doing the copying. Not quite ripping your own stuff, but at least ripping things that would become yours after the fact. Even though the end result is the exact same.

I always thought power was measured in Newton meters per second, Joules per second, or more commonly as Watts.

I find it strange that Canada, being closer than Mexico, isn't on the list.

Actually, it's 11 months in the future, September, 2011.

Rather than payI prefer to take a limited bandwidth plan and save my GBs for the next months. That way I can use them when I feel like. [insert GPL non-trademarked sarcmark here]

There a couple things I've noticed that havn't really been addressed here yet, and that's power factor. Compact florencent lights have horrible power factor by comparison to the incandecent lights. Which while it means that people who are using the lights pay less, the power plants will have to supply even more than what's being paid for, which could mean that there is the need for more power generation, and bigger power line gauges. Another issue is that since it's a throw away product, they use the cheapest components in them, this means that there's a much higher chance of spectacular failure. People with dimmers can't use CFLs either, since while it'll look like it might work, it'll draw around 5 times as much current (even if the dimmers are set to 100%), which could pose a serious fire hazard. Other issues include that CFLs still generate a lot of heat, even though they do generate less, and because of the cheaper components, the enclosure has to be properly ventalated, which could result in people having to pay a hell of a lot more just to replace all their recessed lighting and other fixtures. There's also a lot of other places where CFLs are impossible to use, like in an oven for instance, where the CFL would pretty much melt right away. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be used, I just think there's a lot of hurdles that need to be beaten before they will actually be liable yet. http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.ht m check out this lovely little website.