Australia needs Rowdy Roddy Piper!
why did their civilization suddenly die out?
Are you actually serious with that question???
I believe the OP was making the common mistake of personifying the system instead of the people. That is common these days. However, the classic maya vanished before that, around 800 C.E. While the people didn't actually 'vanish', their way of life did. While it is possible that the maya became victims of their own overgrowth like the romans, subject to the law of diminishing returns, it seems more plausible they just abandoned it when it no longer served them. Perhaps the city was more a project or experiment than an exercise in domination and superiority like it was with the romans. The experiment served its purpose and then the people dispersed back into the jungle. It's unfortunate that most of what they learned and recorded during this time was destroyed by those invading peoples you mentioned.
I'm not going to bother to look it up, but I bet it is more than 40 times, a LOT more.
Let's see, eh.
Ballmer's 2009 Total Compensation:
$1,276,627 [src: forbes.com]
Microsoft factory worker in China:
65 cents x 15 hours x 24 days (people work 6 days a week there) = US$234/mo [from below post]
$2,808/yr
Ballmer makes about 454.6X a factor worker. Not really a thousand times, but getting there. Not to mention these workers have to buy their own bedding so they essentially have no benefits. None.
Explain then, how OTR http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ makes a man in the middle attack possible, assuming I've authenticated the person at the other end.
Besides, all the other IM protocols (AIM, ICQ, MSN, YAHOO) have been using ssl/tls for years, right?
Yeah, so? Now you can use OTR (off the record encryption) which provides all the privacy you couldn't get before. No need for protocol encryption. All with the comfort of your familiar IM client.
plagarism checker databases like turnitin lack the ability to parse anything but word files
I didn't believe this statement so I looked it up.
According to their student guide at http://www.turnitin.com/resources/documentation/turnitin/training/en_us/qs_student_en_us.pdf
At the top of page 2:
" We accept submissions in these formats: MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, PDF, PostScript, HTML, and plain text (.txt)"
So while I think plagiarism checkers are kind of a waste of resources, your statement is still false.
A drive by remote code execution for IE that replaces mshtml.dll with a compatible wrapper for the gecko engine. Problem solved! Now all those IE6 users are using firefox without even knowing it.
Happiness is twin floppies.