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List of computer term etymologies

This is a list of the origins of computer-related terms or terms used in the computing world (i.e., a list of computer term etymologies). It relates to both computer hardware and computer software.

Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a compiler is an application that compiles (programming language source code into the computer's machine language). However, there are other terms with less obvious origins, which are of etymological interest. This article lists such terms.

A

 * ABEND – originally from an IBM System/360 error message, short for "abnormal end". Jokingly reinterpreted as German Abend ("evening"), because "it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day."

 * Ada – named after Ada Lovelace, who is considered by many to be the first programmer.
 * Apache – originally chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache. It was suggested that the name was appropriate, as Apache began as a series of patches to code written for NCSA's HTTPd daemon. The result was "a patchy" server.

 * AWK – composed of the initials of its authors Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan.

B

 * B – probably a contraction of "BCPL", reflecting Ken Thompson's efforts to implement a smaller BCPL in 8 KB of memory on a DEC PDP-7. Or, named after Bon.

 * biff – named after a dog known by the developers at Berkeley, who – according to the UNIX manual page – died on 15 August 1993, at the age of 15, and belonged to a certain Heidi Stettner. Some sources report that the dog would bark at the mail carrier, making it a natural choice for the name of a mail notification system. The Jargon File contradicts this description, but confirms at least that the dog existed.

 * bit – first used by Claude E. Shannon in his seminal 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Shannon's "bit" is a portmanteau of "binary digit". He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had used the word in a Bell Labs memo of 9 January 1947.

 * Bon – created by Ken Thompson and named either after his wife Bonnie, or else after "a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas" (a reference to the Tibetan native religion Bön).
 * booting or bootstrapping – from the phrase "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", originally used as a metaphor for any self-initiating or self-sustaining process. Used in computing due to the apparent paradox that a computer must run code to load anything into memory, but code cannot be run until it is loaded.
 * bug – often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Harvard Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. However, use of the word 'bug' to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s, perhaps especially in Scotland. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks and letters.
 * byte – coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer.

C

 * C – a programming language.
 * Dennis Ritchie, having improved on the B language, named his creation New B. He later renamed it C. (See also D).

 * C++ – an object-oriented programming language, a successor to the C programming language.
 * C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup named his new language "C with Classes" and then "new C". The original language began to be called "old C" which was considered insulting to the C community. At this time Rick Mascitti suggested the name C++ as a successor to C. In C the '++' operator increments the value of the variable it is appended to, thus C++ would increment the value of C.

 * computer – from the human computers who carried out calculations mentally and possibly with mechanical aids, now replaced by electronic programmable computers.
 * cookie – a packet of information that travels between a browser and the web server.
 * The term was coined by web browser programmer Lou Montulli after the term "magic cookies" used by Unix programmers. The term "magic cookie" in turn derives from "fortune cookie", a cookie with an embedded message.

 * Cursor (user interface) - Cursor is Latin for 'runner.' A cursor is the name given to the transparent slide engraved with a hairline that is used for marking a point on a slide rule. The term was then transferred to computers through analogy.

D

 * D – a programming language.
 * Designed by Walter Bright as an improved C, avoiding many of the design problems of C (e.g., extensive pointer manipulation, unenforced array boundaries, etc.).

 * daemon – a process in an operating system that runs in the background.
 * It is not an acronym for Disk And Execution Monitor: according to the original team that introduced the concept, the use of the word daemon was inspired by the Maxwell's demon of physics and thermodynamics (an imaginary agent which helped sort molecules with differing velocities and worked tirelessly in the background) The term was embraced, and possibly popularized, by the Unix operating systems which supported multiple background processes: various local (and later Internet) services were provided by daemons. This is exemplified by the BSD mascot, John Lasseter's drawing of a friendly imp.

 * Dashboard - Originally, the word dashboard applied to a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed up" (thrown up) by the horses' hooves.[1] The first known use of the term (hyphenated as dash-board, and applied to sleighs) dates from 1847.[2] Commonly these boards did not perform any additional function other than providing a convenient handhold for ascending into the driver's seat, or a small clip with which to secure the reins when not in use.
 * Debian – a Linux distribution.
 * A portmanteau of the names Ian Murdock, the Debian Project creator, and Debra Lynn, Ian's then girlfriend and future wife.

 * default – an initial value for a variable or user setting.
 * The original meaning of the word 'default' is 'failure to fulfill an obligation'. The obligation here is to provide an input that is required by a program. In the early days of programming, if an input value was missing, or 'null', the program would almost certainly crash. This is often to do with variable 'typing' – for example, a simple calculation program would expect a number as an input: any other type of input such as a text string or even a null (no value), would make any mathematical operation such as multiplication impossible. In order to guard against this possibility, programmers defined initial values that would be used if the user *defaulted* or failed to fulfill the obligation of providing the correct input value. Over time, the term 'default' has come to refer to the initial value itself.

E

 * Ethernet – a computer networking technology.
 * According to Robert Metcalfe (one of its initial developers), he devised the name in an early company memo as an endocentric compound of "luminiferous ether"—the "substance" that was widely believed to be the medium through which electromagnetic radiation propagated in the late 19th century—and "net", short for "network". When the networking team would describe data flowing into the network infrastructure, they would routinely describe it as data packets going "up into the ether".

F

 * finger – Unix command that provides information about users logged into a system.
 * Les Earnest wrote the finger program in 1971 to provide for users who wanted information about other users on a network or system. According to Earnest, it was named after the act of pointing, because it "bypassed the need to point to a user ID and ask, 'Who is that?'"

 * foobar – from the U.S. Army slang acronym, FUBAR. Both foo and bar are commonly used as metasyntactic variables.

G

 * Gentoo – a Linux distribution.
 * Named after a variety of penguin, the universal Linux mascot.

 * Git – a distributed version control system.
 * In the project's initial README file, Linus Torvalds wrote that "'git' can mean anything, depending on your mood", and offers several definitions:
 * A random three-letter combination which is pronounceable and not a preexisting Unix command
 * British English slang, meaning a stupid or contemptible person
 * An acronym for "global information tracker" (when it works)
 * An acronym for "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t" (when it breaks)
 * When asked about the origin of the name, Torvalds jokingly stated, "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself."

 * GNU – a project with an original goal of creating a free operating system.
 * Gnu (also called wildebeest) are a genus of African antelopes resembling cattle. The founder of the GNU project Richard Stallman liked the name because of the humour associated with its pronunciation (officially, ), and was also influenced by The Gnu Song, by Flanders and Swann, which is sung by a gnu. It is also an early example of a recursive acronym: "GNU's Not Unix".

 * Google – a search engine.
 * The name started as an exaggerated boast about the amount of information the search engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. The word was originally invented by Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, in 1938 during a discussion of large numbers and exponential notation.

 * Gopher – an early protocol for distributing documents over a network. Declined in favor of the World Wide Web.
 * The name was coined by developer Farhad Anklesaria, as a play on, an assistant who fetches things, and a gopher, who digs, as if through nested hierarchies. The name was also inspired by Goldy Gopher, the mascot for the University of Minnesota where the protocol was developed.

 * grep – a Unix command line utility
 * The name comes from a command in the Unix text editor ed that takes the form  meaning search globally for a regular expression and print lines where instances are found. "Grep" like "Google" is often used as a verb, meaning "to search".

H

 * Hotmail – free email service, now named Outlook.com.
 * Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" – the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

I

 * i18n – short for "internationalization".
 * "18" is for the number of letters between the i and the n. Related, less common terms include l10n (for localization), g11n (for globalization) and a11y (for accessibility).

 * ICQ – an instant messaging service.
 * ICQ is not an initialism. It is a play on the phrase "I seek you" or "Internet seek you" (similar to CQ in ham radio usage).

 * ID10T – pronounced "ID ten T" – is a code frequently used by a customer service representative (CSR) to annotate their notes and identify the source of a problem as the person who is reporting the problem rather than the system being blamed. This is a thinly veiled reference to the CSR's opinion that the person reporting the problem is an IDIOT. Example: Problem reported caused by ID10T, no resolution possible. See also PEBKAC.

J

 * Jakarta Project – a project constituted by Sun and Apache to create a web server for Java servlets and JSPs.
 * Jakarta was the name of the conference room at Sun where most of the meetings between Sun and Apache took place. The conference room was most likely named after Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, which is located on the northwest coast of the island of Java.

 * Java – a programming language by Sun Microsystems, later acquired by Oracle.
 * Named after, a blend of coffee from the island of Java, and also used as slang for coffee in general. The language was initially called "Greentalk" and later "Oak", but this was already trademarked by Oak Technologies, so the developers had to choose another name shortly before release. Other suggested names were "WebRunner", "DNA", and "Silk".

 * JavaScript – a programming language.
 * It was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name "Mocha", which was later renamed to "LiveScript", and finally to "JavaScript". The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript was first introduced and deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3 in December 1995. The naming has caused confusion, giving the impression that the language is a spin-off of Java, and it has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web-programming language.

K

 * Kerberos – a computer network authentication protocol that is used by both Windows 2000 and Windows XP as their default authentication method.
 * When created by programmers at MIT in the 1970s, they wanted a name that suggested high security for the project, so they named it after Kerberos, in Greek mythology the three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hades. The reference to Greek mythology is most likely because Kerberos was developed as part of Project Athena.

L

 * Linux – an operating system kernel, and the common name for many of the operating systems which use it.
 * Linux creator Linus Torvalds originally used the MINIX operating system on his computer, didn't like it, liked DOS less, and started a project to develop an operating system that would address the problems of MINIX. Hence the working name was Linux (Linus' Minix). Originally, however, Linus had planned to have it named Freax (free + freak + x). His friend Ari Lemmke encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded. Ari gave Linus a directory named linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax.

 * Lisa – A personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s.
 * Apple stated that Lisa was an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture; however, it is often inferred that the machine was originally named after the daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and that this acronym was invented later to fit the name. Accordingly, two humorous suggestions for expanding the acronym included Let's Invent Some Acronyms, and Let's Invent Silly Acronyms.

 * liveware – computer personnel.
 * A play on the terms "software" and "hardware". Coined in 1966, the word indicates that sometimes the computer problem is not with the computer itself, but with the user.

 * Lotus Software – Lotus founder Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' ('Padmasana' in Sanskrit). Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

M

 * Macintosh, Mac – a personal computer from Apple Computer.
 * From McIntosh, a popular type of apple.

N

 * Nerd – A colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one. Originally created by Dr. Seuss from his book If I Ran the Zoo.

O

 * Oracle – a relational database management system (RDBMS).
 * Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was Oracle (the CIA evidently saw this as a system that would give answers to all questions). The project was designed to use the newly written SQL database language from IBM. The project eventually was terminated but they decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine.

P

 * Pac-Man – a video arcade game.
 * The term comes from paku paku which is a Japanese onomatopoeia used for noisy eating; similar to chomp chomp. The game was released in Japan with the name Puck-Man, and released in the US with the name Pac-Man, fearing that kids may deface a Puck-Man cabinet by changing the P to an F.

 * Patch – A set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve it.
 * Historically, software suppliers distributed patches on paper tape or on punched cards, expecting the recipient to cut out the indicated part of the original tape (or deck), and patch in (hence the name) the replacement segment

 * PCMCIA – the standards body for PC card and ExpressCard, expansion card form factors.
 * The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association is an international standards body that defines and promotes standards for expansion devices such as modems and external hard disk drives to be connected to notebook computers. Over time, the acronym PCMCIA has been used to refer to the PC card form factor used on notebook computers. A twist on the acronym is People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.

 * PEBKAC – an acronym for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair", which is a code frequently used by a customer service representative (CSR) to annotate their notes and identify the source of a problem as the person who is reporting the problem rather than the system being blamed. This is a thinly veiled reference to the CSR's opinion that the person reporting the problem is the problem. Example: PEBKAC, no resolution possible. See also ID10T.
 * Pentium – a series of microprocessors from Intel.
 * The fifth microprocessor in the 80x86 series. It would have been named i586 or 80586, but Intel decided to name it Pentium (penta = five) after it lost a trademark infringement lawsuit against AMD due to a judgment that numbers like "286", "386", and "486" cannot be trademarked. According to Intel, Pentium conveys a meaning of strength, like titanium.

 * Since some early Pentium chips contained a mathematical precision error, it has been jokingly suggested that the reason for the chip being named Pentium rather than 586 was that Intel chips would calculate 486 + 100 = 585.99999948.

 * Perl – an interpreted scripting language.
 * Perl was originally named Pearl, after the "pearl of great price" of Matthew 13:46. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations and claims to have looked at (and rejected) every three- and four-letter word in the dictionary. He even thought of naming it after his wife Gloria. Before the language's official release Wall discovered that there was already a programming language named Pearl, and changed the spelling of the name. Although the original manuals suggested the backronyms "Practical Extraction and Report Language" and "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister", these were intended humorously.

 * PHP – a server-side scripting language
 * Originally named "Personal Home Page Tools" by creator Rasmus Lerdorf, it was rewritten by developers Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans who gave it the recursive name "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor". Lerdorf currently insists the name should not be thought of as standing for anything, for he selected "Personal Home Page" as the name when he did not foresee PHP evolving into a general-purpose programming language.

 * Pine – e-mail client.
 * Many people believe that Pine stands for "Pine Is Not Elm". However, one of its original authors, Laurence Lundblade, insists this was never the case and that it started off simply as a word and not an acronym; his first choice of a backronym for pine would be "Pine Is Nearly Elm". Over time it was changed to mean Program for Internet News and E-mail.

 * ping – a computer network tool used to detect hosts.
 * The author of ping, Mike Muuss, named it after the pulses of sound made by a sonar called a "ping". Later Dave Mills provided the backronym "Packet Internet Groper".

 * Python – an interpreted scripting programming language.
 * Named after the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

R

 * Radio button – a GUI widget used for making selections.
 * Radio buttons got their name from the preset buttons in radio receivers. When one used to select preset stations on a radio receiver physically instead of electronically, depressing one preset button would pop out whichever other button happened to be pushed in.

 * Red Hat Linux – a Linux distribution from Red Hat.
 * Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) by his grandfather while at college. People would turn to him to solve their problems, and he was referred to as "that guy in the red hat". He lost the cap and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return the hat if found by anyone.

 * RSA – an asymmetric algorithm for public key cryptography.
 * Based on the surnames of the authors of this algorithm – Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman.

S

 * Samba – a free implementation of Microsoft's networking protocol.
 * The name samba comes from inserting two vowels into the name of the standard protocol that Microsoft Windows network file system use, named Server Message Block (SMB). The author searched a dictionary using grep for words containing S M and B in that order; the only matches were Samba and Salmonberry.

 * shareware – coined by Bob Wallace to describe his word processor PC-Write in early 1983. Before this Jim Knopf (also known as Jim Button) and Andrew Fluegelman called their distributed software "user supported software" and "freeware" respectively, but it was Wallace's terminology that prevailed.
 * spam – unwanted repetitious messages, such as unsolicited bulk e-mail.
 * The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. While a customer plaintively asks for some kind of food without SPAM in it, the server reiterates the SPAM-filled menu. Soon, a chorus of Vikings join in with a song: "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM", over and over again, drowning out all conversation.

 * SPIM – a simulator for a virtual machine closely resembling the instruction set of MIPS processors, is simply MIPS spelled backwards. In recent time, spim has also come to mean SPam sent over Instant Messaging.
 * Swing – a graphics library for Java.
 * Swing was the code-name of the project that developed the new graphic components (the successor of AWT). It was named after swing, a style of dance band jazz that was popularized in the 1930s and unexpectedly revived in the 1990s. Although an unofficial name for the components, it gained popular acceptance with the use of the word in the package names for the Swing API, which begin with.

T

 * Tomcat – a web server from the Jakarta Project.
 * Tomcat was the code-name for the JSDK 2.1 project inside Sun. Tomcat started off as a servlet specification implementation by James Duncan Davidson who was a software architect at Sun. Davidson had initially hoped that the project would be made open-source, and since most open-source projects had O'Reilly books on them with an animal on the cover, he wanted to name the project after an animal. He came up with Tomcat since he reasoned the animal represented something that could take care of and fend for itself.

 * troff – a document processing system for Unix.
 * Troff stands for "typesetter roff", although many people have speculated that it actually means "Times roff" because of the use of the Times font family in troff by default. Troff has its origins from roff, an earlier formatting program, whose name is a contraction of "run off".

 * Trojan horse – a malicious program that is disguised as legitimate software.
 * The term is derived from the classical myth of the Trojan Horse. Analogously, a Trojan horse appears innocuous (or even to be a gift), but in fact is a vehicle for bypassing security.

 * Tux – The penguin mascot used as the primary logo for the Linux kernel, and Linux-based operating systems.
 * Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, suggested a penguin mascot because he "likes penguins a lot", and wanted Linux to be associated with something "kind of goofy and fun". The logo was originally created by Larry Ewing in 1996 as an entry in a Linux Logo competition. The name Tux was contributed by James Hughes, who suggested "(T)orvolds (U)ni(X) — TUX!"

U

 * Ubuntu Linux – a Debian-based Linux distribution sponsored by Canonical Ltd.
 * Derived from ubuntu, a South African ideology.

 * Unix – an operating system.
 * When Bell Labs pulled out of the MULTiplexed Information and Computing System (MULTICS) project, which was originally a joint Bell Labs/GE/MIT project, Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, soon joined by Dennis Ritchie, wrote a simpler version of the operating system for a spare DEC minicomputer, allegedly found in a corridor. They needed an OS to run the game Space Travel, which had been compiled under MULTICS. The new OS was named UNICS – UNiplexed Information and Computing System by Brian Kernighan.

V

 * vi – a text editor,
 * Initialism for visual, a command in the ex editor which helped users to switch to the visual mode from the ex mode. the first version was written by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley.

 * Vim – a text editor.
 * Acronym for Vi improved after Vim added several features over the vi editor. Vim however had started out as an imitation of Vi and was expanded as Vi imitation.

 * Virus – a piece of program code that spreads by making copies of itself.
 * The term virus was first used as a technical computer science term by Fred Cohen in his 1984 paper "Computer Viruses Theory and Experiments", where he credits Len Adleman with coining it. Although Cohen's use of virus may have been the first academic use, it had been in the common parlance long before that. A mid-1970s science fiction novel by David Gerrold, When H.A.R.L.I.E. was One, includes a description of a fictional computer program named VIRUS that worked just like a virus (and was countered by a program named ANTIBODY). The term "computer virus" also appears in the comic book "Uncanny X-Men" No. 158, published in 1982. A computer virus's basic function is to insert its own executable code into that of other existing executable files, literally making it the electronic equivalent to the biological virus, the basic function of which is to insert its genetic information into that of the invaded cell, forcing the cell to reproduce the virus.

W

 * Wiki or WikiWiki – a hypertext document collection or the collaborative software used to create it.
 * Coined by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki concept, who named them for the "wiki wiki" or "quick" shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport. Wiki wiki was the first Hawaiian term he learned on his first visit to the islands. The airport counter agent directed him to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.

 * Worm – a self-replicating program, similar to a virus.
 * The name 'worm' was taken from a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner entitled The Shockwave Rider. The book describes programs known as "tapeworms" which spread through a network for the purpose of deleting data. Researchers writing an early paper on experiments in distributed computing noted the similarities between their software and the program described by Brunner, and adopted that name.

 * WYSIWYG – describes a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product.
 * Acronym for What You See Is What You Get, the phrase was originated by a newsletter published by Arlene and Jose Ramos, named WYSIWYG. It was created for the emerging Pre-Press industry going electronic in the late 1970s.

X

 * X Window System – a windowing system for computers with bitmap displays.
 * X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system named the W Window System.

Y

 * Yahoo! – internet portal and web directory.
 * Yahoo!'s history site says the name is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", but some remember that in its early days (mid-1990s), when Yahoo! lived on a server named akebono.stanford.edu, it was glossed as "Yet Another Hierarchical Object Organizer." The word "Yahoo!" was originally invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

Z

 * zip – a file format, also used as a verb to mean compress.
 * The file format was created by Phil Katz, and given the name by his friend Robert Mahoney. The compression tool Phil Katz created was named PKZIP. Zip means "speed", and they wanted to imply their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time.

title: List of computer term etymologies


text:
Nixon's Enemies List

"Nixon's Enemies List" is the informal name of what started as a list of President of the United States Richard Nixon's major political opponents compiled by Charles Colson, written by George T. Bell (assistant to Colson, special counsel to the White House), and sent in memorandum form to John Dean on September 9, 1971. The list was part of a campaign officially known as "Opponents List" and "Political Enemies Project".

The list became public knowledge on June 27, 1973, when Dean mentioned during hearings with the Senate Watergate Committee that a list existed containing those whom the president did not like. Journalist Daniel Schorr, who happened to be on the list, managed to obtain a copy of it later that day.

A longer second list was made public by Dean on December 20, 1973, during a hearing with the Congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation.

Purpose
The official purpose, as described by the White House Counsel's Office, was to "screw" Nixon's political enemies, by means of tax audits from the Internal Revenue Service, and by manipulating "grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc." In a memorandum from John Dean to Lawrence Higby (August 16, 1971), Dean explained the purpose of the list:

"This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."

The IRS commissioner, Donald C. Alexander, refused to launch audits of the people on the list. While none on the list were audited, several major donors to the presidential campaign of George McGovern did get audited in 1973, prompting a later remark from Karl Hess, "The right of the victor of a presidential election is to the authority to audit the losers".

People listed
The twenty names in the memo were as follows, although a master list of Nixon's political opponents with additional names was developed later.

 * Arnold Picker, film executive
 * Alexander E. Barkan, head of the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education
 * Edwin Guthman, journalist
 * Maxwell Dane, advertising executive
 * Charles Dyson, businessman
 * Howard Stein, financier
 * Rep. Allard Lowenstein (D-NY), congressman
 * Morton Halperin, foreign policy expert
 * Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers
 * S. Sterling Munro Jr., aide of former Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson
 * Bernard T. Feld, professor
 * Sidney Davidoff, lawyer
 * Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), congressman
 * Samuel M. Lambert, executive secretary of the National Education Association
 * Stewart Rawlings Mott, philanthropist
 * Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA), congressman
 * Daniel Schorr, journalist
 * S. Harrison Dogole, president of Globe Security Systems
 * Paul Newman, actor
 * Mary McGrory, journalist

Master list of political opponents
According to Dean, Colson later compiled hundreds of names on a "master list" which changed constantly. On December 20, 1973, the Congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation concluded that people on the "Enemies" list had not been subjected to an unusual number of tax audits. The report revealed a second list of about 576 (with some duplicates) supporters and staffers of George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign given to Internal Revenue Commissioner Johnnie Walters by John Dean on September 11, 1972. The Washington Post printed the entire list the next day, but The New York Times reported just a few paragraphs on page 21.

Reception
Newsman Daniel Schorr and actor Paul Newman stated, separately, that inclusion on the list was their greatest accomplishment. When this list was released, Schorr read it live on television, not realizing that he was on the list until he came to his own name. Author Hunter S. Thompson remarked he was disappointed he was not on it.

In popular culture
In the United States, the term "enemies list" has come to be used in contexts not associated with Richard Nixon. For example, satirist P. J. O'Rourke's 1989 "A Call for a New McCarthyism" in The American Spectator has a hybrid blacklist and enemies list, suggesting that, contrary to the spirits of these lists, the subjects there should be overexposed, not suppressed, "so that a surfeited public rebels in disgust."

In Philip Roth's Our Gang, which was published in 1971, two years before the list was first mentioned in public, the Nixon parody character Trick E. Dixon begins to compile a rudimentary list of five political enemies. It includes Jane Fonda and the Black Panthers who were on the real-life expanded master list, The Berrigans (who were not) and Curt Flood.

In "Homer's Enemy" (1997), an 8th-season episode of The Simpsons, Moe Szyslak shows off his own enemies list, which Barney Gumble quickly appraises as Nixon's list, with the latter's name crossed out and replaced with Moe's. Moe promptly adds Barney to the list for his insolence. An earlier episode was also a likely reference to the enemies' list when Homer falls to the floor as a result of a shoddy chair. In anger, Homer remarks that the manufacturer "just made the list!".

In Futurama's first episode, "Space Pilot 3000" (1999), Fry and Bender walk through a room of live preserved heads of famous people. When Fry knocks over Nixon's jar, Nixon says "That's it, you just made my list!"

In a BoJack Horseman second-season episode called "The Shot" (2015), the title character and Todd visit the Nixon Presidential Library with the intent of stealing a scaled-down replica of the library. Mounted on the walls are Nixon's Enemy and "Frenemy" Lists. Walt Disney is included on the Enemy List.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Nixon's Enemies List


text:
Royal tern

The royal tern (Thalasseus maximus) is a tern in the family Laridae. The species is endemic to the Americas, though vagrants have been identified in Europe.

Taxonomy
The royal tern was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1781 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-colored plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Sterna maxima in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The royal tern is now placed in the genus Thalasseus that was erected by the German zoologist Friedrich Boie in 1822.

The generic name is derived from the Ancient Greek θάλασσα (thálassa) meaning "sea". The specific epithet maximus is Latin for "greatest".

The royal tern belongs to the class Aves and the order Charadriiformes. Charadriiformes includes seabirds and shorebirds of small to medium-large size. Within Charadriiformes, it is placed in the family Laridae, subfamily Sterninae, because of its white plumage, a black cap on its head, long bill, webbed feet, and bodies that are more streamlined than those of gulls.

The taxonomy of the royal tern has been debated, whether the correct scientific name was Thalasseus maximus or Sterna maxima. It was originally placed in the genus Sterna; however, a 2005 study found that the genus Thalasseus is genetically distinct from Sterna. ; thus it is presently classified as Thalasseus maximus, which places it with seven other crested terns.

The West African crested tern (Thalasseus albididorsalis) was formerly considered to be a subspecies of royal tern. It was elevated to species status in January 2020.

Description

This is a large tern, second only to the Caspian tern but is unlikely to be confused with this "carrot-billed" giant, which has extensive dark underwing patches.

The royal tern has an orange-red bill, pale gray upperparts, and white underparts. Its legs are black. In winter, the black cap becomes patchy. Juvenile royal terns are similar to non-breeding adults. Differences include juveniles having black splotched wings and a yellower bill. An adult royal tern has an average wingspan of 130 cm, for both sexes, but their wingspan can range from 125 –. Its length ranges from 45 – and their weight is anywhere from 350 –.

The calls of the royal tern are usually short, clear shrills. Some of the shrills sound like kree or tsirr; the royal tern also has a more plover-like whistle that is longer, rolling, and more melodious.

In parts of its range, the royal tern could be confused with the elegant tern, but the elegant tern has a longer but slenderer, more curved, bill, and shows more white on the forehead in winter. Vagrants in Europe need careful documentation to distinguish them from the same-sized West African crested tern, which has also been recorded in Europe.

Distribution and habitat
The royal tern is found on both coasts of the Americas. In the northeast, during the breeding season (April to July) it is primarily found from Texas to Virginia, with scattered breeding records as far north as Long Island, New York, and south to French Guiana, and on several Caribbean islands. It also breeds in the southeast from southeastern Brazil south to Chubut Province in Argentina. The wintering range in the east is from North Carolina south to Panama and the Guianas and throughout the Caribbean. The western population nests from California to Mexico and winters from California south to Peru. Argentinian breeders are resident or disperse into Brazil.

Feeding
The royal tern typically feeds in small secluded bodies of water such as estuaries, mangroves, and lagoons. Also, but less frequently, the royal tern will hunt for fish in open water, typically within about 100 m of the shore. The royal tern feeds in salt water and on very rare occasions in fresh water. When feeding they fly long distances from the colony to forage. The royal tern feeds by diving into the water from heights near 9 m. They usually feed alone or in groups of two or three but on occasion, they feed in large groups when hunting large schools of fish.

The royal tern usually feeds on small fish such as anchovies, weakfish, and croakers. Fish are their main source of food but they also eat insects, shrimp,crabs, and hatchling sea turtles. The royal tern feeds on small crabs, such as young blue crabs that swim near the surface of the water. When feeding on small crabs the royal tern does not use its normal plunge-dive technique, but instead uses short shallow dives so that they are concealed from their prey. The royal tern also uses this technique when hunting flying fish.

Breeding

The royal tern nests on island beaches or isolated beaches with limited predators. It lays one or two eggs, usually in a scrape, an area on the ground where a tern has made a small hole to lay its eggs. In some cases, tern eggs are laid directly on the ground, not in a scrape. The eggs incubate from 25 to 30 days; after the eggs hatch the chicks remain in the scrape for about a week. About two weeks after hatching the chicks gather into groups called a crèche. When the chicks are in the crèche, they are primarily fed by their parents who recognize their offspring by their voice and looks. While the chicks are in the crèche, they usually roam freely around the colony. In a large colony, there can be thousands of chicks in the crèche. When the chicks are a month old they fledge or start to fly. Royal terns mature around the age of 4 years, after which they build their own nests and reproduce.

Threats
The royal tern has few predators when it is mature, but before the chicks hatch or while they are chicks the tern is threatened by humans, other animals, and the tides. Humans threaten terns by fishing and by disrupting the tern nesting sites. Fishing nets can catch a tern while it is diving, making it unable to feed or it may cause it to drown if it is caught underwater. Animals such as foxes, raccoons, and large gulls prey on tern chicks and tern eggs.

Tern nesting sites can also be affected by the tides; if a tern colony has nested too close to the high tide mark, a spring tide would flood the nesting site and kill the chicks and make unhatched eggs infertile.

A royal tern was documented with a wing broken in three places near the launch site of the recent SpaceX Starship. A local vet at the zoo calls this a common injury. The bird was found 53 hours after the launch hurled concrete and rocks into the area. The Zoo vet says the injury could not have been caused by the debris, as the animal would have been removed by predators. This would have been the only bird alive injured after the launch. Reference injury report, 04/22/23 Brownsville Zoo.

Conservation
The IUCN has rated the royal tern as of Least Concern.

title: Royal tern


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Talk:Bell Labs

Include other prizes?
I think if you are NOT going to restrict the list of prizes to Nobel Prizes but are also going to include winners of the Turing Award, you should include anyone who won an Abel Prize for mathematics (if there are any), a Fields Medal for mathematics (if there are any), and a Noble Prize for Engineering (and there is definitely at least one, Claude Shannon in 1939, and if you leave out ALL Nobles, then you have to leave out Shannon's, and it's so important I don't think you want to do that). Maybe others. Does the IEEE give out awards?2603:7000:9906:A91C:1C64:8308:33BC:E2D6 (talk) 21:17, 10 August 2021 (UTC)Christopher Lawrence Simpson

/* Nobel Prizes, Turing Awards, Emmy Awards, Grammy Award, and Academy Award */
Met an archivist from Nokia at Murray Hill, NJ that went through the various companies, beginning at AT&T Bell Labs. Showed one Emmy of two in the lecture that was presented. Researched this and determined that there were five. Also, in the lecture was Academy award and Grammy, hence the section was significant as an addition to Nobel Prizes, and Turing Awards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Antonio cruz wiki (talk • contribs) 04:22, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Educational films
During the research of Bell Labs material, there were several important short films done by AT&T with significant information of telephony, science and technology. One hidden gem was the Live from AT&T Bell Labs short films that featured renowned scientists and ideas or inventions being shown and discussed for PBS showings. Viewed the films for scientists and inventions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Antonio cruz wiki (talk • contribs) 05:08, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Bell Labs President "James Brown Fisk"
Noticed the fourth President of Bell Labs did not have a Wikipedia entry. Created a basic entry for James Brown Fisk using the similarity of the entry for William Oliver Baker. After searching the biographical sources, there was tremendous achievements that should be included in the entry for Mr. Fisk beyond my basic creation and editing experience. Antonio cruz wiki (talk) 21:07, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Presidents
Created the table for Western Electric Presidents using this table design. Noticed, that the Bell Labs table was in chronological order from current to first, so reversed table entries from first to current order. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Antonio cruz wiki (talk • contribs) 16:11, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Bell Labs Fellow
I have heard of a Bell Labs Fellow and I have read a person is a Bell Labs Fellow. But what is a Bell Labs Fellow? It is a person that has been identified by Bell Labs for their technical accomplishments in technical fields important for Bell Labs research as staff. There is an annual award ceremony held by Bell Labs and the recipients is cited for their individual work with other inductees as an achievement of their career. It is not one but a few or many. According to a Nokia Bell Labs website, there were 341 already recipients of this honor or prestigious award in 2022 and can't determine if the five new inductees were in this total. I have never met a Bell Labs Fellow in my life, or identified a person as a Fellow, but they were historical important as they existed or exist for their corporate accomplishments. The program, as I read started in 1982 by AT&T Bell Labs and continued through the other companies mergers, Lucent Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia. There also is an AT&T Fellow honor when AT&T branched off from the creation of Lucent Technologies in 1996. Why are these employees important or attributed to the scientific community is probably similar that there are IEEE Fellows or IEC Fellows or SPIE Fellows. There has be a list at Nokia of the recipients for them to indicate the total tally, not even part of the program since its' inception by AT&T in 1982. When I read that a person is a Bell Labs Fellow with a date or the citation, I add the entry as it gives a name or a former Bell Labs employee, a year of the award when present at the company, and what technical or scientific work was being done for this achievement. This allows a little more history about Bell Labs and specific workings. Being a Bell Labs Fellow appears as an international accomplishment because publications, other companies, and bios have this title with a person that has been awarded. It is prestigious that four other companies have carried this program into their corporate realms (old AT&T, new AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia.) This program is not a fellowship for employees that work for Bell Labs due to being minorities or gender criteria. There seems to exist or existed a program as Bell Labs Graduate Fellowship where students were granted monies to work with Bell Labs and study in fields of science and technology. Antonio cruz wiki (talk) 02:57, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 16:53, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Wilson penzias200.jpg

Funding?
No mention of their funding here? Apeholder (talk) 16:58, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Lumantity Nureo Scientist AI Systemts
They have implanted in my body an metal device that is connected to their AI System without permission nor consent as Dr. David Thomas broke into my apartment to perform illegal procedure without consent going against HIPPA regulations. My husband and myself have been physically being taking advantage of and their is a Federal Case -23-212 a complaint with the US Department of Health and Human Services and complaints with the United Nations Office of Human Rights. Identity was stolen for the illegal and bad business practices that involves sexual torture daily. 2601:46:47F:7F90:7475:C627:5883:1306 (talk) 18:38, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Alumni
Noticed a video was presented on a Bell Labs Facebook Group... about Neil deGras Tyson discussing area codes. ￼Thanks for the video. He actually gave information that he was a summer intern at MH... So did an entry on Wikipedia.... "Neil deGras Tyson Summer Intern at Murray Hill Bell Labs. American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator." 2607:FB91:1C0F:C5C4:9A0A:96B4:911C:C820 (talk) 20:44, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

There were four individuals that had significant Bell Labs and NASA Aerospace Officials history. Mervin J. Kelly, Louis John Lanzerotti, Donald P. Ling, and Walter A. MacNair. https://history.nasa.gov/biosk-n.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.88.107.15 (talk) 04:27, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

The TRADIC design team should be included into the alumni lists: Jean Howard Felker, James R. Harris, and Louis C. Brown ("Charlie Brown") — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.88.107.15 (talk) 21:28, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Leaving Murray Hill
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/famed-bell-labs-leaving-historic-headquarters-to-move-to-new-brunswick/ar-AA1lp7mG 67.249.53.128 (talk) 18:07, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Bell Labs


text: User talk:192.107.26.131

title: User talk:192.107.26.131


text:
Elegant tern

The elegant tern (Thalasseus elegans) is a tern in the family Laridae. It breeds on the Pacific coasts of the southern United States and Mexico and winters south to Peru, Ecuador and Chile.

This species breeds in very dense colonies on coasts and islands, including Isla Rasa and Montague Island (Mexico), and exceptionally inland on suitable large freshwater lakes close to the coast. It nests in a ground scrape and lays one or two eggs. Unlike some of the smaller white terns, it is not very aggressive toward potential predators, relying on the sheer density of the nests (often only 20–30 cm apart) and nesting close to other more aggressive species, such as Heermann's gulls, to avoid predation.

The elegant tern feeds by plunge-diving for fish, almost invariably from the sea, like most Thalasseus terns. It usually dives directly, and not from the "stepped-hover" favoured by the Arctic tern. The offering of fish by the male to the female is part of the courtship display.

This Pacific species has wandered to western Europe as a rare vagrant on a number of occasions, has nested in Spain and has interbred with the Sandwich tern in France; there is also one record from Cape Town, South Africa, in January 2006, the first record for Africa. An elegant tern was recorded in the British Isles, in Pagham, West Sussex, in June 2017. In May 2021, 1500 sand nests with thousands of eggs were abandoned when a drone crashed land near a nesting site in Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve, scaring off 2,500 nesting elegant terns and leading to a catastrophic loss.

Etymology
The current genus name is derived from Greek Thalassa, "sea", and elegans is Latin  for "elegant, fine". The genus was created when a 2005 study implied that the systematics of the terns needed review.

Identification
This is a medium-large tern, with a long, slender orange bill, pale grey upperparts and white underparts. Its legs are black. In winter, the forehead becomes white. Juvenile elegant terns have a scalier pale grey back. The call is a characteristic loud grating noise like a Sandwich tern.

This bird could be confused with the royal tern or Forster's tern, but the royal tern is larger and thicker-billed and shows more white on the forehead in winter. Out of range, it can also be easily confused with the lesser crested tern. See also orange-billed tern, and the external link below.

This species is marginally paler above than the lesser crested tern with a white (not grey) rump, with a slightly longer, more slender bill with a different curve. The black of the crest that comes down from the crown extends through the eye, creating a small black "smudge" in front of the eye. On royal terns, the black crest stops at the eye, and lesser crested tern has a less shaggy crest

Measurements:

 * Length: 15.3-16.5 in (39-42 cm)
 * Weight: 6.7-11.5 oz (190-325 g)
 * Wingspan: 76-81 cm

title: Elegant tern


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Mikuláš Dzurinda

Mikuláš Dzurinda (born 4 February 1955) is a Slovak politician who was the prime minister of Slovakia from 30 October 1998 to 4 July 2006. Dzurinda is the founder and leader of the Slovak Democratic Coalition (SDK) and then the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ–DS). From 2002 to 2006, his party formed a coalition government with the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), the Alliance of the New Citizen (ANO), and the Party of the Hungarian Coalition (SMK–MKP).

Dzurinda's second government was labeled as a reformist and pro-market. Reforms included a flat tax of 19%, pension reform (second pillar), and education financing reform (except colleges and universities). During his term, Slovakia joined both the European Union and NATO. Dzurinda later served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Prime Minister Iveta Radičová's coalition government from 2010 to 2012. On 3 December 2013, Dzurinda was elected as President of the Martens Centre, the think tank of the European People's Party.

Early life
Dzurinda was born on 4 February 1955 in the eastern Slovak village of Spišský Štvrtok. He graduated from the College of Transport and Communications in Žilina in 1979. In 1988, he completed his post-graduate scientific research there and was awarded with a Candidate of Sciences (CSc.) degree. He worked for the Transport Research Institute (VÚD) in Žilina as an economic analyst (1979–1988). Later he was the director of an information technology section within the regional directorate of the Czechoslovak Railways (ČSD) in Bratislava (1988–1990). Dzurinda is married and has two daughters. He speaks Slovak, Czech, English, and French.

Dzurinda entered Slovak politics as one of the founding members of the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), a conservative political party officially constituted in 1990. The first democratic general election in Czechoslovakia was held in 1990, and he was appointed Deputy Minister of Transportation and Posts of the Slovak Government in 1991. In 1992 he became a member of the Slovak parliament (National Council of the Slovak Republic) and worked as a member of the Committee for Budget and Finance. At the time of the split of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of an independent Slovakia (1993), he was KDH Deputy Chairman responsible for economy. During the tenure of Jozef Moravčík as Prime Minister (March–October 1994), Dzurinda was Minister of Transportation, Posts and Public Works. Following the 1994 general election, won by Vladimír Mečiar, he returned to the opposition as a member of the parliament.

Prime Minister 1998–2002
In response to the Election Act prepared and approved by Mečiar's government in 1997, five opposition parties (Christian Democratic Movement/KDH, Democratic Party/DS, Democratic Union/DU, Social Democratic Party of Slovakia/SDSS and the Green Party of Slovakia/SZS) formed the Slovak Democratic Coalition (SDK). Dzurinda became its spokesman, and later, on 4 July 1998, its chairman. Dzurinda was appointed as prime minister for the first time in October 1998, leading five opposition parties united as the Slovak Democratic Coalition (SDK) and defeating the government of Vladimír Mečiar at the polls.

Under Dzurinda's leadership Slovakia managed to re-enter integration processes and registered a political comeback in relations both with the European Union and trans-Atlantic economic and political structures. The success of the reforms put through by his cabinet were best reflected in Slovakia's entry into the OECD in September 2000, completion of accession negotiations with the European Union and the entry of major investors into the Slovak market. The U.S. Steel investment, for example, came with a pledge to invest more than a billion dollars here over the next decade.

In January 2000 he founded a new political party, the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ), which he has chaired since. In an intra-party election in March 2002, SDKU members confirmed his leading position and following the September 2002 general election he was given the opportunity to again form the Slovak government. The Party of the Hungarian Coalition (SMK), Christian Democratic Union (KDH) and the Alliance of the New Citizen (ANO) have joined the SDKU in the ruling coalition. The Free Forum split from the SDKU in early 2004.

Prime Minister 2002–2006
The reformist course of Dzurinda's policies was confirmed by a mandate he was given by electors in the 2002 general election to form his second government. It was also a year when the NATO Prague Summit in November decided on Slovakia's invitation to join NATO; and the country also completed accession talks with the EU at the Copenhagen Summit in December, thus launching its ratification process. During this period, the budget deficit has been reduced to less than 3 percent of GDP, and it opened the door for Slovakia to join the eurozone in 2009. Economic growth, higher than 6 per cent, has become the fastest in the region. Nevertheless, foreign investors has discovered the country, notably car companies such as PSA Peugeot-Citroën and Kia.

The government of Mikuláš Dzurinda has been praised by the World Bank as the best market reformer in the world. Flat tax rate 19 per cent for income, corporates and value added tax led Steve Forbes to call Slovakia an "investors' paradise". But country was still facing many challenges, especially in rural areas. Unemployment increased to 20 percent under Dzurinda's first government, and was still at 12% when he left office, one of the highest rates in Europe. Dzurinda's party was defeated by SMER in the 2006 parliamentary election. SDKU-DS was second with more than 18 per cent of votes. Because of refusal to renew the right-wing coalition government with the support of Meciar's party he was not able to continue governing. SMER leader Robert Fico has formed a coalition government with Meciar's HZDS and Slota's Slovak National Party (SNS).

Dzurinda in opposition 2006–2010
Mikuláš Dzurinda has been a regular MP in the National Council of the Slovak Republic since his party's defeat in the 2006 parliamentary elections. In February 2008, Juraj Liška, SDKÚ-DS's deputy leader, openly asked Dzurinda to resign as the party leader due to the low party polls and the arguably undemocratic style of leadership. The members of the party praesidium denied Mr. Liška's accusations and since the praesidium assembly, Mr. Liška has been unwilling to speak out on the inner affairs of the party. This affair led to the open protests against Mr. Dzurinda from party members from Bratislava. Since their exclusion from the party by a regular party judge there are no longer any thrills in the party.

Foreign minister 2010–2012
Dzurinda was appointed foreign minister in the cabinet of prime minister Iveta Radičová on 9 July 2010. He was again elected to be the chairman of the SDKÚ-DS party on 6 November 2010 for next four years. He was only one candidate, the incumbent prime minister Radičová (from the same party) declined the nomination for candidacy.

Public image
Dzurinda has been known for his enthusiasm for cycling and especially long distance running, cultivating an image of a healthy and competitive person. After the Dzurinda led-coalition defeated the autocratic Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, Dzurinda became unpopular with the People's Party - Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (ĽS-HZDS) electorate. While the media routinely covered ĽS-HZDS political meetings full of anti-Dzurinda rants, the most iconic representation of this antipathy was recorded by journalist Karol Lovaš at a ĽS-HZDS meeting in support of Gustav Krajči where a large group of 70- and 80-year-old citizens repeatedly shouted the slogan "Dzurinda is a Gypsy". Internationally, Dzurinda is perceived as a successful and progressive politician, mostly due to the internationally acclaimed economic reforms his government implemented during Dzurinda's second government (2002–2006). In 2006, United States president George W. Bush called Dzurinda a friend and issued his admiration.

Other activities
Dzurinda has lectured at North American and European universities, and to both experts and public audiences. He is a strong advocate of trans-Atlantic ties. He has met and talked personally to leading foreign politicians, including U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, European Commission President Romano Prodi, NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson, and several influential US senators and congressmen. Under his leadership, the Visegrád Group—a co-operative grouping of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia—was revived and gained new stimuli.

Dzurinda serves on the Leadership Council for Concordia,a nonpartisan, nonprofit based in New York City focused on promoting effective public-private collaboration to create a more prosperous and sustainable future. Dzurinda is a keen marathoner. He has taken part in the International Peace Marathon (MMM) in Košice 13 times, he ran the Lesser Carpathians Marathon (in 1986 in his personal best of 2 hours, 54 minutes and 57 seconds) and in 1996 the Rajec Marathon. In 2001, as Slovakia's premier he took part in the famous New York City Marathon, completing the 42.195-km course in 3 hours, 42 minutes. On 13 April 2003 he ran his second foreign marathon, held in London. He mended his final time at 3 hours 36 minutes. When speaking to the BBC presenter, he aired his hopes for a Slovakia as part of the EU, which occurred in 2004.

title: Mikuláš Dzurinda


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3Dlabs

3DLABS Inc. Ltd. was a fabless semiconductor company. It was founded by Yavuz Ahıska and Osman Kent in 1994 with headquarters in San Jose, California. It originally developed the GLINT and PERMEDIA high-end graphics chip technology that was used on many of the world's leading computer graphics cards in the CAD and DCC markets, including its own Wildcat and Oxygen cards.

In 2006 the company focused development efforts on its emerging media processing business, and in 2009 became the Singapore-based ZiiLABS.

History
3Dlabs was formed from a management buy-out of DuPont Pixel Systems in the UK in April 1994 and went public on Nasdaq in October 1996. 3Dlabs acquired Dynamic Pictures in July 1998 and the Intense3D division of Intergraph in July 2000. It was itself acquired by Creative Labs in June 2002. In February 2006, 3Dlabs announced that it would stop developing professional 3D graphic chips and focus on embedded and mobile media processors.

3Dlabs was an early pioneer in bringing 3D graphics to the PC. Its GLINT 300SX graphics processor was the industry's first single chip, 3D-capable graphics device that was shipped on graphics boards from multiple vendors. Gamma was the first single chip graphics geometry processor for the PC. Permedia was the first low-cost OpenGL accelerator chip. 3Dlabs was a member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board and played an important role in the development of OpenGL 2.0 and ongoing evolution of the OpenGL API.

The new media processor business was developed out of the original UK R&D center with most of the workstation graphics teams that came from Intense3D and Dynamic Pictures having been hired by Intel and NVIDIA.

In November 2006 3Dlabs introduced the DMS-02, its first media processor capable of 720P HD Video for portable devices. In January 2009 the SoC team merged with a Creative product division and rebranded as ZiiLABS. It claimed the new company was to offer processors and complete market-ready hardware and software platforms to consumer OEMs and ODMs.

Media processors
The ZMS processors are based on a low-power multicore architecture including dual ARM cores for handling traditional CPU tasks plus a closely coupled, fully programmable SIMD array processor to do the heavy lifting for intensive media processing tasks such as; 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video decode/encode, image processing and floating point (32-bit IEEE). The processors integrate on-chip peripherals and interfaces suitable for a broad range of handheld and embedded devices.

Originally developed under the 3Dlabs name, the processor-related products are now sold and supported by ZiiLABS.

Graphics card listing

These are cards which were supplied by 3DLABS. Drivers and limited support for these products can be found at: https://web.archive.org/web/20080227235127/http://www.3dlabs.com/content/legacy/

Chips:
 * 3Dlabs GLINT GMX - GMX 1000 (Gamma + MX), GMX 2000 (Gamma + 2xMX)
 * 3Dlabs GLINT Gamma (geometry processor)
 * 3Dlabs GLINT DMX - DMX 1000 (Delta + MX), DMX 2000 (Delta + 2xMX)
 * 3Dlabs GLINT Delta (triangle setup processor)
 * 3Dlabs GLINT MX
 * 3Dlabs GLINT 500TX
 * 3Dlabs GLINT 300SX
 * 3Dlabs Permedia
 * 3Dlabs Permedia NT (Permedia + GLINT Delta)
 * 3Dlabs Permedia 2

Boards:
 * Wildcat Realizm series - consists of Vertex/Scalability Units (VSU), Visual Processing Units (VPU)
 * (2005) 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 800 - 1 VSU, 2 VPU, 512 + 128 MB GDDR3, 512-bit memory interface, x16 PCIe
 * (2005) 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 500 - 1 VPU, 256 MB GDDR3, 256-bit memory interface, x16 PCIe,
 * (2004) 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 200 - 1 VPU, 512 MB GDDR3, 256-bit memory interface, AGP x8
 * (2004) 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 100 - 1 VPU, 256 MB GDDR3, 256-bit memory interface, AGP x8
 * Wildcat VP (Visual Processing) Series - based on P10 and P9 chips:
 * (2003) 3Dlabs Wildcat VP990 Pro - P10, 512 MB RAM, AGP x8
 * (2003) 3Dlabs Wildcat VP880 Pro - P10, 256 MB RAM, AGP x8
 * (2002) 3Dlabs Wildcat VP970 - P10, 128 MB RAM, AGP x8
 * (2002) 3Dlabs Wildcat VP870 - P10, 128 MB RAM, AGP x8
 * (2002) 3Dlabs Wildcat VP760 - P10, 64 MB RAM, AGP x8
 * (2003) 3Dlabs Wildcat VP560 - P9, 64 MB RAM, AGP x8
 * Wildcat4 Series:
 * (2003) 3Dlabs Wildcat4 7210 - 256 MB texture memory and 128 MB frame buffer, AGP Pro 50 x8
 * (2003) 3Dlabs Wildcat4 7110 - 128 MB texture memory and 128 MB frame buffer, AGP Pro 50 x8
 * Wildcat III Series:
 * (2002) 3Dlabs Wildcat III 6210 - 256 MB texture memory and 128 MB frame buffer, AGP Pro 50
 * (2002) 3Dlabs Wildcat III 6110 - 128 MB texture memory and 64 MB frame buffer, AGP Pro 50
 * Wildcat II Series:
 * (2001) 3Dlabs Wildcat II 5110 - 64 MB texture memory and 64 MB frame buffer, AGP Pro 50 x4
 * (2001) 3Dlabs Wildcat II 5000 - 32 MB texture memory and 32 MB frame buffer
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX420 - 2xGLINT R4 + GLINT Gamma G2 + 128 MB SGRAM
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 Pro - GLINT R4 + GLINT Gamma G2 + 64 MB SDRAM + DVI-I
 * (2000) 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210 - 2xGLINT R3 + GLINT Gamma G2 + 64 MB SGRAM
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 - GLINT R3 + GLINT Gamma G1 + 32 MB SDRAM, PCI and AGP version available
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 - GLINT R3 + 32 MB SDRAM
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1-16 - GLINT R3 + 16 MB SDRAM
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 Stereo - GLINT R3 + 32 MB SDRAM + CrystalEyes
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 1600SW - GLINT R3 + 32 MB SDRAM + LVDS connector (for use with the SGI 1600SW flat panel)
 * 3Dlabs Permedia3 Create! - Permedia3
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen GMX - a GMX 2000 based card
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen RPM - dual RPM based card
 * 3Dlabs Oxygen ACX - a Permedia 2 based card

Acquired with Intense3D:
 * Intense3D Wildcat 4210
 * Intense3D Wildcat 4110
 * Intense3D Wildcat 4105
 * Intense3D Wildcat 4000
 * Intense3D Wildcat 3510
 * Intense 3D Pro 3600
 * Intense 3D Pro 3400
 * Intense 3D Pro 2200S
 * Intense 3D Pro 2200
 * Intense 3D Pro 1000

Acquired with Dynamic Pictures Inc.:
 * Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 102, 202, 402
 * Dynamic Pictures V192

Before ATI acquired the FireGL team in 2001, Diamond Multimedia used 3Dlabs chipsets for some of their FireGL cards. Newer Technology sold the RenderPix cards based on the 500TX + Glint Delta for the Macintosh. Formac also made a number of Macintosh graphics cards using Permedia 1, 2, and 3 chipsets.

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Forster's tern

Forster's tern (Sterna forsteri) is a tern in the family Laridae. The genus name Sterna is derived from Old English "stearn", "tern", and forsteri commemorates the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster.

It breeds inland in North America and winters south to the Caribbean and northern Central America.

This species is rare but annual in western Europe, and has wintered in Ireland and Great Britain on a number of occasions. No European tern winters so far north.

This species breeds in colonies in marshes. It nests in a ground scrape and lays two or more eggs. Like all white terns, it is fiercely defensive of its nest and young.

The Forster's tern feeds by plunge-diving for fish, but will also hawk for insects in its breeding marshes. It usually feeds from saline environments in winter, like most Sterna terns. It usually dives directly, and not from the "stepped-hover" favoured by the Arctic tern. The offering of fish by the male to the female is part of the courtship display.

This is a small tern, 33 – long with a 64 – wingspan and a weight ranging from 130 to 190 g (4.6-6.7 oz ). It is most similar to the common tern. It has pale grey upperparts and white underparts. Its legs are red and its bill is red, tipped with black. In winter, the forehead becomes white and a characteristic black eye mask remains. Juvenile Forster's terns are similar to the winter adult. The call is a harsh noise like a black-headed gull.

This species is unlikely to be confused with the common tern in winter because of the black eye mask, but is much more similar in breeding plumage. Forster's has a grey centre to its white tail, and the upperwings are pure white, without the darker primary wedge of the common tern.

Description
Forster's tern is a medium-sized tern with a slender body, deeply forked long tail and relatively long legs.

In its non-breeding plumage, the crown is white and a black comma-shaped patch covers the eye and the ear-covert. The wings are grey with the primaries being dark silver grey, while the underside is white. The bill is black and the legs are a dull brownish red.

When breeding, an intense black cap extending down the neck appears. The wings and the back are pale grey while the underside is bright white. It has a black-tipped orange bill and bright orange legs.

The juveniles have coloring similar to a non-breeding adult but often have darker primaries.

Taxonomy
Forster's tern is a member of the Sternidae. They were previously considered as a subfamily of the Laridae (gull) but have been classified as a distinct family since 1838. Linnaeus described the tern using the term rustrum subulatum in reference to their awl-shaped bill. Forster's tern was named in honor of Johann Reinhold Forster, a German naturalist.

Habitat and distribution
Forster's tern is a marsh dwelling species. It can be found either in freshwater, brackish or saltwater. It is often found over shallow open water deep in the marsh. Main habitats are marshes, estuaries, islands, salt marshes and marshy areas surrounding lakes and streams.

Forster's tern is usually restricted to North America. It nests in marshes during the summer, either on the Atlantic or Pacific coast, but also in the Prairies or along the Great Lakes in Canada and the US. Due to the instability of its nesting habitat, Forster's tern exhibits a high annual turnover rate.

Forster's tern also winters in marshes along the southern coast of the US and Mexico but can sometimes reach the northern extremity of Central America. It is also common for the tern to winter in the Caribbean.

It near annual vagrant to Western Europe and has occasionally wintered in Great Britain and Ireland.

Behavior
Forster's tern is often found in marshes over shallow open water. It is a shallow plunge-diver that often hovers before attacking. When hunting, its head is pointed downward whereas when travelling, it is pointed forward.

It is a colonial nesting species that builds a shallow nest using marsh vegetation and often competes with gulls for nesting sites. A breeding colony may vary in numbers from a few couples to a thousand individuals. In many occasions, Forster's tern will share nesting sites with the Yellow-headed blackbird.

Both parents are involved in brood caring and Forster's tern does not exhibit sex-specific differences in space use. Males tend to guard the nest more often during the day while the female is more present at night. When disturbed, newborn chicks tend to crouch and remain silent. Forster's tern is a single prey loader and provision chicks with prey correlated to their size.

Before breeding, males practice courtship feeding.

Vocalization
The common call of the Forster's tern is a descending kerr. The threat call used in defensive attack is a low harsh zaar. A succession of kerrs is used by the female as a begging call during courtship.

Diet and feeding
The major constituent of Forster's tern diet is fish. Carp, minnow, sunfish, trout-perch, trout, perch, killifish, stickleback, shiner are common prey in freshwater whereas pompano, herring, menhaden and shiner perch are often consumed in brackish or marine habitats. On the West Coast of the United States and Canada, Forster's tern is also known to prey on Pacific lamprey juveniles. Insects such as dragonflies, caddisflies and grasshoppers are often consumed, but aquatic insect larvae, crustaceans and amphibian can complement the diet.

The Forster's tern is a shallow plunge-diver, having its head pointing downward when hunting. The attack usually starts in a hovering position before initiating a headfirst dive with wings partially folded backward. Insects may occasionally be caught by the wing and preys are swallowed in the air. Prey handling behavior may include dropping and re-catching fish before swallowing them. In some areas, Forster's tern tends to prefer forage to turbid water. This may prevent detection but it may also be a sign of higher prey density and increased presence near the surface. Preferences for water clarity may depend on prey availability.

Reproduction
The breeding season for Forster's tern can start as early as April on the Gulf Coast of the United States and extend from May to mid-June depending on latitude. Forster's tern is a colonial nester with colony size ranging from one to a thousand nests. Adults establish a very small territory around the nest and nests are usually clumped together. Males will practice courtship feeding and females will beg for food using a kerr kerr kerr call.

A typical clutch off eggs ranges from 2 to 4. The incubation period may last 24 or 25 days after laying. The young are semi-precocial with shell removal being done by the parents. The chicks have upper and lower mandible egg teeth, which they lose 3 to 5 days after hatching. The chicks usually leave the nest with the parents 4 days post hatching and move into areas of denser vegetation. Fledging occurs 28 days after hatching. After a few weeks of fledging, young terns leave the natal colony but join the group for roosting, while migrating towards the wintering ground.

There is a similar involvement from both male and female in incubation and chick rearing. Males tend to incubate the eggs diurnally and females, mostly nocturnally. Reproductive success varies from year to year and from colony to colony.

Mobbing
Forster's tern exhibits very aggressive behavior when threatened by nest predators; if a nest is disturbed, the colony mobs the aggressor, diving towards it and issuing loud calls. Aggressiveness increases immediately prior to and during hatching of the chicks. Ducks and grebes nesting in the same area often benefit from the tern's aggressive behavior toward potential predators

Yellow-headed blackbirds sharing nesting sites have been known to actively join tern mobs against predators. Western grebes recognize the tern's alarm call; this can be interpreted as information parasitism.

Nest
Forster's terns tend to nest in marshy areas, either in freshwater or in estuaries. The nests are usually located deep within the marsh, either on tidal islands or evaporation pond islands, but also on manmade dikes. Nests are composed of adjacent marsh vegetation. Many nests are considered floating and are made of marsh grasses, then can be set on top of the vegetation or deposited on floating rafts of vegetation. In Manitoba, there is a strong association between Forster's tern nests and muskrat houses. They are, in fact, highly solicited nesting grounds. Also in Manitoba, Scirpus and often Typha are the main plants used for nest building.

In the case of large colonies, nesting area availability decreases. Forster's tern will then nest on sand, gravel or mud. The nests will consist of a hollow in the substrates, either lined with grass or not and driftwood, shells, dried fish, bones and feathers are also often used.

Floating nests are usually tolerant to a slight increase or decrease of water movement but re-nesting is common. Strong wave action, wind or flooding, usually induced by a storm can often damage the nest and eggs. Weather is the main explanation for nest failure and egg loss. Unsheltered nests are more prone to destruction than sheltered one. Nest made on higher ground are also more shielded from flooding but are more exposed to the wind.

Forster's Terns have been recorded using man-made platforms, most notably in Wisconsin, where they were built to substitute for the Cat Island Chain. They demonstrated overall success, with Forster's Terns preferring to use them to avoid the vulnerabilities that come with a natural nest.

Eggs
The egg's primary color ranges from a greenish to a brownish hue. They are evenly spotted with dark brown, almost black or grey spots. There are color variations between and within clutches; earlier eggs are usually paler, greener and larger. Coloration of the eggs may vary depending on location. Whitish or cream colored eggs have also been reported.

Predator
Raptors such as falcons and hawks, as well as owls and corvidae may prey on adults and young. There have also been anecdotal reports of snapping turtle preying on young still in the nest. American Bittern, Great Blue Heron, and Black-crowned Night-heron are also possible predators while gulls and Caspian terns notably prey on the eggs of the Forster's Tern.

When their ranges overlap, marsh rice rats are possibly the most efficient Forster's Tern egg predator. Minks are also one of few mammalian predators that can venture in the marsh and prey on eggs and young.

Predator success usually remains low during breeding season due to the aggressive mobbing response of adults.

Status and conservation
According to the IUCN, the status of the Forster's tern is of little concern, however, degradation of marsh habitat may be threatening. Boating activity may also affect nest vegetation and increase erosion, which may lead to further degradation of tern nesting grounds. Excessive noise may also have caused nest desertion and chick mortality. This species is listed under the Migratory Birds Treaty act in the U.S. It is endangered in Illinois and Wisconsin while being of special concern in Michigan and Minnesota. Preservation of wetlands and introduction of artificial nesting sites may help preserve the species in high-risk areas.

Increasing populations of carp in drainage systems, causing damages to marsh vegetation may limit habitat availability for Forster's tern. There have also been anecdotal reports of intense spawning activity of carp damaging tern's floating nests.

As with many species of piscivorous birds, Forster's tern is susceptible to bioaccumulation of pollutants. High mercury concentration may induce biochemical stress, reducing the overall health of terns. Biomethylation of mercury is increased in marshes and salt ponds, hence increasing the susceptibility of the Forster's tern. High levels of Selenium may also have deleterious effects on their health. Organochlorine contaminants such as PCB may also diminish their breeding success.

title: Forster's tern