Department of National Defence (Canada)

The Department of National Defence (French: Ministère de la Défense nationale), commonly abbreviated as DND, is a Canadian government department responsible for defending Canada's interests and values at home and abroad. National Defence is the largest department of the Government of Canada in terms of budget as well as staff. It also is the department with the largest number of buildings (6,806 in 2015). The Department is headed by the Deputy Minister of National Defence, who is the Department’s senior civil servant, and reports directly to the Minister of National Defence.

The Department of National Defence exists to aid the minister in carrying out his responsibilities within the Defence Portfolio, and provides a civilian support system for the Canadian Armed Forces. Under the National Defence Act, the Canadian Armed Forces is a completely separate and distinct organisation from, and is not part of, the Department of National Defence.

The Department of National Defence is currently headed by Deputy Minister John Forster.

International Ultramarine Corps

The International Ultramarine Corps, formerly the Ultramarine Corps, is a fictional team of superheroes published by DC Comics. They first appeared in DC One Million #2 (November 1998), and were created by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter.

History

The Corps was created by the U.S. as a government-sponsored group of superhumans to rival the more independent Justice League. Led by General Wade Eiling, the original members of the team were Flow, 4-D, Pulse 8 and Warmaker One. During a fight with the JLA, the UMC realised that Eiling was dangerously insane and that they were on the wrong side; they then sided with the League against their leader.

Having developed a mistrust of governments, the Corps subsequently declared themselves independent of any and all nations and built a free-floating city in which to dwell, which they named Superbia and set in the air above the ruins of Montevideo. They put out a call to other disaffected superheroes to join them in their city, and received a number of responses from around the globe, although the total population and demographics of Superbia are unknown.

Traffic flow (computer networking)

In packet switching networks, traffic flow, packet flow or network flow is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. RFC 2722 defines traffic flow as "an artificial logical equivalent to a call or connection."RFC 3697 defines traffic flow as "a sequence of packets sent from a particular source to a particular unicast, anycast, or multicast destination that the source desires to label as a flow. A flow could consist of all packets in a specific transport connection or a media stream. However, a flow is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport connection." Flow is also defined in RFC 3917 as "a set of IP packets passing an observation point in the network during a certain time interval."

Conceptual description

A flow can be uniquely identified by the following parameters within a certain time period:

Rapping

Rapping (or emceeing,MCing,spitting bars,or rhyming) is "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The components of rapping include "content", "flow" (rhythm and rhyme), and "delivery". Rapping is distinct from spoken-word poetry in that it is performed in time to a beat. Rapping is often associated with and a primary ingredient of hip-hop music, but the origins of the phenomenon can be said to predate hip-hop culture by centuries. It can also be found in alternative rock such as that of Cake, gorrilaz and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rapping is also used in Kwaito music, a genre that originated in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is composed of hip-hop elements.

Rapping can be delivered over a beat or without accompaniment. Stylistically, rap occupies a gray area between speech, prose, poetry, and singing. The word (meaning originally "to hit") as used to describe quick speech or repartee predates the musical form. The word had been used in British English since the 16th century. It was part of the African-American dialect of English in the 1960s meaning "to converse", and very soon after that in its present usage as a term denoting the musical style. Today, the terms "rap" and "rapping" are so closely associated with hip-hop music that many use the terms interchangeably.