Seal (contract law)

In the law, a seal affixed to a contract or other legal instrument has had special legal significance at various times in the jurisdictions that recognise it. In the courts of common law jurisdictions, a contract which was sealed ("made under seal") was treated differently from other written contracts (which were "made under hand"), although this practice gradually fell out of favour in most of these jurisdictions in the 19th and early 20th century. The legal term seal arises from the wax seal used throughout history for authentication (among other purposes).

Originally, only a wax seal was accepted as a seal by the courts, but by the 19th century many jurisdictions had relaxed the definition to include an impression in the paper on which the instrument was printed, an embossed paper wafer affixed to an instrument, a scroll made with a pen, or the printed words "Seal" or "L.S." (standing for the Latin term locus sigilli meaning "place of the seal").

Notwithstanding their reduced significance, seals are still used on contracts, usually in the impression on paper form.

SEAL (cipher)

In cryptography, SEAL (Software-Optimized Encryption Algorithm) is a very fast stream cipher optimised for machines with a 32-bit word size and plenty of RAM. SEAL is actually a pseudorandom function family in that it can easily generate arbitrary portions of the keystream without having to start from the beginning. This makes it particularly well suited for applications like encrypting hard drives.

The first version was published by Phillip Rogaway and Don Coppersmith in 1994. The current version, published in 1997, is 3.0. SEAL, covered by two patents in the United States, both of which are assigned to IBM.

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System

A system is a set of interacting or interdependent component parts forming a complex/intricate whole. Every system is delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, surrounded and influenced by its environment, described by its structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning.

The term system may also refer to a set of rules that governs structure and/or behavior. Alternatively, and usually in the context of complex social systems, the term is used to describe the set of rules that govern structure and/or behavior.

Etymology

The term "system" comes from the Latin word systēma, in turn from Greek σύστημα systēma: "whole compounded of several parts or members, system", literary "composition".

History

According to Marshall McLuhan,

"System" means "something to look at". You must have a very high visual gradient to have systematization. In philosophy, before Descartes, there was no "system". Plato had no "system". Aristotle had no "system".

In the 19th century the French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, who studied thermodynamics, pioneered the development of the concept of a "system" in the natural sciences. In 1824 he studied the system which he called the working substance (typically a body of water vapor) in steam engines, in regards to the system's ability to do work when heat is applied to it. The working substance could be put in contact with either a boiler, a cold reservoir (a stream of cold water), or a piston (to which the working body could do work by pushing on it). In 1850, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius generalized this picture to include the concept of the surroundings and began to use the term "working body" when referring to the system.

System (disambiguation)

The term system may refer to:

In natural sciences

In information technology

System (journal)

System (ISSN 0346-251X) is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the applications of educational technology and applied linguistics to problems of foreign language teaching and learning. It was established in 1973 and is published quarterly by Elsevier.

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