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Your retort reeks of the Wikipedia page on universities, so I'll reference a few too.
University of Bologna is widely accepted as the first and oldest (11th century) western university. And madrasahs - which certainly do have origins in religion - predate that. (See Al-Azhar University) But I don't think you're trying to connect the big C Church to Islam, and we're talking modern university origins, not 6th century Roman religious scholars. (See Cassiodorus)

The thing is, Bologna didn't start teaching theology until almost 300 years after it was formed, so it's highly unlikely it could be considered a monastic school. http://www.eng.unibo.it/PortaleEn/University/Our+History/default.htm

Even after the printing press was invented, I don't believe the Church was actively encouraging common folk to read the bible themselves in their own language. Better to hear it from the pulpit by an official that knows Latin. (See Bible Translations) "New ideas" as you say, are precisely the thing the Church found most dangerous, especially when things got competitive and educated men started discovering things with technology. For a good while there, it was Aristotle or bust. (See Galileo Affair)

The main problem here is that making such a program without throwing away at least some of the good features of TeX/LaTeX is hard, and the market is small so there is not much manpower available. There is at present not even a full-fledged GUI toolkit for mathematical typesetting (GtkMathView is good, but this really should be integrated tightly with a text typesetting engine such as Pango).
One attempt you might want to have a look at is TeXmacs, which at least keeps a very structured approach to document creation and has all the TeX typesetting and layout algorithms.

Anyway, it's not too bad. It depends on the size of the system and number of cars, and the number of ports available for loading. It can beat typical shuttles fairly easily, though of course there will be wait times. Airports don't actually seem that bad; there's enough steps involved that there's always a stream of people moving about, the people from one plane are quickly dispersed. A more challenging situation is something like a stadium game letting out, when you really get huge numbers of people leaving at exactly the same time. But of course, no system works very well in that case.

It's very easy to detect cheating in a swarm. If a client reports that it's uploaded ten megabytes, but the remainder of the swarm has only downloaded one megabyte, there's obviously something askew. Of course, not everybody will get their stats counted accurately, due to disconnection and tracker outages, but things should average out reasonably (*). If these community-based ratio-monitoring sites simply count the number of times a given member is part of a swarm with a mismatched overall upload:download ratio, greedy leechers will be identified quickly. Can I recommend the paper "How to cheat BitTorrent, and why nobody does"? It's a lot older than this article. http://www.cs.unibo.it/pub/TR/UBLCS/2005/2005-12.p df (*) Obviously I've never measured this or anything :)

A quick search with Google suggests there is: VectorConverter

Depends on the particular implementation that's a possible scenario, they would be queued up.

One thing thing to mention is that the systems are generally designed to constantly try to fill any empty bays in the stand. As each car is rejected or used a new one is ordered from the next nearest upstream station.

According to the simulations the average wait for a vehicle would be around 120 seconds during rush hour if there wasn't already a taxi waiting. The stations are designed to be small and cheap, more like bus stops a few hundred metres apart and holding a few vehicles than train stations which are miles apart and holding tens of vehicles.

BTW, you can design a network and run simulations on your PC. Requires Python.

http://www.trasporti.ing.unibo.it/personale/schwei zer/mait/projects/

? Not sure if you're serious - this is afterall how MS does things http://www.cs.unibo.it/~cianca/wwwpages/ids/lettur e/Cusumano.pdf

Simulations seem to show that's it's not too bad. iTS is a neat graphical simulation program for PRT, and this simpler simulation shows what happens with a backup at a single station (that one also has a movie of the simulation, though I believe both are fairly easy to install).

The prisoners are not supposed to negotiate, and that is the essential difference. The MAD doctrine doesn't work if you keep it secret, or the opponent doesn't believe it is what you will do.

Abiword doesn't even have text boxes or math equation editors yet.

No text boxes? That's odd, considering there are at least 7 textbox bugs fixed in 2.1.6.

As for math equation editors, the functionality does not exist yet. However, work has been ongoing to integrate gtkmathview with Abi since Guadec 2004. Look for it in Abi 2.3 or 2.4.

This reminds me of some similar hardware predictions (which I sincerely hope won't be analogous to this case): 1. Researchers have continually predicted that we will reach the fundamental limit of Moore's law in about ten years. (i.e. in 1970, it was ~1980, now, it's ~2014). You can look at a chart of the predicted end of Moore's Law as a function of time, and it's almost a straight line! The thing is that we've continuously found ways around it, seemingly in the nick of time.
I suppose the scary analogy here is that Microsoft will continually innovate just a little bit faster than the open-source community. While I'd like to say that the open-source community can out-innovate MS, let's not forget that MS has a LOT of money to throw at it, and they'll do whatever it takes if they feel threatened. 2. Gallium arsenide is the silicon of tomorrow, and it always will be. The carrier mobilities in GaAs are MUCH higher than silicon (i.e. the electrons move quicker), and we can incorporate several similar (III-V) semiconductors on a single chip to make ridiculously high frequency HEMTs (can you say 400GHz?), but it never caught on for VLSI applications. Primarily, this is because silicon has a nice native oxide (SiO2) layer that allows us to make high quality MOSFETs, which are better for VLSI integration for various reasons. GaAs can make some REALLY fast transistors and lasers, and gets plenty of use in cell phones and optics, but it's just too hard to integrate into VLSI, and all-optical processors are a long way off, so we're still using silicon in our processors.
The analogy here is that Linux may be well suited to the server environment, where it's more configurable and secure, but may never catch on on the desktop because of its the very same complexity that makes it so useful for servers.

So we've learned something important about Eco himself, something he didn't tell us. He's less creative and original than he would like us to think.

You can't say this just by reading one article. Eco (though by many considered just a novelist) is a university teacher, has written many works and also regularly writes on many newspapers.
In a recent article, for example, he was talking about books he read when he was a student, and how much they influenced his later works.
He surely his one author that gives credit where credits is due.
FYI: here's his Curriculum vitae

Sub-file versioning implies the version control system knows the internal format of each content type. This makes open source tools dependent on the availability (and correctness) of specifications of proprietary file formats. Imagine CVS being dependent on the file format of Word!

VTML (Versioned Text Markup Language, not to be confused with VTML, the Visual Tools Markup Language), shows how you can have sub-document versioning of XML documents.

one of my posts has been admitted into the annals of the Troll Library!!! i cannot fucking believe it!!!

propz to Commanders Zat Solo!!! and John Jordan!!!!

Ok, I didn't read all the replies... So, I apologize in advance if this is a repeat. This solotion uses a combination of HAM and Commercial pieces. The commercial part of it is you'll need to license frequencies from the government. The HAM part of it is packet radio. There is a college in Italy that is using this. They have connection speeds ranging from 2Mb to 34Mb. Check out their web site here. The theoretical limit is 155Mb according to the site. If your interested in reading more about packet radio you can check out The Tucson Amateur Packet Radio Club. I'm not sure what is entailed in licensing frequencies from the government. But, it can't be that much trouble.

3tech remote explorerNT

PC Anywhere from Compaq

NT Remote Controller

Take a seminar

Or visit your favourite website.

In italy there is a law passed in 1997 that makes digital signatures legal not only to sign contracts but also when exchanging documents with the government. The local authorities (Municipalities, Regions etc) are setting up CA that will store the certificates. The first city to implement this process is (as usual) Bologna where the "beta" phase was supposed to end last year (I havent checked the status lately) You can get some info about this at this address