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21-letter words containing r, i, t, u

  • bromine pentafluoride — a colorless, corrosive liquid, BrF 5 , used as an oxidizer in liquid rocket propellants.
  • bulletin board system — (communications, application)   (BBS, bboard /bee'bord/, message board, forum; plural: BBSes) A computer and associated software which typically provides an electronic message database where people can log in and leave messages. Messages are typically split into topic groups similar to the newsgroups on Usenet (which is like a distributed BBS). Any user may submit or read any message in these public areas. The term comes from physical pieces of board on which people can pin messages written on paper for general consumption - a "physical bulletin board". Ward Christensen, the programmer and operator of the first BBS (on-line 1978-02-16) called it a CBBS for "computer bulletin board system". Since the rise of the World-Wide Web, the term has become antiquated, though the concept is more popular than ever, with many websites featuring discussion areas where users can post messages for public consumption. Apart from public message areas, some BBSes provided archives of files, personal electronic mail and other services of interest to the system operator (sysop). Thousands of BBSes around the world were run from amateurs' homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Although BBSes were traditionally the domain of hobbyists, many connected directly to the Internet (accessed via telnet), others were operated by government, educational, and research institutions. Fans of Usenet or the big commercial time-sharing bboards such as CompuServe, CIX and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they helped connect hackers and users in the personal-micro and let them exchange code. Use of this term for a Usenet newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet.
  • burn the midnight oil — to work or study late into the night
  • burroughs corporation — (company)   A company which merged with Sperry Univac to form Unisys Corporation. They produced the Datatron 200 series among other computers.
  • bursting at the seams — If a place is very full, you can say that it is bursting at the seams.
  • butterfly common lisp — A parallel version of Common LISP for the BBN Butterfly computer.
  • cantilever foundation — a building foundation supporting its load partly or wholly upon cantilevers.
  • cause-effect graphing — (programming)   A testing technique that aids in selecting, in a systematic way, a high-yield set of test cases that logically relates causes to effects to produce test cases. It has a beneficial side effect in pointing out incompleteness and ambiguities in specifications.
  • central european time — the standard time adopted by Western European countries one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, corresponding to British Summer Time
  • certificate authority — (cryptography, body)   (CA or "Trusted Third Party") An entity (typically a company) that issues digital certificates to other entities (organisations or individuals) to allow them to prove their identity to others. A Certificate Authority might be an external company such as VeriSign that offers digital certificate services or they might be an internal organisation such as a corporate MIS department. The Certificate Authority's chief function is to verify the identity of entities and issue digital certificates attesting to that identity. The process uses public key cryptography to create a "network of trust". If I want to prove my identity to you, I ask a CA (who you trust to have verified my identity) to encrypt a hash of my signed key with their private key. Then you can use the CA's public key to decrypt the hash and compare it with a hash you calculate yourself. Hashes are used to decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. The hash function must be cryptographically strong, e.g. MD5.
  • chinese water torture — a form of torture in which water is made to drip for a long period of time onto a victim's forehead to drive him insane
  • circular polarization — electromagnetic radiation (esp light) in which the electric field vector describes a circle about the direction of propagation at any point in the path of the radiation
  • clayton antitrust act — an act of Congress in 1914 supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act and establishing the FTC.
  • clerk to the justices — (in England) a legally qualified person who sits in court with lay justices to advise them on points of law
  • clostridium difficile — Clostridium difficile is a bacterium that causes severe diarrhoea. It is commonly found in hospitals. C.diff is also used.
  • comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
  • communications server — (operating system)   IBM's rebranding of ACF.
  • compensation neurosis — an unconscious attempt to retain physical or psychological symptoms of illness when some advantage may be obtained (distinguished from malingering).
  • completing the square — a method, usually of solving quadratic equations, by which a quadratic expression, as x 2 − 4 x + 3, is written as the sum or difference of a perfect square and a constant, x 2 − 4 x + 4 + 3 − 4 = (x − 2) 2 − 1, by addition and subtraction of appropriate constant terms.
  • computer aided design — (application)   (CAD) The part of CAE concerning the drawing or physical layout steps of engineering design. Often found in the phrase "CAD/CAM" for ".. manufacturing".
  • computer architecture — the structure, behaviour, and design of computers
  • computer conferencing — the conduct of meetings through the use of computer-based telecommunications
  • computer-aided design — the use of computer techniques in designing products, esp involving the use of computer graphics
  • compuware corporation — (company)   A US software and service company established in 1973. Since 1973, Compuware focused on optimising business software development, testing and operation. In 1999 the company had grown to over 15,000 employees worldwide and revenues of more than $1.6B. By 2013 it had shrunk to less than 5000. Current (2013) products and services include performance optimisation, availability and quality of web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications; project portfolio management, professional services automation; mainframe applications and developer tools; rapid application development and professional services.
  • concurrent processing — the ability of a computer to process two or more programs in parallel
  • concurrent resolution — a resolution passed by one branch of a legislature and concurred in by the other, indicating the opinion of the legislature but not having the force of law
  • conductivity improver — A conductivity improver is a substance used to get rid of static electrical charge in fuel, and improve the flow of the fuel.
  • congregational church — any evangelical Protestant Christian Church that is governed according to the principles of Congregationalism. In 1972 the majority of churches in the Congregational Church in England and Wales voted to become part of the United Reformed Church
  • conjunction-reduction — a rule that reduces coordinate sentences, applied, for example, to convert John lives in Ireland and Brian lives in Ireland into John and Brian live in Ireland
  • constituent structure — phrase structure.
  • constitutional strike — a stoppage of work by the workforce of an organization, with the approval of the trade union concerned, in accordance with the dispute procedure laid down in a collective agreement between the parties
  • construction engineer — a person trained in the profession of planning and managing the construction of buildings, bridges, etc
  • construction industry — a branch of commercial enterprise concerned with the construction of buildings, bridges, etc
  • consummatory behavior — a behavior pattern that occurs in response to a stimulus and that achieves the satisfaction of a specific drive, as the eating of captured prey by a hungry predator (distinguished from appetitive behavior).
  • continuing resolution — legislation enacted by Congress to allow government operations to continue until the regular appropriations are enacted: used when action on appropriations is not completed by the beginning of a fiscal year.
  • continuous processing — the systems in a plant or factory for the manufacturing of products, treating of materials, etc, that have been designed to run continuously and are often computer-controlled
  • continuous stationery — paper that is perforated between pages and folded concertina fashion, used in dot-matrix, line, and daisywheel printers
  • convertible debenture — a convertible bond that is not secured with collateral.
  • convertible insurance — any form of life or health insurance, either individual or group, that enables the insured to change or convert the insurance to another form, as term to whole life insurance or group to individual health insurance.
  • coordination compound — complex (def 10).
  • coordination language — (networking, protocol)   A language defined specifically to allow two or more parties (components) to communicate in order to accomplish some shared goal. Examples of coordination languages are Linda and Xerox's CLF (STITCH).
  • corpuscular radiation — radiation consisting of atomic and subatomic particles, as alpha particles, beta particles, and neutrons.
  • corrupt practices act — any of several U.S. statutes for ensuring the purity of elections by forbidding the purchase of votes, restricting the amount and source of political contributions, limiting campaign expenditures, and requiring the submission of an itemized statement of such expenditures.
  • cosmological argument — one of the arguments that purport to prove the existence of God from empirical facts about the universe, esp the argument to the existence of a first cause
  • cost driver attribute — (programming)   Factors affecting the productivity of software development. These include attributes of the software, computers, personnel, and project.
  • counsel of perfection — excellent but unrealizable advice
  • count of monte cristo — a novel (1844–45) by Alexandre Dumas père.
  • counter-revolutionary — Counter-revolutionary activities are activities intended to reverse the effects of a previous revolution.
  • counterdemonstrations — Plural form of counterdemonstration.
  • counterinterpretation — An interpretation that goes against another interpretation.
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