The flag of Australia is a national flag. In 1901, Australia became a single country, instead of six separate colonies. A competition was held to design a new flag for the new country. The winning flag has a blue background, the Union Jack, and six stars. Five stars are in the shape of the constellation the Southern Cross, the other is the Commonwealth Star. The flag has been used from 1903, but did not become the official flag of Australia until 1953.
On 29 April 1901, some private companies with the support of the Australian Government set up a competition to design a new flag for Australia. The prize money was ₤200 including ₤75 from a magazine and ₤50 from a tobacco company. There were 32,823 designs entered into the competition. These were put on show in Melbourne at the Royal Exhibition Building. The judges, from the army, navy, merchant navy, and pilot service, to choose the best flag were:
The judges took eight days to choose a winning flag.
Five flags were almost the same, and they shared first prize. The Prime Minister of Australia, Edmund Barton, announced the winners on 3 September 1901. The winners were:
The winning flag was flown from the top of the Exhibition Building. The Prime Minister Edmund Barton wrote to the Governor-General to get approval from the King for the new flag. This was officially announced on February 20, 1903.
Some of the winning flags had different numbers of points on the stars of the Southern Cross. This was simplified to seven points for the four largest stars and five for the small one. The Commonwealth Star had six points for the six states. This was the design in 1903. In 1912, an extra point was added to the Commonwealth Star for the Territories of Australia.
In 1934, the government published how the Australian flag should be made. The flag of the United Kingdom, the Union Jack was still the official flag in Australia until 1954. By law, only the Australian government was allowed to fly the blue Australian flag. Everyone else that wanted to use an Australian flag used the red one, called the Red Ensign. In 15 March 1941, the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, gave permission for the blue flag to be used on public buildings, schools and by the public. Australian ships would use the Red Ensign.
In 1954, the Australian Flag became the official Australian National Flag. The Australian flag is the most important flag flown in Australia, and must be given more importance than flags from other countries. When it is raised or lowered people should face the flag and not talk. It should only be used properly, for example, it can not be used to cover a table or a seat, and it can not be allowed to touch the ground.
The Royal Australian Navy has had its own flag from 1 March 1967. This looks like the national flag but has a white background with blue stars, called the Australian White Ensign. The Royal Australian Air Force got its own flag in 1949. This was changed in 1981 to feature a red kangaroo.
The Queen of Australia has her own flag for use when she visits Australia. The Governor-General of Australia also has a flag which is flown from his or her official house and from his or her car.
2000 United States presidential election
The 2000 United States presidential election happened on November 7, 2000. The Republican candidate, George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush, won the election. He defeated the Democratic candidate Al Gore, who was then-Vice President.
Incumbent Democratic President Bill Clinton was not eligible to serve a third term, and Vice President Gore was able to secure the Democratic nomination. Bush was seen as the early favorite for the Republican nomination, and despite a contentious primary battle with Senator John McCain and other candidates, secured the nomination by Super Tuesday. Many third-party candidates also ran, most prominently Ralph Nader. Bush chose former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as his running mate, and Gore chose Senator Joe Lieberman as his. Both candidates focused primarily on domestic issues, such as the budget, tax relief, and reforms for federal social insurance programs, though the foreign policy was not ignored. Clinton and Gore did not often campaign together, a deliberate decision resulting from the Lewinsky scandal two years prior.
Bush narrowly won the November 7 election, with 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266. There was a disagreement over who won Florida's 25 electoral votes because the way Florida voted was different from other states. A recount happened in the state and the uncommon event that the winner got fewer popular votes than the loser. The Court's decision in Bush v. Gore announced on December 12, 2000, this ended the recounts, effectively awarding Florida's votes to Bush and granting him the victory.
2004 United States presidential election
The 2004 United States presidential election happened on November 2, 2004. During that day the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States were elected. President George W. Bush won against Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Foreign Policy was the biggest issue during the election mainly because of the War on Terrorism and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.
Since the last presidential election, there were concerns about voting. The winner was not determined until the following day when Kerry decided not to dispute Bush's win in the state of Ohio. The state held enough electoral votes to determine the winner of the presidency. Both Kerry and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have stated their opinion that voting in Ohio did not proceed fairly and that, had it done so, the Democratic ticket might have won that state and therefore the election.
Only three states changed which party to vote for. New Mexico and Iowa voted Democratic in 2000, but those states voted Republican in 2004. New Hampshire voted Republican in 2000 but the state voted Democratic in 2004. In the Electoral College, Bush received 286 electoral votes, and Kerry received 251 electoral votes. Kerry was supposed to have 252, but one electoral vote that was supposed to go for Kerry went for his running mate, John Edwards.
Register renaming
In computer engineering, register renaming refers to a technique used to avoid unnecessary serialized execution of program instructions because of the reuse of the same registers by those instructions.
Programs are composed of instructions which operate on values. The instructions must name these values in order to distinguish them from one another. A typical instruction might say, add X and Y and put the result in Z. In this instruction, X, Y, and Z are the names of storage locations.
In order to have a compact instruction encoding, most processor instruction sets have a small set of special locations which can be directly named. For example, the x86 instruction set architecture has 8 integer registers, x86-64 has 16, many RISCs have 32, and IA-64 has 128. In smaller processors, the names of these locations correspond directly to elements of a register file.
Different instructions may take different amounts of time (e.g., CISC architecture). For instance, a processor may be able to execute hundreds of instructions while a single load from main memory instruction is in progress. Shorter instructions executed while the load is outstanding will finish first, thus the instructions are finishing out of the original program order. Out-of-order execution has been used in most recent high-performance CPUs to achieve some of their speed gains.
Consider this sequance of instructions running on an out-of-order CPU:
Instructions 4, 5, and 6 are independent of instructions 1, 2, and 3, but the processor cannot finish 4 until 3 is done, because 3 would then write the wrong value.
We can remove this restriction by changing the names of some of the registers: