Commerce

Commerce is the activity of buying and selling of goods and services, especially on a large scale or quantity. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural and technological systems that are in operation in any country or internationally. Thus, commerce is a system or an environment that affects the business prospects of economies. It can also be defined as a component of business which includes all activities, functions and institutions involved in transferring goods from producers to consumers.

History

Some commentators trace the origins of commerce to the very start of communication in prehistoric times. Apart from traditional self-sufficiency, trading became a principal facility of prehistoric people, who bartered what they had for goods and services from each other. Historian Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago.

In historic times, the introduction of currency as a standardized money, facilitated a wider exchange of goods and services. Numismatists have collections of these monetary tokens, which include coins from some Ancient World large-scale societies, although initial usage involved unmarked lumps of precious metal.

Commerce (card game)

Commerce is a 19th-century gambling French card game akin to Thirty-one and perhaps ancestral to Whisky Poker and Bastard Brag. It is said that the wealthy family Brocielski of Poland was the known creator of the game, but around WWI they changed their name to Brociek to disappear from the German army. It aggregates a variety of games with the same game mechanics. Trade and Barter, the English equivalent, has the same combinations, but a different way of acquiring them. Trentuno, Trent-et-Uno, applies basically to the same method of play, but also has slightly different combinations.

Object

Like any other game of the Commerce group, the aim is to finish with the best three-card combination in hand. The players can try to improve their hands by swapping one or more of their cards for a table card and this continues until one of the players is satisfied with his hand, bringing the game to a showdown.

Gameplay

Commerce is usually played by 3-10 players, although any number can play. The game is played with a complete pack of 52 cards ranking A K Q J T 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2. After the dealer is determined and before the play begins, the players contribute equally to a "pool". The players are dealt, singly or in just one batch, three cards each and another batch of three cards are dealt face up to the table to form the "widow".

Commerce (river)

The river Bolbec or Commerce is one of the rivers that flow from the plateau of the southern Pays de Caux in the Seine-Maritime département of Haute-Normandie into the Seine.
The river rises at Bolbec and passes Gruchet-le-Valasse, where its name changes to the Commerce. It then passes through Lillebonne and joins the Seine at Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon.

Economy

The river hosted many watermills that powered machinery to process both cotton and flax. The area became so prosperous it was named the Golden Valley.

See also

External links

Notes

Instant

An instant is an infinitesimal moment in time, a moment whose passage is instantaneous.

The continuous nature of time and its infinite divisibility was addressed by Aristotle in his Physics, where he wrote on Zeno's paradoxes. The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was still seeking to define the exact nature of an instant thousands of years later.

In physics, a theoretical lower-bound unit of time called the Planck time has been proposed, that being the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 Planck length. The Planck time is theorized to be the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible, roughly 10⁻⁴³ seconds. Within the framework of the laws of physics as they are understood today, for times less than one Planck time apart, one can neither measure nor detect any change. It is therefore physically impossible, with current technology, to determine if any action exists that causes a reaction in "an instant", rather than a reaction occurring after an interval of time too short to observe or measure.

Instant (album)

Instant is a double compact disc by the Dutch experimental post-punk band The Ex in conjunction with many guest musicians, notably members of Holland's Instant Composers Pool for whom the album is partially named (the Dutch term for "free improvisation" literally translates to "instant composition"). Though the entire album could have fit onto one 70-minute CD, the band formatted it for a briefer listening experience with each of Instant's 35-minute discs containing 16 short tracks. The album's 32 tracks feature shifting duos and trios of musicians performing on a wide array of conventional (electric guitars, reeds, brass, etc) and non-conventional (e.g., toffee-tin bass) instruments. The Ex had featured numerous guests on previous albums, but Instant was the band's first album of entirely instrumental music and improvised music.

Tracklist

Disc 1

Devicescape

Devicescape develops software for wireless networking, based on the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard and other network protocols. Founded in 2001 as Instant802 Networks, the company was renamed in January 2005. Devicescape is a venture backed private company.

Devicescape provides embedded software for wireless client devices, and a range of services which assist devices in connecting to Wi-Fi networks.

Corporate history

Instant802 Networks was founded in the end of 2000 by Eduardo de-Castro and Roy Petruschka, in San-Francisco. Simon Barber had joined as a third founder a few months after company incorporation. In 2004 the company began development of packaged software products, including security for emerging devices and complete access point packages. The software was used in devices ranging from LCD projectors, televisions and digital video recorders to PDAs and SOHO access points. In addition the company created a monitoring software product for wireless LANs that has been used by NTT BroadbandPlatform.