The moon is still slightly protected by earths magnetic field. The field doesn't just suddenly end; inverse square law, and all that.
Actually, the moon is usually not protected by the earth's magnetic field. The earth's magnetic field is greatly affected by solar wind so that the part of the field projecting towards the sun is squished and the part away from the sun forms a long "tail"
If you look at this website, you can see that the moon only spends about 6 days/month inside the earth's magnetic tail.
Not only that, extremely dilute atmospheric particles have been discovered on the far side of the moon - the moon is technically inside Earth's atmosphere.
I think this is just false. Although some missions have detected traces of an atmosphere on parts of the moon (e.g., Apollo detected Argon, O2, CO2, CH4, etc, and LRO detected H3), these are thought to be from outgassing or sputtering from material inside the moon itself. The reason that some of them are similar to earth atmopheric components are that the earth-moon system may have actually been formed from prehistoric collision
As a parent of a 2 year old human todder, I question how common toddler features like periodic temper tantrums when things don't work out as expected will somehow be the golden sauce that "make robots that people are more comfortable with in day-to-day situations."
Perhaps they should be trying to just build "small" people rather than toddlers;^)
Spammers start a petition against DomainKeys to stand up for their freedom to spam. Programmers start a petition against CheckStyle to stand up for their freedom to format as they please. Anonymous starts a petition against virus checkers to stand up for their freedom to infiltrate systems. Drivers start a petition against radar/laser guns to stand up for their freedom to travel at whatever velocity they want. Drunks start a petition against breathalizers to stand up for their freedom to get a buzz. Students start a petition against grades to stand up for their freedom to learn what they want to learn. Citizens start a petition against taxes to stand up for their freedom to keep what they earn.
All these things like SecureBoot are tools. Sometimes they are useful. Making them mandatory may cause problems, but their mere existance isn't necessarily something to protest. In fact, I believe Microsoft HW certification requires x86 system to ship with the ability for the user to disable SecureBoot UEFI. Only in WinRT is secure boot required. The common rational for this dichotomy is that the WinRT ecosystem is more like a cell-phone captive tablet consumer product where it is not common for users to be able to install their own software as the HW is often captive or subsidized.
After all, didn't dramatic price cuts pretty much kill car stereo theft?
The general consensus of criminologist is that two factors killed car stero thefts... First, car manfacturers started putting in better stereos into most cars reducing the market for stolen car stereos. Second, it was much easier to fence GPS navigation devices in glove boxes than spend the time to rip out the car stereo.
So with this logic, we should force carriers to only give out smart phones for free (you could still get a feature phone for $40) and have people carry easy to fence sunglasses and gold jewelry.
One of my favorite recent/. stories along these lines was this anonymous anecdote from last year. A company "flexes" staff in times of low engineering demand, then decides to expand a plant later, only to find out that, oops, they have nobody left who understands how the plant works. The unsurprising result is that they had to hire back some old employees as contractors at 2-3x their previous salaries and try to recover the know-how.
Sadly this might have actually saved the company net money. Employees are not just salary, but employer FICA/Medicare contributions, benefits (like 401K, medical, FUTA, etc), office space, and software licences, etc, etc. Plus, when you recover the know-how after a few months, you can dump the contractors on their ass. It's unfortunate that this possibility exists, but sometimes it true...
I'm curious when it became in fashion celebrate those that choose to deliberatly not learn something (sometimes out of spite) and counsel other folks to do the same? Sure Google should be dog-fooding their own product, but not everyone needs to put on the Goggles (aka drinking the koolaid).
Sure, for something like "intro-to-computers" it may not exactly matter which word processor you use. But as some point reality will kick in. Of course time is finite and you can't learn everything, but Microsoft office is the standard bearer, so if you are going to fill your skills bag with some items, a quick reality check might confirm that being proficient with Microsoft office would be a good thing to learn if there is a chance that you might need to use it in a corporate environment. That's the difference between vocational training and a generic education.
Also on the hiring front, it might be prudent to choose to employ people (say as an executive compensation analyst) who are somewhat in tune with the real world vs out on their own crusade, dontchathink? Okay, maybe that was a bad example occupation to illustrate needing to be in tune with real-world, come to think of it;^P
FWIW, quite a bit of the fish sold in the US is mislabled already. Nobody seems to be doing much about it.
This report details how grim the situation is with non GM fish. There is probably no hope for labeling fish in general.
* 58 percent of the 81 retail outlets sampled sold mislabeled fish (three in five). * Small markets had significantly higher fraud (40 percent) than national chain grocery stores (12 percent). * 100 percent of the 16 sushi bars tested sold mislabeled fish. * Tilefish, on the FDA’s do-not-eat list because of its high mercury content,1 was substituted for red snapper and halibut in a small market. * 94 percent of the “white tuna” was not tuna at all, but escolar, a snake mackerel that has a toxin with purgative effects for people who eat more than a small amount of the fish. * Thirteen different types of fish were sold as “red snapper,” including tilapia, white bass, goldbanded jobfish, tilefish, porgy/seabream, ocean perch and other less valuable snappers.
Of course you are missing the obvious... They seem to have demonstrated a state of magnetism where is might be possible to demostrate yet another macro-quantum effect.
As I understand it, one way to think of a Quantum Spin Liquid (or Glass), is that you have a bunch of magnetic domains embedded in a crystaline structure such that there is no stable anti-ferromagnetic pairing (there's no particular energetic reason for a specific two to pair to cancel each other out vs them forming pairs with other neighbors). In some ways, you can think of the delocalized electrons in a semiconductor lattice to be a quantum "electrical" liquid. There's no energeticly favored pairings, so the near the ground state, if classical, would be a metastable pairing, but in the domain where quantum effects dominate, could be a superposition of paired states.
Some of the weird quantum-ness that you might have heard about so-called "holes" in a semiconductor lattice which exhibits some quantum-mechanical effects as if they were positively charged electrons. Similarly a spinon in a quantum spin liquid may exhibit similar effects (or so people specualte). The strange-ness occurs near the ground state where you might be able to somehow entangle these quasi-particles with each other or with photons. To my knowledge this hasn't been done in semiconductors yet, but is theoretically possible. Perhaps it might be easier to do this in a quantum spin liquid however, as the energy levels near the ground state are probably much higher.
Seems unlikely to avoid detection using a port like 53 (DNS services, something that filter all the time). Actually it's probably pretty easy to look at most standard port traffic and infer that they are being used for non-standard purposes.
To make matters worse, even non-chinese ISPs have been known to intercept DNS requests and substitute their own responses
and after that forum becomed a popular route for circumvention, they block that whole website in China via IP filtering, DNS and connection blacklisting...
Certainly anything might for a while, but then there are countermeasures...
If you need a narrow band VPN, you could always encrypt it in such a way that it can't be detected by the sniffers. For example, use something like the technique used by port knocking, i.e. utilize the time domain for your encrypted channel. In other words, don't send encrypted data directly, just send regular data and modulate the time intervals between the packets to reflect your encrypted data.
That's likely to be really low bandwidth and a bright target for thier firewall learning algorithms. Modulating the time intervals on a high-latency connection with the typically large amount of buffering will be troublesome if the just randomly drop packets on suspicious connections and wait for TCP/IP retransmit. Of course you could hack your TCP/IP stack to be aware of this, but that's quite a bit of work.
We could even parallel something like the Antarctic Treaty which basically ban military activity on the continent.
The Antarctic Treaty Article I
1. Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measures of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military maneuvers, as well as the testing of any type of weapons. 2. The present Treaty shall not prevent the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose.
Article IV of the apparently "less well known" OuterSpace treaty...
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.
Strangely similar wouldn't you say? A quick read of a history book published after 1970 would probably indicate that the 1967 Outerspace Treaty was based on the 1959 Anarctic Treaty. http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/tos/tos.html
Small problem. When the US planted the flag, it was to memorialize the event, not to claim the moon for anyone. The plaque with the flag says "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Likely part of the reason that the Nixon ordered the US flag (vs the UN flag or both) planted was that he caved to congressional pressure. At the time, a rider attached to the house appropriations bill for space funding would have required the US flag be planted (under the justification that the US taxpayers funded it). Even though that rider did not survive to the senate, its mere existance was probably part of decision process.
Another problem is that although the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures show that the flags appear to still be there, they are likely to be bleached out white (the surrender color).
And about the Indian language, yes, I mean whatever they speak in India.
When talking about IT/programming, in India, they speak English.
Of the several hundred native languages in India, the most popular is Hindi, but the unrelated languages of Marathi, Punjabi, Gelugu, Oriya, Tamal, Kannada, Malayalam, Kashmiri, Urdu, Dogri are all official state-languages of India spoken by many more than a million people and I believe there are a total of 22 officially recognized native langugages, and many unofficial languages have more than 2 million native speakers who do not speak Hindi (or any dialect of it).
I was merely assuming you meant Hindi as the next one down the line from English which roughly 40% seem to know some dialect of Hindi as at least their second language, but even with a broad definition Hindi is still a minority language in the country as a whole (but maybe in the subset of the IT community, Standard Hindi might be a bit higher than 40%).
First spoken language should be English. Second spoken language can be a choice between Indian and Chinese. Third spoken language should be C or Pascal.
As mentioned by many folks, there is no 'indian", you probably mean Hindi (which is the 2nd most popular language used in India).
Also, conversing in C can difficult, for example do you pronounce it "squiggly open brace", or is it "bracket" ? Is the "int" slient in "long int"? and who speaks Pascal these days? You are better off trying to speak Python or even Object Oriented Cobol if you want a job;^)
China (if we were to anthropomorphize the country) might beg to differ. Although outsiders seem to want to call the official spoken language "mandarin" chinese to somehow distinguish it from other spoken dialects of hanzi/kanji script, the chinese just call it putunghua which roughly translates to the people's tongue or common spoken language. Of course putunghua is mostly just a codified Beijing dialect, but similarly, there's no such thing as (spoken) English either, except maybe if you count RP...
Of course there is no "Indian" language, though. The most common languages in India are English and "standard" Hindi. Of course Hindi has lots of dialects which are pretty much as unintelligible to standard Hindi speakers as some of the Chinese dialects are to the putunghua speaker.
I think a hammer is technically a hash, not encryption.
Well, if you want to get technical about it, hammer is more akin to a disc fragmentation algorithm (as opposed to the more commonly used disc defragmentation algorithm).
But apparently they grew "hands" (which is apparently what pseudo-journalists call autopods) not hands (sans quotes)...
However, from the truth is stranger than fiction department, a possible reason that it didn't really work might be the lack of a mediating factors like Sonic Hedgehog expression signalling (yes, that's the name of a real gene, which was named after the video game character by the Harvard researchers who discovered it) which has to something to do with making limbs from autopods, but is mostly used in the formation of scale structures in zebrafish.
At some price level eReaders might be doomed (no-one will want to sell them anymore). Of course companies could always give them away with books for free, but when most things that fall under some critical price level, they tend to become junk (because there's no incentive for a better mousetrap, just a cheaper one) and then nobody wants them anymore either even when they are free.
The pension funds were quite healthy until the financial industry screwed everything up, extracting their fees and profits from the investments before they tanked them of course.
Actually, the pension funds were quite fictional until the financial industry screwed everything up, which exposed that fact.
Most pension funds are based on the fact that the enterprises running them are on-going, growing concerns. If/when they start shrinking, incoming contributions cannot finance accumulating pension liabiities w/o unrealistic investment return rates (which steered some pension investments into higher risk categories). So a bet on a pension is really just a bet on the underwriters continuing existence. Although this risk is mitigated somewhat by pension insurance (which is a pooling of risk), as many retired folks covered by pension plans that went into receivership, the net result of covered risk is pennies on the dollar.
Consider "Right to Work" as a simple example, it is NOT the case that these laws repealed some requirement that all unions contract be exclusive by law. Those exclusivity terms were negotiated between two free groups. Instead these laws scratch out, by government fiat, parts of existing contracts and make it illegal for two parties to agree these terms.
Government has always messed around with contracts. Consider minimum (or in some localities so-called "living") wage as another simple example. Instead of allowing two parties to agree on a wage less than some arbitrary minimum, the government by fiat makes this illegal. Why? Although it may or may not be the actual case, the intention was that these terms were deemed to be against the broader public interest.
Why if you are free to join with another person and start a company, should you not be free to join with another person and start a Union.
I don't think there are any laws against being free to join with another person to start a union in any state (right to work or not), Can you point to an example?
Getting back to the orignal topic, in any society, there generally is an "order" to splitting up the spoils and bearing the burden. The problem is that most traditional societies, the association (be it familial, or fraternal) is considered to be an important determining factor on the spoils/burdens assignment, and actual merit is less of a factor. In an so-called "egalitarian" society, how would this be different? Because you associate with certain other folks or were born into a group would you be able to use this leverage against other groups? Notice how money really doesn't need to enter into this.
The strange thing about money is one way to introduces a mathematical "pseudo-metric" or measure to compute leverage and thus imposes a partial-order (which is the function of any society than isn't anarchy). As with any such measures, a specific one-dimensional measure doesn't do justice to the multi-dimensional problem to measurement, but has some good properties, and some poor properties.
Although you might argue for a different measure (say intelligence), what would you do with a child who was born less intelligent than you. How would you "gift" them some of your intelligence to improve their lot in life? Money is certainly not fair, and is far from perfect, but it has helped to create a system that preserves some of the natural desires of familial and fraternal orders in society. An alternate scheme would have to provide for this if there is any hope for an orderly transition (not that many folks that advocate these changes hope for an orderly transition, but more like a revolutionary transition).
It's not to say that some of the makings of alternate systems don't exist today. For example, in China, often children that show some abilities in specialized areas are sometimes swept away to far away academies under the guise of creating a net benefit to society (but of course usually not to the individual benefit or the familial benefit). The fact that many folks find this unappealing serves to underscore the familial and fraternal orientation of what most of us have deemed to be a society. Something to think about when you talk about "egalitarian".
Certain cryptography functions and related software packages are export-restricted by some governments for National Security(tm). As a result, products that contain export-restricted software is also export-restricted. Go read the PuTTY webpage, you'll see what I mean.
That's old news, at least this is not true in the US anymore. IANAL, but my understanding is that as long as the software package is primarly used for DRM purposes and is not directly accessible to the user, it is exempt from export controls. An iPhone seems like it would meet that definition for any potential use of cryptography.
Downloading PuTTY which uses open source libraries and are distributed in a form directly accessible to the user and use encryption over 64-bits is a different story, so by EAR section 740.13(e), they would probably have to be export self classified (submit a form to the government), but it too is no longer restricted from export to a country like China, but still restricted to so-called "E" countries (basically Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria). The PuTTY folks don't want to self certify (perhaps for liability, hassle factor, as a protest, or whatever reason), so they leave it to whomever wants to use their software to self certify if they want to export it.
Basically, this was just an excuse to justify tasering the poor woman. Maybe they thought she was from North Korea. Nobody wants to upset any marketing plans made by big corporations... Nobody...
No, they didn't. Not until the law changed. Encryption no longer counts as munitions.
That's not true. Encryption for DRM purposes no longer counts as munitions. In general, devices that enable custom encryption applications are still considered munitions (e.g., cryptoanalysis libraries and devices that have hardware encryption accellerators that make them easy to use in password cracking farms).
You can thank hollywood and the computer software folks for the DRM exemption, though...;^)
Slashdot Mirror
The moon is still slightly protected by earths magnetic field. The field doesn't just suddenly end; inverse square law, and all that.
Actually, the moon is usually not protected by the earth's magnetic field. The earth's magnetic field is greatly affected by solar wind so that the part of the field projecting towards the sun is squished and the part away from the sun forms a long "tail"
If you look at this website, you can see that the moon only spends about 6 days/month inside the earth's magnetic tail.
Not only that, extremely dilute atmospheric particles have been discovered on the far side of the moon - the moon is technically inside Earth's atmosphere.
I think this is just false. Although some missions have detected traces of an atmosphere on parts of the moon (e.g., Apollo detected Argon, O2, CO2, CH4, etc, and LRO detected H3), these are thought to be from outgassing or sputtering from material inside the moon itself. The reason that some of them are similar to earth atmopheric components are that the earth-moon system may have actually been formed from prehistoric collision
As a parent of a 2 year old human todder, I question how common toddler features like periodic temper tantrums when things don't work out as expected will somehow be the golden sauce that "make robots that people are more comfortable with in day-to-day situations."
Perhaps they should be trying to just build "small" people rather than toddlers ;^)
Spammers start a petition against DomainKeys to stand up for their freedom to spam.
Programmers start a petition against CheckStyle to stand up for their freedom to format as they please.
Anonymous starts a petition against virus checkers to stand up for their freedom to infiltrate systems.
Drivers start a petition against radar/laser guns to stand up for their freedom to travel at whatever velocity they want.
Drunks start a petition against breathalizers to stand up for their freedom to get a buzz.
Students start a petition against grades to stand up for their freedom to learn what they want to learn.
Citizens start a petition against taxes to stand up for their freedom to keep what they earn.
All these things like SecureBoot are tools. Sometimes they are useful. Making them mandatory may cause problems, but their mere existance isn't necessarily something to protest. In fact, I believe Microsoft HW certification requires x86 system to ship with the ability for the user to disable SecureBoot UEFI. Only in WinRT is secure boot required. The common rational for this dichotomy is that the WinRT ecosystem is more like a cell-phone captive tablet consumer product where it is not common for users to be able to install their own software as the HW is often captive or subsidized.
After all, didn't dramatic price cuts pretty much kill car stereo theft?
The general consensus of criminologist is that two factors killed car stero thefts...
First, car manfacturers started putting in better stereos into most cars reducing the market for stolen car stereos.
Second, it was much easier to fence GPS navigation devices in glove boxes than spend the time to rip out the car stereo.
So with this logic, we should force carriers to only give out smart phones for free (you could still get a feature phone for $40) and have people carry easy to fence sunglasses and gold jewelry.
One of my favorite recent /. stories along these lines was this anonymous anecdote from last year. A company "flexes" staff in times of low engineering demand, then decides to expand a plant later, only to find out that, oops, they have nobody left who understands how the plant works. The unsurprising result is that they had to hire back some old employees as contractors at 2-3x their previous salaries and try to recover the know-how.
Sadly this might have actually saved the company net money. Employees are not just salary, but employer FICA/Medicare contributions, benefits (like 401K, medical, FUTA, etc), office space, and software licences, etc, etc. Plus, when you recover the know-how after a few months, you can dump the contractors on their ass. It's unfortunate that this possibility exists, but sometimes it true...
I'm curious when it became in fashion celebrate those that choose to deliberatly not learn something (sometimes out of spite) and counsel other folks to do the same? Sure Google should be dog-fooding their own product, but not everyone needs to put on the Goggles (aka drinking the koolaid).
Sure, for something like "intro-to-computers" it may not exactly matter which word processor you use. But as some point reality will kick in. Of course time is finite and you can't learn everything, but Microsoft office is the standard bearer, so if you are going to fill your skills bag with some items, a quick reality check might confirm that being proficient with Microsoft office would be a good thing to learn if there is a chance that you might need to use it in a corporate environment. That's the difference between vocational training and a generic education.
Also on the hiring front, it might be prudent to choose to employ people (say as an executive compensation analyst) who are somewhat in tune with the real world vs out on their own crusade, dontchathink? Okay, maybe that was a bad example occupation to illustrate needing to be in tune with real-world, come to think of it ;^P
FWIW, quite a bit of the fish sold in the US is mislabled already. Nobody seems to be doing much about it.
This report details how grim the situation is with non GM fish. There is probably no hope for labeling fish in general.
* 58 percent of the 81 retail outlets sampled sold mislabeled fish (three in five).
* Small markets had significantly higher fraud (40 percent) than national chain grocery stores (12 percent).
* 100 percent of the 16 sushi bars tested sold mislabeled fish.
* Tilefish, on the FDA’s do-not-eat list because of its high mercury content,1 was substituted for red snapper and halibut in a small market.
* 94 percent of the “white tuna” was not tuna at all, but escolar, a snake mackerel that has a toxin with purgative effects for people who eat more than a small amount of the fish.
* Thirteen different types of fish were sold as “red snapper,” including tilapia, white bass, goldbanded jobfish, tilefish, porgy/seabream, ocean perch and other less valuable snappers.
Of course you are missing the obvious... They seem to have demonstrated a state of magnetism where is might be possible to demostrate yet another macro-quantum effect.
As I understand it, one way to think of a Quantum Spin Liquid (or Glass), is that you have a bunch of magnetic domains embedded in a crystaline structure such that there is no stable anti-ferromagnetic pairing (there's no particular energetic reason for a specific two to pair to cancel each other out vs them forming pairs with other neighbors). In some ways, you can think of the delocalized electrons in a semiconductor lattice to be a quantum "electrical" liquid. There's no energeticly favored pairings, so the near the ground state, if classical, would be a metastable pairing, but in the domain where quantum effects dominate, could be a superposition of paired states.
Some of the weird quantum-ness that you might have heard about so-called "holes" in a semiconductor lattice which exhibits some quantum-mechanical effects as if they were positively charged electrons. Similarly a spinon in a quantum spin liquid may exhibit similar effects (or so people specualte). The strange-ness occurs near the ground state where you might be able to somehow entangle these quasi-particles with each other or with photons. To my knowledge this hasn't been done in semiconductors yet, but is theoretically possible. Perhaps it might be easier to do this in a quantum spin liquid however, as the energy levels near the ground state are probably much higher.
Ebay is something like the 150th most popular site in China. It is dwarfed by TaoBao. The typical chinese user wouldn't probably notice much...
Seems unlikely to avoid detection using a port like 53 (DNS services, something that filter all the time). Actually it's probably pretty easy to look at most standard port traffic and infer that they are being used for non-standard purposes.
To make matters worse, even non-chinese ISPs have been known to intercept DNS requests and substitute their own responses
Just post some nice pictures on a forum...
and after that forum becomed a popular route for circumvention, they block that whole website in China via IP filtering, DNS and connection blacklisting...
Certainly anything might for a while, but then there are countermeasures...
If you need a narrow band VPN, you could always encrypt it in such a way that it can't be detected by the sniffers. For example, use something like the technique used by port knocking, i.e. utilize the time domain for your encrypted channel. In other words, don't send encrypted data directly, just send regular data and modulate the time intervals between the packets to reflect your encrypted data.
That's likely to be really low bandwidth and a bright target for thier firewall learning algorithms. Modulating the time intervals on a high-latency connection with the typically large amount of buffering will be troublesome if the just randomly drop packets on suspicious connections and wait for TCP/IP retransmit. Of course you could hack your TCP/IP stack to be aware of this, but that's quite a bit of work.
We could even parallel something like the Antarctic Treaty which basically ban military activity on the continent.
The Antarctic Treaty Article I
1. Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measures of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military maneuvers, as well as the testing of any type of weapons.
2. The present Treaty shall not prevent the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose.
Article IV of the apparently "less well known" OuterSpace treaty...
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.
Strangely similar wouldn't you say? A quick read of a history book published after 1970 would probably indicate that the 1967 Outerspace Treaty was based on the 1959 Anarctic Treaty. http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/tos/tos.html
Small problem. When the US planted the flag, it was to memorialize the event, not to claim the moon for anyone. The plaque with the flag says "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Likely part of the reason that the Nixon ordered the US flag (vs the UN flag or both) planted was that he caved to congressional pressure. At the time, a rider attached to the house appropriations bill for space funding would have required the US flag be planted (under the justification that the US taxpayers funded it). Even though that rider did not survive to the senate, its mere existance was probably part of decision process.
Another problem is that although the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures show that the flags appear to still be there, they are likely to be bleached out white (the surrender color).
And about the Indian language, yes, I mean whatever they speak in India.
When talking about IT/programming, in India, they speak English.
Of the several hundred native languages in India, the most popular is Hindi, but the unrelated languages of Marathi, Punjabi, Gelugu, Oriya, Tamal, Kannada, Malayalam, Kashmiri, Urdu, Dogri are all official state-languages of India spoken by many more than a million people and I believe there are a total of 22 officially recognized native langugages, and many unofficial languages have more than 2 million native speakers who do not speak Hindi (or any dialect of it).
I was merely assuming you meant Hindi as the next one down the line from English which roughly 40% seem to know some dialect of Hindi as at least their second language, but even with a broad definition Hindi is still a minority language in the country as a whole (but maybe in the subset of the IT community, Standard Hindi might be a bit higher than 40%).
First spoken language should be English.
Second spoken language can be a choice between Indian and Chinese.
Third spoken language should be C or Pascal.
As mentioned by many folks, there is no 'indian", you probably mean Hindi (which is the 2nd most popular language used in India).
Also, conversing in C can difficult, for example do you pronounce it "squiggly open brace", or is it "bracket" ? Is the "int" slient in "long int"? and who speaks Pascal these days? You are better off trying to speak Python or even Object Oriented Cobol if you want a job ;^)
There's no such thing as (spoken) Chinese either.
China (if we were to anthropomorphize the country) might beg to differ. Although outsiders seem to want to call the official spoken language "mandarin" chinese to somehow distinguish it from other spoken dialects of hanzi/kanji script, the chinese just call it putunghua which roughly translates to the people's tongue or common spoken language. Of course putunghua is mostly just a codified Beijing dialect, but similarly, there's no such thing as (spoken) English either, except maybe if you count RP...
Of course there is no "Indian" language, though. The most common languages in India are English and "standard" Hindi. Of course Hindi has lots of dialects which are pretty much as unintelligible to standard Hindi speakers as some of the Chinese dialects are to the putunghua speaker.
I think a hammer is technically a hash, not encryption.
Well, if you want to get technical about it, hammer is more akin to a disc fragmentation algorithm (as opposed to the more commonly used disc defragmentation algorithm).
But apparently they grew "hands" (which is apparently what pseudo-journalists call autopods) not hands (sans quotes)...
However, from the truth is stranger than fiction department, a possible reason that it didn't really work might be the lack of a mediating factors like Sonic Hedgehog expression signalling (yes, that's the name of a real gene, which was named after the video game character by the Harvard researchers who discovered it) which has to something to do with making limbs from autopods, but is mostly used in the formation of scale structures in zebrafish.
No eReaders are not doomed by tablets.
eReader prices are doomed.
At some price level eReaders might be doomed (no-one will want to sell them anymore). Of course companies could always give them away with books for free, but when most things that fall under some critical price level, they tend to become junk (because there's no incentive for a better mousetrap, just a cheaper one) and then nobody wants them anymore either even when they are free.
The pension funds were quite healthy until the financial industry screwed everything up, extracting their fees and profits from the investments before they tanked them of course.
Actually, the pension funds were quite fictional until the financial industry screwed everything up, which exposed that fact.
Most pension funds are based on the fact that the enterprises running them are on-going, growing concerns. If/when they start shrinking, incoming contributions cannot finance accumulating pension liabiities w/o unrealistic investment return rates (which steered some pension investments into higher risk categories). So a bet on a pension is really just a bet on the underwriters continuing existence. Although this risk is mitigated somewhat by pension insurance (which is a pooling of risk), as many retired folks covered by pension plans that went into receivership, the net result of covered risk is pennies on the dollar.
Consider "Right to Work" as a simple example, it is NOT the case that these laws repealed some requirement that all unions contract be exclusive by law. Those exclusivity terms were negotiated between two free groups. Instead these laws scratch out, by government fiat, parts of existing contracts and make it illegal for two parties to agree these terms.
Government has always messed around with contracts. Consider minimum (or in some localities so-called "living") wage as another simple example. Instead of allowing two parties to agree on a wage less than some arbitrary minimum, the government by fiat makes this illegal. Why? Although it may or may not be the actual case, the intention was that these terms were deemed to be against the broader public interest.
Why if you are free to join with another person and start a company, should you not be free to join with another person and start a Union.
I don't think there are any laws against being free to join with another person to start a union in any state (right to work or not), Can you point to an example?
Getting back to the orignal topic, in any society, there generally is an "order" to splitting up the spoils and bearing the burden. The problem is that most traditional societies, the association (be it familial, or fraternal) is considered to be an important determining factor on the spoils/burdens assignment, and actual merit is less of a factor. In an so-called "egalitarian" society, how would this be different? Because you associate with certain other folks or were born into a group would you be able to use this leverage against other groups? Notice how money really doesn't need to enter into this.
The strange thing about money is one way to introduces a mathematical "pseudo-metric" or measure to compute leverage and thus imposes a partial-order (which is the function of any society than isn't anarchy). As with any such measures, a specific one-dimensional measure doesn't do justice to the multi-dimensional problem to measurement, but has some good properties, and some poor properties.
Although you might argue for a different measure (say intelligence), what would you do with a child who was born less intelligent than you. How would you "gift" them some of your intelligence to improve their lot in life? Money is certainly not fair, and is far from perfect, but it has helped to create a system that preserves some of the natural desires of familial and fraternal orders in society. An alternate scheme would have to provide for this if there is any hope for an orderly transition (not that many folks that advocate these changes hope for an orderly transition, but more like a revolutionary transition).
It's not to say that some of the makings of alternate systems don't exist today. For example, in China, often children that show some abilities in specialized areas are sometimes swept away to far away academies under the guise of creating a net benefit to society (but of course usually not to the individual benefit or the familial benefit). The fact that many folks find this unappealing serves to underscore the familial and fraternal orientation of what most of us have deemed to be a society. Something to think about when you talk about "egalitarian".
Factory worker... what could possibly go wrong there?
I guess we'll find out soon enough...
Certain cryptography functions and related software packages are export-restricted by some governments for National Security(tm). As a result, products that contain export-restricted software is also export-restricted. Go read the PuTTY webpage, you'll see what I mean.
That's old news, at least this is not true in the US anymore. IANAL, but my understanding is that as long as the software package is primarly used for DRM purposes and is not directly accessible to the user, it is exempt from export controls. An iPhone seems like it would meet that definition for any potential use of cryptography.
Downloading PuTTY which uses open source libraries and are distributed in a form directly accessible to the user and use encryption over 64-bits is a different story, so by EAR section 740.13(e), they would probably have to be export self classified (submit a form to the government), but it too is no longer restricted from export to a country like China, but still restricted to so-called "E" countries (basically Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria). The PuTTY folks don't want to self certify (perhaps for liability, hassle factor, as a protest, or whatever reason), so they leave it to whomever wants to use their software to self certify if they want to export it.
Basically, this was just an excuse to justify tasering the poor woman. Maybe they thought she was from North Korea. Nobody wants to upset any marketing plans made by big corporations... Nobody...
No, they didn't. Not until the law changed. Encryption no longer counts as munitions.
That's not true. Encryption for DRM purposes no longer counts as munitions. In general, devices that enable custom encryption applications are still considered munitions (e.g., cryptoanalysis libraries and devices that have hardware encryption accellerators that make them easy to use in password cracking farms).
You can thank hollywood and the computer software folks for the DRM exemption, though... ;^)