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🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Video games 🔗 Chess

Battle Chess is a computer game version of chess in which the chess pieces come to life and battle one another when capturing. It was originally developed and released by Interplay Entertainment for the Amiga in 1988 and subsequently on many other systems, including 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Acorn Archimedes, Amiga CD32, Amiga CDTV, Apple IIGS, Apple IIe, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, FM Towns, NES, Mac OS, NEC PC-9801, X68000 and Microsoft Windows. In 1991, Battle Chess Enhanced was released by Interplay for the PC, featuring improved VGA graphics and a symphonic musical score that played from the CD-ROM.

Battle Chess was critically acclaimed and commercially successful, resulting in two official follow-ups as well as several inspired games. Its remake, Battle Chess: Game of Kings, was released on Steam on December 11, 2015.

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Taxation

Companies of the United States with untaxed profits deals with those U.S. companies whose offshore subsidiaries earn profits which are retained in foreign countries to defer paying U.S. corporate tax. The profits of United States corporations are subject to a federal corporate tax rate of 21%. In principle, the tax is payable on all profits of corporations, whether earned domestically or abroad. However, overseas subsidiaries of U.S. corporations are entitled to a tax deferral of profits on active income until repatriated to the U.S., and are regarded as untaxed. When repatriated, the corporations are entitled to a foreign tax credit for taxes (if any) paid in foreign countries.

Retaining such profits offshore may be regarded as a tax strategy. Many corporations have accumulated substantial untaxed profits offshore, especially in countries with low corporate tax rates. In recent years it has been estimated that untaxed profits range from US$1.6 to $2.1 trillion. The Wall Street Journal noted that the "[u]ntaxed foreign earnings are part of a contentious debate over U.S. fiscal policy and tax code." The profits earned abroad and retained there are subject to a foreign exchange risk, besides other financial risks.

The downside of a strategy of retaining profits offshore is that corporations may want or need to pay dividends to shareholders, or to make investments in the United States, besides other reasons. The alternative may be to borrow funds in the U.S., or access the funds retained offshore in the form of inter-company loans.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) imposed a one time tax on these offshore profits at 8% (non-cash) and 15.5% (cash) respectively. The Act also includes a provision that taxes all foreign profits in the US in the year they are earned ending the ability of US companies to defer paying US tax on unrepatriated earnings.

An auto-antonym or autantonym, also called a contronym, contranym or Janus word, is a word with multiple meanings (senses) of which one is the reverse of another. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This phenomenon is called enantiosemy, enantionymy (enantio- means "opposite"), antilogy or autantonymy. An enantiosemic term is necessarily polysemic.

🔗 Physics

A Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter (also called the fifth state of matter) which is typically formed when a gas of bosons at low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (-273.15 °C). Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which point microscopic quantum phenomena, particularly wavefunction interference, become apparent macroscopically. A BEC is formed by cooling a gas of extremely low density, about one-hundred-thousandth (1/100,000) the density of normal air, to ultra-low temperatures.

This state was first predicted, generally, in 1924–1925 by Albert Einstein following a paper written by Satyendra Nath Bose, although Bose came up with the pioneering paper on the new statistics.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Textile Arts 🔗 Aviation/airport

The carpet at Portland International Airport (PDX) in Portland, Oregon, featured geometric shapes on a teal background, representing the intersection of the north and south runways seen by air traffic controllers from the airport's tower at night. SRG Partnership designed it in 1987, and since then, the carpet has received much media attention.

In 2013, the Port of Portland announced the carpet's replacement with a new pattern conceptualized by the Portland-based firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects. The announcement generated a social media "phenomenon" and gained attention from local and national news outlets. Removal of the original carpet began in January 2015, with the airport recycling worn portions and making remaining pieces available for sale by local retail vendors.

In 2015, Portland Trail Blazers point guard Damian Lillard released his first PDX carpet colorway on the Adidas D Lillard 1 sneaker. In 2016, Lillard released the colorway on the D Lillard 2, also inspired by the carpet.

In February of 2022, it was announced that the iconic carpet would be returning to the airport when a new terminal opens in 2024.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

Ousterhout's dichotomy is computer scientist John Ousterhout's categorization that high-level programming languages tend to fall into two groups, each with distinct properties and uses: system programming languages and scripting languages – compare programming in the large and programming in the small. This distinction underlies the design of his language Tcl.

System programming languages (or applications languages) usually have the following properties:

• They are typed statically
• They support creating complex data structures
• Programs in them are compiled into machine code
• Programs in them are meant to operate largely independently of other programs

System programming languages tend to be used for components and applications with large amounts of internal functionality such as operating systems, database servers, and Web browsers. These applications typically employ complex algorithms and data structures and require high performance. Prototypical examples of system programming languages include C and Modula-2.

By contrast, scripting languages (or glue languages) tend to have the following properties:

• They are typed dynamically
• They have little or no provision for complex data structures
• Programs in them (scripts) are interpreted

Scripting languages tend to be used for applications where most of the functionality comes from other programs (often implemented in system programming languages); the scripts are used to glue together other programs or add additional layers of functionality on top of existing programs. Ousterhout claims that scripts tend to be short and are often written by less sophisticated programmers, so execution efficiency is less important than simplicity and ease of interaction with other programs. Common applications for scripting include Web page generation, report generation, graphical user interfaces, and system administration. Prototypical examples of scripting languages include AppleScript, C shell, DOS batch files, and Tcl.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers

John "Walking" Stewart (19 February 1747 – 20 February 1822) was an English philosopher and traveller. Stewart developed a unique system of materialistic pantheism.

🔗 Computing

JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs) is an open-source, Emacs-like text editor, primarily intended for Unix-like operating systems. It also supports MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. JOVE was inspired by Gosling Emacs but is much smaller and simpler, lacking Mocklisp. It was originally created in 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, United States on a PDP-11 minicomputer. JOVE was distributed with several releases of BSD Unix, including 2.9BSD, 4.3BSD-Reno and 4.4BSD-Lite2.

As of 2022, the latest development release of JOVE is version 4.17.4.4; the stable version is 4.16. Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8.

🔗 Game theory

The pirate game is a simple mathematical game. It is a multi-player version of the ultimatum game.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 Technology 🔗 Private Equity 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area

Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator launched in March 2005 and has been used to launch over 2,000 companies including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, and Dropbox. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019.