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π Today a greater percentage of Dutch people speak English than Canadians
The following is a list of English-speaking population by country, including information on both native speakers and second-language speakers.
Some of the entries in this list are dependent territories (e.g.: U.S. Virgin Islands), autonomous regions (e.g.: Hong Kong) or associated states (e.g.: Cook Islands) of other countries, rather than being fully sovereign countries in their own right.
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- "Today a greater percentage of Dutch people speak English than Canadians" | 2016-10-28 | 13 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Free Speech Zone
Free speech zones (also known as First Amendment zones, free speech cages, and protest zones) are areas set aside in public places for the purpose of political protesting. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The existence of free speech zones is based on U.S. court decisions stipulating that the government may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner β but not content β of expression.
The Supreme Court has developed a four-part analysis to evaluate the constitutionality of time, place and manner (TPM) restrictions. To pass muster under the First Amendment, TPM restrictions must be neutral with respect to content, be narrowly drawn, serve a significant government interest, and leave open alternative channels of communication. Application of this four-part analysis varies with the circumstances of each case, and typically requires lower standards for the restriction of obscenity and fighting words.
Free speech zones have been used at a variety of political gatherings. The stated purpose of free speech zones is to protect the safety of those attending the political gathering, or for the safety of the protesters themselves. Critics, however, suggest that such zones are "Orwellian", and that authorities use them in a heavy-handed manner to censor protesters by putting them literally out of sight of the mass media, hence the public, as well as visiting dignitaries. Though authorities generally deny specifically targeting protesters, on a number of occasions, these denials have been contradicted by subsequent court testimony. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed, with various degrees of success and failure, a number of lawsuits on the issue.
Though free speech zones existed prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush, it was during Bush's presidency that their scope was greatly expanded. These zones continued through the presidency of Barack Obama; he signed a bill in 2012 that expanded the power of the Secret Service to restrict speech and make arrests.
Many colleges and universities earlier instituted free speech zone rules during the Vietnam-era protests of the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, a number of them have revised or removed these restrictions following student protests and lawsuits.
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- "Free Speech Zone" | 2013-06-29 | 70 Upvotes 22 Comments
π Microsoft v MikeRoweSoft
Microsoft v. MikeRoweSoft was a legal dispute between Microsoft and a Canadian Belmont High School student named Mike Rowe over the domain name "MikeRoweSoft.com". Microsoft argued that their trademark had been infringed because of the phonetic resemblance between "Microsoft" and "MikeRoweSoft".
The case received international press attention following Microsoft's perceived heavy-handed approach to a 12th grade student's part-time web design business and the subsequent support that Rowe received from the online community. A settlement was eventually reached, with Rowe granting ownership of the domain to Microsoft in exchange for an Xbox and additional compensation.
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- "Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft" | 2024-03-22 | 49 Upvotes 8 Comments
- "Microsoft v MikeRoweSoft" | 2018-04-17 | 96 Upvotes 20 Comments
- "Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft" | 2017-10-12 | 19 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft" | 2013-07-20 | 52 Upvotes 24 Comments
π Uno β The βUnitβ for Dimensionless Quantities
In science and engineering, the parts-per notation is a set of pseudo-units to describe small values of miscellaneous dimensionless quantities, e.g. mole fraction or mass fraction. Since these fractions are quantity-per-quantity measures, they are pure numbers with no associated units of measurement. Commonly used are parts-per-million (ppm, 10β6), parts-per-billion (ppb, 10β9), parts-per-trillion (ppt, 10β12) and parts-per-quadrillion (ppq, 10β15). This notation is not part of the International System of Units (SI) system and its meaning is ambiguous.
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- "Uno β The βUnitβ for Dimensionless Quantities" | 2021-07-01 | 131 Upvotes 115 Comments
π Secure Remote Password protocol
The Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) is an augmented password-authenticated key agreement (PAKE) protocol, specifically designed to work around existing patents.
Like all PAKE protocols, an eavesdropper or man in the middle cannot obtain enough information to be able to brute force guess a password without further interactions with the parties for each guess. Furthermore, being an augmented PAKE protocol, the server does not store password-equivalent data. This means that an attacker who steals the server data cannot masquerade as the client unless they first perform a brute force search for the password.
In layman's terms, during SRP (or any other PAKE protocol) authentication, one party (the "client" or "user") demonstrates to another party (the "server") that they know the password, without sending the password itself nor any other information from which the password can be derived. The password never leaves the client and is unknown to the server.
Furthermore, the server also needs to know about the password (but not the password itself) in order to instigate the secure connection. This means that the server also authenticates itself to the client, without reliance on the user parsing complex URLs. This prevents Phishing.
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- "Secure Remote Password protocol" | 2017-04-11 | 17 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997
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- "Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997" | 2011-03-05 | 7 Upvotes 54 Comments
π Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
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- "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" | 2023-11-15 | 30 Upvotes 6 Comments
π The fire that has been burning for 56 years
The Centralia mine fire is a coal-seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962. Its original cause is still a matter of debate. It is burning in underground coal mines at depths of up to 300 feet (90Β m) over an 8-mile (13Β km) stretch of 3,700 acres (15Β km2). At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years. It has caused most of the town to be abandoned: the population dwindled from around 1,500 at the time the fire started to 7 in 2013, and most of the buildings have been levelled.
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- "Pennsylvania town coal mine has been on fire since 1962" | 2021-02-07 | 60 Upvotes 35 Comments
- "The fire that has been burning for 56 years" | 2018-12-13 | 12 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Stalin's Poetry
Before he became a Bolshevik revolutionary and the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was a promising poet.
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- "Stalin's Poetry" | 2019-09-29 | 50 Upvotes 47 Comments
π Implicate and explicate order
Implicate order and explicate order are ontological concepts for quantum theory coined by theoretical physicist David Bohm during the early 1980s. They are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behavior of subatomic particles which quantum physics struggles to explain.
In Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, he used these notions to describe how the appearance of such phenomena might appear differently, or might be characterized by, varying principal factors, depending on contexts such as scales. The implicate (also referred to as the "enfolded") order is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality. In contrast, the explicate or "unfolded" order include the abstractions that humans normally perceive. As he wrote,
- In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders (Bohm 1980, p.Β xv).