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πŸ”— Intellipedia (U.S. intelligence agencies' internal wiki)

πŸ”— United States/U.S. Government πŸ”— United States

Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community (IC). It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006. Intellipedia consists of three wikis running on the separate JWICS (Intellipedia-TS), SIPRNet (Intellipedia-S), and DNI-U (Intellipedia-U) networks. The levels of classification allowed for information on the three wikis are Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS SCI), Secret (S), and Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU or FOUO) information, respectively. Each of the wikis is used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the US intelligence community and other national-security related organizations, including Combatant Commands and other federal departments. The wikis are not open to the public.

Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES) office headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. It includes information on the regions, people, and issues of interest to the communities using its host networks. Intellipedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project. To the contrary of mainstream Wikipedia, its intelligence analogue encourages editing that incorporates personal points of view regardless of rank as it was decided that, "much of the self-corrective knowledge in the Intelligence Community resides in personal points of view," and that, "not all good ideas originate at the top."

The Secret version connected to SIPRNet predominantly serves Department of Defense and the Department of State personnel, many of whom do not use the Top Secret JWICS network on a day-to-day basis. Users on unclassified networks can access Intellipedia from remote terminals outside their workspaces via a VPN, in addition to their normal workstations. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) users share information on the unclassified Intelink-U wiki.

πŸ”— Strowger Telephone Switch (1891)

πŸ”— Telecommunications

The Strowger switch is the first commercially successful electromechanical stepping switch telephone exchange system. It was developed by the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company founded in 1891 by Almon Brown Strowger. Because of its operational characteristics it is also known as a step-by-step (SXS) switch.

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πŸ”— Triple Fault

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Computer hardware πŸ”— Computing/Software

On the x86 computer architecture, a triple fault is a special kind of exception generated by the CPU when an exception occurs while the CPU is trying to invoke the double fault exception handler, which itself handles exceptions occurring while trying to invoke a regular exception handler.

x86 processors beginning with the 80286 will cause a shutdown cycle to occur when a triple fault is encountered. This typically causes the motherboard hardware to initiate a CPU reset, which, in turn, causes the whole computer to reboot.

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πŸ”— Paige Compositor

πŸ”— Typography

The Paige Compositor was an invention developed by James W. Paige (1842–1917) between 1872 and 1888. It was designed to replace the human typesetter of a lead type-composed printing form with a mechanical arm. In the early 1890s, a group of inventors signed a contract with Towner K. Webster in Chicago to produce 3000 compositors. However, the machine was not nearly as precise as it should have been and never turned a profit because of its complexity and continual need for adjustment based upon trial and error. As a result, it was the Linotype typesetting machine, which composed in a hot metal typesetting process, that became the new popular typesetting machine.

The Paige typesetting machine is notable for substantial investment that the prominent writer Mark Twain made into the failed endeavor: $300,000 ($6,000,000 today). Twain, a former printer, invested not only the bulk of his book profits but also a large portion of the inheritance of Olivia Clemens, his wife. Many point to his over-investment in the Paige typesetting machine and other inventions as the cause of not only his family's financial decline but also the decline of his wit and humor.

Webster Manufacturing made fewer than six machines costing $15,000 apiece, over three times as much as the initial production estimates. One was donated by Cornell University for a scrap metal drive during World War II. The only surviving machine is displayed at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut.

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πŸ”— Tell HN: Perseids: "Last Chance" for Best Meteor Viewing Tonight

πŸ”— Astronomy πŸ”— Geology πŸ”— Geology/Meteorites πŸ”— Solar System

The Perseids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift–Tuttle. The meteors are called the Perseids because the point from which they appear to hail (called the radiant) lies in the constellation Perseus.

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πŸ”— Managed Nationalism

πŸ”— Russia πŸ”— Politics πŸ”— Discrimination

Managed nationalism or controlled nationalism (Russian: УправляСмый Π½Π°Ρ†ΠΈΠΎΠ½Π°Π»ΠΈΠ·ΠΌ, romanized:Β Upravlyayemyy natsionalizm) is a term used by some academics to refer to an informal policy of pragmatic collaboration with Russian nationalists and neo-Nazis (or in broader cases, the Russian far-right as a whole) pursued by the government of Russia under Vladimir Putin. Beginning after Putin's election as President of Russia in 2000 and escalating after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, managed nationalism led to the promotion of the Russian Image organisation throughout the late 2000s until the 2009 murders of human rights activists Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, at which point Russian Image was dissolved.

Since the 2011–2013 Russian protests and Euromaidan, managed nationalism has faced a revival, with far-right militants supporting the anti-Maidan and Novorossiya. The policy of managed nationalism is closely linked to other Russian government policies of promoting neo-Nazism and other far-right movements in foreign countries.

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πŸ”— The Skip list

πŸ”— Computer science

In computer science, a skip list is a data structure that allows O ( log ⁑ n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(\log n)} search complexity as well as O ( log ⁑ n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(\log n)} insertion complexity within an ordered sequence of n {\displaystyle n} elements. Thus it can get the best features of an array (for searching) while maintaining a linked list-like structure that allows insertion, which is not possible in an array. Fast search is made possible by maintaining a linked hierarchy of subsequences, with each successive subsequence skipping over fewer elements than the previous one (see the picture below on the right). Searching starts in the sparsest subsequence until two consecutive elements have been found, one smaller and one larger than or equal to the element searched for. Via the linked hierarchy, these two elements link to elements of the next sparsest subsequence, where searching is continued until finally we are searching in the full sequence. The elements that are skipped over may be chosen probabilistically or deterministically, with the former being more common.

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πŸ”— US Supreme Court upholds state power to enforce compulsory vaccination (1905)

πŸ”— Law πŸ”— U.S. Supreme Court cases

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that the freedom of the individual must sometimes be subordinated to the common welfare and is subject to the police power of the state.

πŸ”— Dean Scream

πŸ”— United States πŸ”— Politics πŸ”— Politics/American politics

The Howard Dean scream incident, commonly known as the Dean scream speech, was an energetic scream by Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, on January 19, 2004, during a speech he gave at the Val-Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa. That night, the presidential candidate had just lost the Iowa caucus to John Kerry and wanted to reassure his supporters. He listed states he would win to a raucous audience before screaming "BYAH!" Within four days, it was broadcast 633 times on national news networks and cable channels.

Following the scream, Dean lost more primaries and suspended his campaign following his third-place result in Wisconsin. Some commentators have described the speech as a political gaffe that destroyed Dean's campaign; however, Dean and his campaign staff have claimed that he would have lost anyway, due to poor campaign organization. Additionally, Christine Pelosi, Pacific Standard, and historian Robert Thompson have all claimed that Dean's probability of being nominated was already low due to a lack of party insider support, the Iowa loss, and the media's previous painting of Dean as too hot-tempered for the presidency.

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