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🔗 Java 🔗 Project-independent assessment

A Java processor is the implementation of the Java virtual machine (JVM) in hardware. In other words, the Java bytecode that makes up the instruction set of the abstract machine becomes the instruction set of a concrete machine. These were the most popular form of a high-level language computer architecture, and were "an attractive choice for building embedded and real-time systems that are programmed in Java". However, as of 2017, embedded Java is no longer common and no realtime Java chip vendors exist.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography, the dining cryptographers problem studies how to perform a secure multi-party computation of the boolean-OR function. David Chaum first proposed this problem in the early 1980s and used it as an illustrative example to show that it was possible to send anonymous messages with unconditional sender and recipient untraceability. Anonymous communication networks based on this problem are often referred to as DC-nets (where DC stands for "dining cryptographers").

Despite the word dining, the dining cryptographers problem is unrelated to the dining philosophers problem.

🔗 Game theory

The Price of Anarchy (PoA) is a concept in economics and game theory that measures how the efficiency of a system degrades due to selfish behavior of its agents. It is a general notion that can be extended to diverse systems and notions of efficiency. For example, consider the system of transportation of a city and many agents trying to go from some initial location to a destination. Let efficiency in this case mean the average time for an agent to reach the destination. In the 'centralized' solution, a central authority can tell each agent which path to take in order to minimize the average travel time. In the 'decentralized' version, each agent chooses its own path. The Price of Anarchy measures the ratio between average travel time in the two cases.

Usually the system is modeled as a game and the efficiency is some function of the outcomes (e.g. maximum delay in a network, congestion in a transportation system, social welfare in an auction, ...). Different concepts of equilibrium can be used to model the selfish behavior of the agents, among which the most common is the Nash equilibrium. Different flavors of Nash equilibrium lead to variations of the notion of Price of Anarchy as Pure Price of Anarchy (for deterministic equilibria), Mixed Price of Anarchy (for randomized equilibria), and Bayes–Nash Price of Anarchy (for games with incomplete information). Solution concepts other than Nash equilibrium lead to variations such as the Price of Sinking.

The term Price of Anarchy was first used by Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou, but the idea of measuring inefficiency of equilibrium is older. The concept in its current form was designed to be the analogue of the 'approximation ratio' in an approximation algorithm or the 'competitive ratio' in an online algorithm. This is in the context of the current trend of analyzing games using algorithmic lenses (algorithmic game theory).

🔗 Death 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Archaeology

The Hagia Triada Sarcophagus is a late Minoan 137 cm (54 in)-long limestone sarcophagus, dated to about 1400 BC or some decades later, excavated from a chamber tomb at Hagia Triada, Crete in 1903, and now on display in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum ("AMH") in Crete.

Uniquely for such a piece from this date on Crete, it is coated in plaster and painted in fresco on all faces. Otherwise the Minoans (unlike the ancient Egyptians) only used frescoes to decorate palaces and houses for the enjoyment of the living and not in funerary practice. It is the only limestone sarcophagus of its era discovered to date; there are a number of smaller terracotta "ash-chests" (larnax), painted far more crudely, usually in a single colour. It is the only object with a series of narrative scenes of Minoan funerary ritual (later sarcophagi found in the Aegean were decorated with abstract designs and patterns). It was probably originally used for the burial of a prince.

It provides probably the most comprehensive iconography of a pre-Homeric thysiastikis ceremony and one of the best pieces of information on noble burial customs when Crete was under Mycenaean rule, combining features of Minoan and Mycenaean style and subject matter, as well as probable influence from Ancient Egyptian religion.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Australia/Western Australia 🔗 Birds 🔗 Military history/Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific military history 🔗 Australia/Australian history 🔗 Australia/Australian biota 🔗 Australia/Australian politics

The Emu War, also known as the Great Emu War, was a nuisance wildlife management military operation undertaken in Australia over the latter part of 1932 to address public concern over the number of emus said to be running amok in the Campion district of Western Australia. The unsuccessful attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with Lewis guns—leading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident. While a number of the birds were killed, the emu population persisted and continued to cause crop destruction.

🔗 Video games

Painstation is an art object and arcade game based on Pong developed by the artists' group "/////////fur//// art entertainment interfaces", with pain feedback.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Gerald Ford 🔗 Politics 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Chile 🔗 Football 🔗 Football/American and Canadian soccer

Henry Alfred Kissinger (; German: [ˈkɪsɪŋɐ]; born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, May 27, 1923) is an American diplomat, political theorist, geopolitical consultant, and politician who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances.

Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Upon arriving in the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively.

A practitioner of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, pioneering the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrating an opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, engaging in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. Kissinger has also been associated with such controversial policies as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a "green light" to Argentina's military junta for their Dirty War, and U.S. support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War despite a genocide being perpetrated by Pakistan. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm. Kissinger has written over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations.

Kissinger remains a controversial and polarizing figure in U.S. politics, both venerated by some as a highly effective U.S. Secretary of State and condemned by others for allegedly tolerating or supporting war crimes committed by allied nation states during his tenure. A 2015 survey of top international relations scholars, conducted by College of William & Mary, ranked Kissinger as the most effective U.S. secretary of state in the 50 years to 2015. A centenarian, Kissinger is the oldest living former U.S. Cabinet member and the last surviving member of Nixon's Cabinet. The previous oldest cabinet member was George Shultz, who died at the age of 100 in February 2021.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

A helium flash is a very brief thermal runaway nuclear fusion of large quantities of helium into carbon through the triple-alpha process in the core of low mass stars (between 0.8 solar masses (M_☉) and 2.0 M_☉) during their red giant phase. The Sun is predicted to experience a flash 1.2 billion years after it leaves the main sequence. A much rarer runaway helium fusion process can also occur on the surface of accreting white dwarf stars.

Low-mass stars do not produce enough gravitational pressure to initiate normal helium fusion. As the hydrogen in the core is exhausted, some of the helium left behind is instead compacted into degenerate matter, supported against gravitational collapse by quantum mechanical pressure rather than thermal pressure. Subsequent hydrogen shell fusion further increases the mass of the core until it reaches temperature of approximately 100 million kelvin, which is hot enough to initiate helium fusion (or "helium burning") in the core.

However, a fundamental quality of degenerate matter is that increases in temperature do not produce an increase in the pressure of the matter until the thermal pressure becomes so very high that it exceeds degeneracy pressure. In main sequence stars, thermal expansion regulates the core temperature, but in degenerate cores, this does not occur. Helium fusion increases the temperature, which increases the fusion rate, which further increases the temperature in a runaway reaction which quickly spans the entire core. This produces a flash of very intense helium fusion that lasts only a few minutes, but during that time, produces energy at a rate comparable to the entire Milky Way galaxy.

In the case of normal low-mass stars, the vast energy release causes much of the core to come out of degeneracy, allowing it to thermally expand. This consumes most of the total energy released by the helium flash, and any left-over energy is absorbed into the star's upper layers. Thus the helium flash is mostly undetectable by observation, and is described solely by astrophysical models. After the core's expansion and cooling, the star's surface rapidly cools and contracts in as little as 10,000 years until it is roughly 2% of its former radius and luminosity. It is estimated that the electron-degenerate helium core weighs about 40% of the star mass and that 6% of the core is converted into carbon.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software

netcat (often abbreviated to nc) is a computer networking utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP. The command is designed to be a dependable back-end that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool, since it can produce almost any kind of connection its user could need and has a number of built-in capabilities.

Its list of features includes port scanning, transferring files, and port listening, and it can be used as a backdoor.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Bangladesh 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Pakistan

Cable 1971, otherwise known as Priority Signal or File 1971 was a high profile and secret military signal communicated in December 1952 between the two main inter-services branches of Pakistan–the Pakistan Army and the Pakistan Navy. It is notable for the fact that it essentially predicted the separation of Pakistan and Bangladesh and by coincidence its title contained the year in which the separation actually happened, almost 20 years later.

The military cable was directed through the Naval Intelligence and Military Intelligence to ISI sent to its headquarter and came in the wake of reactionary of Basic Principles Committee's first report towards the writing of the first set of the Constitution of Pakistan. The cable was sent by then-Commodore S.M. Ahsan to DG ISI Major-General R. Cawthome on a file coincidentally numbered 1971. The cable discussed the implication of One Unit, religious fanaticism, and the economic parity between the West and East Pakistan that will ultimately result in the division of Pakistan into two different groups.

The Cable's message read as:

• The creation of Committee of Ulema to veto the decisions taken in the House of People on religious matters, gives excess of powers to Ulema over the rights of elected representatives of the people. This gives an impression of Pakistan as being a Theocratic State.
• To recommend that the head of the state should be a Muslim will unnecessarily create suspicions in minds of the minorities in Pakistan. The choice to select the head of the state should be left entirely to the people, to select without prejudice to caste, colour and creed.
• It is maintained by same officers that a single House elected on population basis should have been envisaged, and we should cease to think in terms of Bengalis and Punjabis etc. The parity between West & East Pakistan will ultimately result in the division of Pakistan into two different groups, therefore, it is the very negation of one people, one country and one culture.

The cable's message was further extended and discussed at the Army GHQ by MI's officer Major KM Arif when he compiled an "Intelligence Report No. 7894 of the Office of Intelligence Research and Analysis" in December 1970.

The cable is notable for its highlighted title and many historians found strange that the cable was coincidentally numbered: Cable/File 1971.