Linux has this, but it's a bit of a pain to actually use it, as I've discovered trying to set up a home Ubuntu network. Macs have all these nice GUIs for setting up network services (printer sharing, SFTP, etc.) that also activate Bonjour for the service with some sane defaults just by marking a checkbox. Linux boxes, by default, contain Avahi, a few applications that use it (such as Empathy/Pidgin, which use it for local messaging, and the Remote Desktop Viewer, which is very polished in its Avahi integration), but that's about it. If you want to, say, set up a (non-Samba) fileshare and have it advertised over Avahi/Bonjour, you've got some quality time with config files ahead of you. Sharing a printer is a bit easier (at least it's GUIable!) but it's still a pain (one dialog box to set up "print server settings" so that shared printers are advertised, and another to actually say to share a printer).

Citation needed (for these supposed coup attempts). Only one I recall is the '91 one, and one case (a rather uncharacteristic one, seeing as it was the death knell of the Soviet state) doesn't give someone license to go ranting about "every time a coup was attempted in the USSR..."

The Chinese government is sensitive about Avatar not because of its Western resonances, but because of specific plot points that are important in the Chinese context: mainly, the idea of natives driven off the land by arbitrary fiat in favor of corporate development. It's a common practice in China these days, and probably one of the biggest issues that causes open dissent in China (actual people-on-the-street protests and legal campaigns against government decisions, not just publishing stuff the Party doesn't like)

And now on to wild speculation: my guess is, they pulled it from 2D and not 3D because the kind of people who have actually lost their land to government-backed development schemes are poor peasants (or newly-minted migrant workers) who aren't going to spend the extra money on fancy 3D movies. To the urban middle class that'll pay extra for the 3D experience, this movie's plot is just as meaningless as it is to an American or European.

RTFA. They're not continuing their lawsuit by still insisting that the tower radiation causes their health problems. Instead they're talking about how it obstructs their view, violates the zoning laws that preserve the picturesque image of their town, and in general lowers their property values. Turns out there are interests with money behind the hypochondriacs.

Singapore: 5 million people, an army, a decent-sized player in regional organizations, an economy based on actual production and trade. Monaco: 30,000 or so people, an economy based on being a tax haven for the French, and no army (because the entire country is so small that, about a hundred years ago, they realized the entire country was within artillery range of the outside). Bit of a difference, no?

What genocide of Palestinians? Four decades of occupation and the Palestinian population has grown by several times. Economic strangulation, the lack of independence, low-level war - yes, this all happens, but genocide is a wildly inappropriate description of what's going on in the Occupied Territories.

I don't think TFA is talking about a desktop workload - it's referring to data centers, where databases and such are precisely the kind of task that needs doing.

The thing is, this has to survive source code inspection - when your employer inspects this program you wrote for them, you have to be able to pass off this maliciousness as an innocent mistake. That's the real fun; invent a subtle bug that most people wouldn't catch!

Good news, then - I've seen tablets in the construction/architecture business at work sites, and they seem pretty rugged to me...

But does it need as much power in vacuum? All of the sensors will be useless during the journey, and the communications system probably won't be sending back all that much to Earth. I'd guess that in vacuum, the engine will be purely devoted to propulsion.

Have you ever been in a boat? If the wind only blows one way, you tack against it (if you want to go close to directly opposite wind direction - slow but it does work) or just set your sails right to get propelled whichever way you want to go roughly perpendicular to wind direction. Or you can always run with the wind if you'd actually like to go wherever the wind blows. Really, sailing on the seas of Titan with a constant wind direction would be damned easy. If there are storms, on the other hand... but (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) I don't think we've seen any big ones in our studies of the atmosphere.

I think they're also required to include a notice that the code is GPLed (so that a distributor can't just mislead people into thinking they can't request the source).

Provides another method for verification of a card's authenticity - you can pass the card through a reader, verify that (a) such a person actually exists, (b) that their information (picture, biometric info) is the same as that on the card, so then when (c) you check that the information on the card matches the appearance and biometric info of the actual person, you can be more sure that it's actually correct. For terrorism problems, this means that a terrorist can't just pay $50 for a fake Israeli ID card (they're notoriously easy to forge) and get through security checkpoints as an Israeli citizen.

Well, there's been a mandatory national ID in Israel for at least several decades now, as in countries like Belgium, Estonia, Germany, etc. (It's actually more common than countries like the US that don't require people to have a national ID card)

Except that the Israeli state explicitly defines itself as the state of the Jewish ethnic nation.