Sure, they did, in the 1970s currencies were measured against the Gold Standard. Not anymore.

At one time, bank notes in used to actually have a silver strip, and were "exchangeable in gold" from the reserve banks. Coins actually contained silver equivalent to their value. Now it's all just 'legal tender'. The Indian Rupee note, says 'I promise to pay the bearer the sum of X rupees". Notice, value is ascribed by legal declaration, not by weight in gold.

In this case, the warning in the letter is a follow-up forward of a warning issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Since the RBI is the currency managing bank for the India, and the bank of the Govt. of India, has legitimacy and privileges awarded by the Constitution of India etc. it might be quite all right to take it as the official stand of the Indian financial authorities.

All programs can be written to work without using the concept of a registry.

...if they can be forced to turn over encryption keys at the whim of some NSA/government authourity?

The problem is that many open-source projects simply will not listen to their minority users, presumably because they have no obligation to do so. Handy examples are the "Use margins to track changes" in Libreoffice. The developers admit that the feature is trivial, but will not implement it even as optional.

Or the recent ridiculous address bar font in Chrome - again obviously trivial but a 'wontfix'.

Now here is the thing, people have specialization and contribute in different ways to open-source. OSS developers need to recognize that very often it is a small specific set of features that prevent users from migrating entirely to their software and this hurts OSS in wide-ranging ways.

The prevalent attitude seems to be 'The code is there for you to modify. Do it yourself.' For the average user, that could mean developing proficiency in some programming language, familiarity with that software's architecture before they even begin to understand how to get what they want.

Here's a shocker : People have different expertise, and knowing C pointers is not the only thing the human race needs. OSS developers needs to recognize the oppurtunity of having a much wider impact by , say, helping that biologist do his convoluted statistical analysis more efficiently in Libreoffice Calc so that he can confirm that the drug his chemist friend made will actually help cancer patients. Ok, that's a long shot - but you get the picture.

A contract can impose that any new code or modifications must be submitted under a license different from the original open-source code. A bribe does not give any rights to anyone.

If anything, bribes revoke rights, in spirit of the open-source ethos.

user of Android 4+ can already get Quickoffice for free through the play store. What's your point?

Firstly, this is not a US-specific problem. Elsevier for example, is Dutch, while the Nature publishing group is UK-based.

Secondly, the problem is not inability to publish in non-paywalled sources like hosting your own website. The problem is that in order to obtain significant recognition of your work even in a narrow field, the journal makes a huge difference. This is why journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell have impact factors in the mid-30s.

Despite the discussion here , every academic knows these journals are not charging for their editorial service or hosting service. They are charging for the brand. In the same way that the $10 sneakers in Vietnam cost $70 when the Nike tick-mark appears on them. The brand has been built because significant discoveries in the past have been published in these journals, making it a self-perpetuating cycle.

The only way the cycle breaks is if all public-funded research is made mandatorily open-access by legislation, or if the scientific community as a whole boycotts paywalled journals. Guess which one will be easier to manifest?

Don't worry too much about what they are saying. They did a formal study of the obvious. The TL:DR is :

If a transmitting node has finite range and finite time of operation, depending on the size of the network, there will always be nodes that never receive the message because 1. they are out of range 2. They is one other node that can transmit information to them , and it died before it could transmit.

I get it. You spent years of hard work and diligence to adapt and meet a standard set by US Government/Corporations that allowed you to stay in the US. But that is not what the parent poster is talking about.

He is asking "Who gave the US Government/Corporations the right to set that particular standard that you had to meet?".

No one. They just happened to be on a certain piece of the earth's geography before you did. In an ideal 'free-world' you wouldn't have had to 'earn' their approval to move there. You would just need to have the resources to get yourself physically there. That is the bigger picture.

No AC , 'Undocumented' means status cannot be determined. For example, family moved here illegaly but baby is born within US borders in a shack without a birth certificate. The baby is then 'undocumented'.

Naturalised US citizen who lost passport, then became homeless and ended up the other side of the country with amnesia = Undocumented.

There is a difference. Unless, any immigration is proved in court to be illegal, it is undocumented. Innocent until proven guilty, remember?

Yeah, because the knowledge the doctor is using to diagnose your brain tumour by eye is completely determinstic, right? Because that how human brains work huh...

This is what Feynman said

""It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today , it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypotheses that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities".

. There is a subtle difference.

Yeah, who the hell are these authors anyway? Engineers?

There is always information around (new-fangled sense). In fact, Any dissimilarity in the universe of any kind is information. Presumably, the ability to recognise such dissimilarities is required for any information retrieval, and in the end humans must detect it if we are to talk about if it is computation or not.

The point they are making is that one must understand a systems physical laws governing events for it to be a computation. Wrong. What they say actually applies to the fact that we must understand physical laws to use a sequence of physical events as a computer. In fact, the computers we use are simply devices where we can set up physical conditions in such a way that they reflect our problem (encode) and then let the physics solve it. That ability to set up physical events in particular ways makes encoding easier. But it is NOT a requirement. You could develop an encoding scheme that allows you to put in your problem in terms of whatever states a system has. That is exactly the principle behind DNA computing. The physical events of DNA polymerization and annealing of complementary strands are computing all the time. If the information makes any sense to you then, you have not magically invented computation, you just discovered a way to use a physical system as a computer for your pet problem.

All computation needs is that some physical events happen in a predictable manner (whether you understand why or not). I am doing the computation all the time, but nobody knows why positive charges and negative charges attract. It's not important to use electrons as a computer as long as I am sure they do. The same thing applies to their slime mould example. It solves a maze. It's. I don't know how it does it...but it predictably does. And that's a computation.