Incredible Google V/S North Korea (A story about google maps)

● North Korea is so paranoid about its citizen accessing the Internet that merely owning a computer requires permission from local government authorities.

● All personal computers are registered with the Police .

● Private Ownership of fax  machines is banned outright and sending even asingle fax requires high-level authorization .

● Pirated DVD's of South-Korean Dramas are so illegal that North Koreans caught red-handed can be sentenced upto 10 years in labour camps.

Therefore, It's quite easy to estimate the number of beltings one would get for breaking an Internet law in North Korea.

Still, North Korea does have Internet -

● There is a group of privileged elites in North Korea who can access the real Internet, which is forbidden to everyone else.

● North Korea's circle of internet users is so small that country has only 1024 IP addresses for 25 million people (US has billions of IP addresses for 316 million people)  

Now, Coming to your actual question.
Here's how Google did it !


The goal of Google Maps is to provide people with the most comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-use modern map of the world.
But For a long time, North Korea was  robbed of this privilige owing to lack of data and low internet penetration.
But Google is Google.They're uber cool and had to get this done at any cost -

● A Community of citizen, Cartographers spent years using Google Map Maker to contribute to the draft.

● It commonly takes Map Maker Community a few years to generate enough high quality data to make something that works in Google Maps.

● It was only after proper collection of high quality data like - Name of Streets, Points of Interest ,Monuments, Nuclear Complexes, Prison Camps etc that the Map went live in the month of January, 2013.

This way, Google is giving the world a never-before-seen, detailed view of one of the most secretive countries in the world.
Let us all thank Google for being Super Cool because Cool nowadays is  too mainstream .

How to avoid "assignment instead of comparison "

Almost every beginning C programmer independently rediscovers

the mistake of writing:

if (i=3)

instead of:

if (i==3)

Once experienced, this painful error (doing an assignment where comparison was intended) is rarely

repeated. Some programmers have developed the habit of writing the literal first, like this:

 if (3==i)

Then, if an equal sign is accidentally left out, the compiler will complain about an

"attempted assignment to literal." This won't protect you when comparing two variables, but every

little bit helps.

The 0's (zeros) story

It might seem like an obvious piece of any numerical system, but the zero is a surprisingly recent development in human history. In fact, this ubiquitous symbol for “nothing” didn’t even find its way to Europe until as late as the 12th century. Zero’s origins most likely date back to the “fertile crescent” of ancient Mesopotamia. Sumerian scribes used spaces to denote absences in number columns as early as 4,000 years ago, but the first recorded use of a zero-like symbol dates to sometime around the third century B.C. in ancient Babylon. The Babylonians employed a number system based around values of 60, and they developed a specific sign—two small wedges—to differentiate between magnitudes in the same way that modern decimal-based systems use zeros to distinguish between tenths, hundreds and thousandths. A similar type of symbol cropped up independently in the Americas sometime around 350 A.D., when the Mayans began using a zero marker in their calendars.

These early counting systems only saw the zero as a placeholder—not a number with its own unique value or properties. A full grasp of zero’s importance would not arrive until the seventh century A.D. in India. There, the mathematician Brahmagupta and others used small dots under numbers to show a zero placeholder, but they also viewed the zero as having a null value, called “sunya.” Brahmagupta was also the first to show that subtracting a number from itself results in zero. From India, the zero made its way to China and back to the Middle East, where it was taken up by the mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi around 773. It was al-Khowarizmi who first synthesized Indian arithmetic and showed how the zero could function in algebraic equations, and by the ninth century the zero had entered the Arabic numeral system in a form resembling the oval shape we use today.

The zero continued to migrate for another few centuries before finally reaching Europe sometime around the 1100s. Thinkers like the Italian mathematician Fibonacci helped introduce zero to the mainstream, and it later figured prominently in the work of Rene Descartes along with Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz’s invention of calculus. Since then, the concept of “nothing” has continued to play a role in the development of everything from physics and economics to engineerin