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Comment Re:Maybe the aliens are just as religious (Score 1) 534

Adding more to the complexity that Hinduism already is: In many cases it is difficult to separate religious services from cultural occasions. For example, Hindu festivals such as Diwali and Holi have their origins in religion and in more traditional families they are celebrated with associated religious rituals. But most Hindus celebrate them merely as cultural occasions with Indians from other religions often joining in.

Submission + - Mangalyaan successfully put into Mars orbit

knwny writes: India's Mars satellite Mangalyaan was successfully placed into orbit around Mars early on Wednesday following a 10-month journey from Earth. India thus joins the U.S., the European Space Agency and the former Soviet Union in having successfully completed a Mars mission. It is however the only one to have done so on the first attempt. Headed by the Indian space agency ISRO, Mangalyaan was made in 15 months at a cost of just around 70 million USD crore — the cheapest inter-planetary mission ever to be undertaken.

Submission + - Plans to introduce FTTH in top 20 Indian cities (indiatimes.com)

knwny writes: Sterlite Industries are finalising the 'proof of concept' of a project to provide fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband services to urban households across the top 20 Indian cities. The company claims that the network and services to end consumers would be similar to the Google Fibre project but the major difference lies in its plans to tie up with mobile operators for last-mile connectivity. Sterlite Industries is initially looking to hook up a million homes by 2016 across Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Chennai but the proposed speeds of 20 to 50 Mbps are definitely a long way off from the 1 Gbit/s speeds that Google Fibre provides.

Comment Too many rules.... (Score 1) 116

Why cannot we force all websites and services to comply with a common password complexity rule? There is a wide variation in the rules that phone companies, banks, utilities and various online services enforce when I create passwords. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to decide on a password-generating algorithm to create and remember passwords across these websites/services. So, coming back to the question, can we not have a standard password complexity rule which every website/service has to stick to? Instead of those irritating, little info boxes near the password field listing different passwords rules for different websites, we could have a URL pointing to the standard password rules which in turn would be maintained by an independent organisation. Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/

Comment Re:Never tell me the odds! (Score 1) 53

6. Send commands to fire engine.

What propels the spacecraft(please excuse my ignorance but then I am not a rocketeer) and how do we know that we have enough of the stuff to complete its manoeuvres? Also, what happens if the results of Step#5 do not turn out to be too positive. Do you have any alternate plans of using it for some other purpose...maybe crash-land it into the nearest planet/comet/moon while it keeps transmitting atmospheric measurements?

Submission + - Bitcoin Battleships (cointelegraph.com)

Haweinn writes: Bitcoin has been identified by the US Navy as a force for supreme evil, it has emerged.

A Broad Agency Announcement project for Navy Engineering Logistics Office of the Department of the Navy is currently being bid for by interested parties.

- See more at: http://cointelegraph.com/post/...

Submission + - Google mulling Wi-Fi for cities with Google Fiber (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: Google is considering deploying Wi-Fi networks in towns and cities covered by its Google Fiber high-speed Internet service. The disclosure is made in a document Google is circulating to 34 cities that are the next candidates to receive Google Fiber in 2015. Specific details of the Wi-Fi plan are not included in the document, which was seen by IDG News Service, but Google says it will be "discussing our Wi-Fi plans and related requirements with your city as we move forward with your city during this planning process."

Submission + - Algorithm Distinguishes Memes from Ordinary Information (medium.com)

KentuckyFC writes: Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes: units that transfer ideas or practices from one human to another by means of imitation. In recent years, network scientists have become increasingly interested in how memes spread, work that has led to important insights into the nature of news cycles, into information avalanches on social networks and so on. But what exactly makes a meme and distinguishes it from other forms of information is not well understood. Now a team of researchers has developed a way to automatically distinguish scientific memes from other forms of information for the first time. Their technique exploits the way scientific papers reference older papers on related topics. They scoured the half a million papers published by Physical Review between 1893 and 2010 looking for common words or phrases. They define an interesting meme as one that is more likely to appear in a paper that cites another paper in which the same meme occurs. In other words, interesting memes are more likely to replicate. They end up with a list of words and phrases that have spread by replication and can also see how this spreading has changed over the last 100 years. The top five phrases are: loop quantum cosmology, unparticle, sonoluminescence, MgB2 and stochastic resonance; all of which are important topics in physics. The team say the technique is interesting because it provides a way to distinguish memes from other forms of information that do not spread in the same way through replication.

Submission + - Sina suspends book site after pornography reported (wfsb.com)

Elizaberp writes: BEIJING (AP) — Sina.com temporarily closed its literature site Friday after being accused of hosting pornography, and authorities confirmed they were revoking two crucial licenses, ensnaring one of China's top web portals in an intensifying online crackdown.

Sina decided to take books off its site while it undergoes "a self-correction action" to screen their content, according to a notice on its reading channel. Book reviews, cultural news, author biographies and interviews were still available.

Submission + - The debate ends - Siphons work due to gravity and not atmospheric pressure (theguardian.com)

knwny writes: Peeved by the widespread misconception that siphons work because of atmospheric pressure, physics lecturer Dr. Stephen Hughes, wrote a mail to the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary(OED) pointing out the error. To back his claim, Dr.Hughes tested a siphon inside a hypobaric chamber to check if changes in atmospheric pressure had any effect on the siphon and demonstrated that gravity and not atmospheric pressure was the driving principle. The paper detailing his experiment was published in Nature. The OED spokesperson responded saying that his suggestions would be taken into account during the next rewrite.

Submission + - FTC Approves Tesla's Direct Sales Model

cartechboy writes: We've all read about Tesla and the ongoing battles its having with different dealer associations. Basically, dealer associations aren't too pleased about the Silicon Valley startup's direct sales model. Today the FTC has had made a statement on the matter and it's actually in favor of Tesla's direct sales model. "In this case and others, many state and local regulators have eliminated the direct purchasing option for consumers, by taking steps to protect existing middlemen from new competition. We believe this is bad policy for a number of reasons," wrote Andy Gavil, Debbie Feinstein, and Marty Gaynor in the FTC's "Who decides how consumers should shop?" posting to the Competition Matters blog. The FTC appears to take issue not with those laws, but with how they're being used, and with the direct-sales bans being passed in several states. Now the only real question is how long will it be before Tesla prevails in all states?

Submission + - Heartbleed Sparks 'Responsible' Disclosure Debate

bennyboy64 writes: IT security industry experts are beginning to turn on Google and OpenSSL, questioning whether the Heartbleed bug was disclosed "responsibly". A number of selective leaks to Facebook, Akamai and CloudFlare occurred prior to disclosure on April 7. A separate, informal pre-notification program run by Red Hat on behalf OpenSSL to Linux and Unix operating system distributions also occurred. But router manufactures and VPN appliance makers Cisco and Juniper had no heads up. Nor did large web entities such as Amazon Web Services, Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr and GoDaddy, just to name a few. The Sydney Morning Herald has spoken to many people who think Google should've told OpenSSL as soon as it uncovered the critical OpenSSL bug in March, and not as late as it did on April 1. The National Cyber Security Centre Finland (NCSC-FI), which reported the bug to OpenSSL after Google, on April 7, which spurred the rushed public disclosure by OpenSSL, also thinks it was handled incorrectly. Jussi Eronen, of NCSC-FI, said Heartbleed should have continued to remain a secret and be shared only in security circles when OpenSSL received a second bug report from the Finnish cyber security centre that it was passing on from security testing firm Codenomicon. "This would have minimised the exposure to the vulnerability for end users," Mr Eronen said, adding that "many websites would already have patched" by the time it was made public if this procedure was followed.

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