Wasn't this the program which caused Lockheed Martin to shut down comsat labs?

God, I hope your message goes through to Mozilla. I am seriously contemplating stopping using firefox altogether on my work comp. It eats 345MB of page memory and completely destroys everything else.

This is why I am increasingly of the opinion that capitalism is dead. The employee (CEO) gambles with his employer's money and walks away with a nice parachute when he is done. The capitalists (share holders) are left to pick up the pieces. They cannot effectively punish the CEO (the board was packed with his cronies anyway, all CEOs somewhere or the other) and he will jump into the CEO's seat in some other company and proceed to ruin that one.

Free speech would be an issue if he had restricted himself to making his own web-page about the subject. But when he went and posted offensive comments on somebody else's tribute page, he crossed the line and became a nuisance.

Multivariable calculus, differential operators, manifolds, tensors and Stoke's theorem

Buy the book by Spivak or Munkres' "Analysis on Manifolds". Multi-variate calculus is a beautiful subject, regardless of whether you want to learn relativity or not. Once you are done with that, you need a higher level book on differential geometry.

Actually, at the old TV spectrum, your signal would bounce nicely of the sky and you could get natural multihop transmission. That is one of the advantages of using OFDMA for the air link, because it is resilient to path variations.

This was an idea conceived in the 1990s, called Skystation, I think - balloons, solar powered, stationed at 80000 ft. It is incredibly hard to maintain the altitude of these HAPS (High Altitude Platforms) and the continuous movements lead to a very complex link management problem. Didn't work then. The new standard 802.22 uses OFDMA which is more resilient to tiny variations in path distance (path from the ground to the blimp), but I think it will still be a complex challenge

I have had two citibank accounts (CC and banking) since 2008, and at least the citibank site that I access is fully https and jsp based. The only thing in the URL is https://citibank.co.in/infolaunch/launch.jsp. So, either the US citibank site is completely different or the real story is worse.

Here is some anecdotal experience. My son goes to this school mentioned in the article. And it is a good school, with some seriously good teachers, from my personal experience. This school and many other schools have been taking in "economically weaker sections" or EWS kids from some time now, but not more than some 5 to 10%. Also, different schools had different models for inclusion. The Delhi Public School, I believe holds special evening classes for these kids, whereas other schools like to integrate them into the main class.

The specific experiment described in this article actually took effect in this school year and has raised the proportion of these kids in the class to 25%. Of course, I am not privy to whatever internal issues the teachers/kids have been having, but its early days still. The no-testing admission has been the law in Delhi for some time now, but now has become law across the nation (I hear that private school admission in Bombay is even more difficult than Delhi). Most of the schools are incensed at having their own policies superseded arbitrarily by the law; hence the resistance. However, I am fairly certain that they will adjust to this and do a good job, once the initial issues are ironed out.

From my own personal experience there are two issues to deal with. First is the rich poor divide. Compared to many of the parents in this school, I am decidedly on the poorer side; these are the parents who own farm-houses in Delhi (about USD 10 million apiece) and send their 5 year olds to the south of France for summer vacation. My family got to go to the hills near Shimla, overnight journey by train. The first time I took my son to one of his friend's birthdays my jaw fell open. As a middle class parent with a middle class upbringing, I am having the same conversation about rich-poor divides with my son when I plan his next birthday party. I simply cannot afford to match his friends birthdays and, even if I could, have no intention of doing it. In my opinion, this is an important purpose of school; my child needs to learn the importance of money but not to make the mistake of conflating it with self-worth; he needs to learn to get along with all people, both richer and poorer than him.

In short, by having EWS students in the school, they are not creating a new problem; however, of course the EWS parents and children feel it more keenly and probably need counseling on how to deal with it.

The second issue is the eagerness for an education and the ability to follow that through. IMHO this is the most serious problem: most of the other kids in school have parents who are genuinely motivated that their children get an education and have the ability to help their children, either directly or by hiring tutors. This is the place where the EWS parents suffer the most and they need the most help. In many cases, they simply need reassurance; it is often the case where the kid is lagging behind a little in something or the other, but within the overall is well within the group limits; given time he or she will catch up. However, the parent panics when they hear about it from the teacher and start that "all work no play" nonsense alluded to in the article. Which actually increases the pressure on the child and makes things worse. I think this is where we parents can actually help, by forming support groups and reaching out to the EWS parents. However, this is the kind of thing which can't be legislated and takes time. The schools can probably also reach out to the parents (the Shri Ram school has a parent teacher association, but I am not aware if they are directly dealing with the issue) for help. Once again, all of this will take time.

Speaking from the Indian perspective. Nokia is busy losing the cheap handset market, initially to Samsung and recently to local manufacturers (Micromax, Lava, Videocon, etc.). Any one of these have offerings at about half the price of the equivalent Nokia phone. In the smart phone business, they are being wiped out both at the low end (Samsung, HTC) and the high end (Samsung, Apple, HTC Android). My wife recently bought a low-end smartphone and I advised her against Nokia; she ended up buying a HTC Wildfire, over the Sony Ericsson Experia. Nokia is busy losing their shirt all over the world.

There was an IEEE spectrum article a few weeks back, proposing a continuous transmission system. Here it is: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-box

I know. And all those cell phone towers my mean neighbour is putting up on his roof.