Agreed, it is hot in Calcutta, or rather it was hot but a couple of KaalBaisakhis ( or NorWester storms) have cooled the air considerably. In fact the school closure looks ridiculous now. Also a cyclone is expected to hit the East Coast in the next two days and finally the Grand Daddy of the South Western Monsoon will arrive on May 20 and all will be well again. But our ClimateNazis will insist that we are being boiled and fried. Not so. Yes it's hot, but hey India was never as cold as Europe or North America. We know how to live with this.

a typically one sided story, narrated from a left-wing perspective, where Facebook is being portrayed as a victim of "Hindu Right Wing" intolerance when there is a large majority of us who feel that Facebook's so called fact checker mechanism is a farce that has been outsourced to left wing illiberals.

Especially in banning cards / words like 'Jihad' that are wildly popular with certain sections of society but without which the world could have been a happier, simpler place

.. in whitewashing the truth and deflect Chinese liability

Like Web 2.0 is this Grid 2.0 ? where you have user-generated content and a network-of-trust?

Yes I have the same doubt. I thought space was COLD

A distributed block-chain database is superior to a centralised SQL or NoSQL database if and only if there is NO centralised authority that is trusted by all participants. A blockchain solution should be attempted only when there is non-heirarchical network of peers who cannot, or will not trust each other. Cryptocurrency -- or equivalents that allow one to store, exchange unit economic value -- are most amenable for a blockchain application. For everything else a good old fashioned RDBMS is cleaner, faster, safer and easier to implement solution.

the number of morons on the planet vastly outnumber the number of non-morons ... that is the tragedy

whether it is because of Slashdotters or ... i dont know

Birds were the first heavier than air bodies to fly in the sky BUT the principles of bird flight were inadequate to make real aeroplanes fly. Modern aeroplane technology is NOT based on the principles of bird flight but that does not make them any less efficient. In fact modern aeroplanes are far bigger, faster, more effective than birds or anything that resembles them. One need not ALWAYS mimic nature to surpass it ... though it could be a starting point.

This whole concept of Agile was dreamt up as a last gasp response to the offshoring of development work to inexpensive developers in India. Nothing more.

An even better solution would be to adopt the "Avatar" route and have robotic avatars explore space under the control of guidance of sentients on Earth. In fact the drone operators hammering the Taliban in Af-Pak are the precursors to this.

God Forbid that NPTEL be the kind of content that is dished out through these tablets! The farmers -- if at all they were the target for this product -- would immediately throw away the tablets in desperation and frustration if they are forced to watch the kind of utterly boring and worthless trash that is dished out through these "IIT lectures". On the other hand, if the product is reliable and stable, then it can be a real force multiplier to the humble mobile phone that has changed the commercial and personal communication landscape of a large yet poor country and introduce a whole new category of users to the information and entertainment that is currently available to a small part of the population.

"Microsoft is participating in the fight against the very criminal element that Microsoft allowed to blossom." Just as the United States is now fighting against the Taliban and the Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan whom it once allowed, encouraged and paid money to, to blossom !