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Comment Re:why do we need a walled garden? (Score 1) 32

You're misinformed. Facebook isn't picking up the tab, operators are.

It's not a charity, it's a marketing expense - operators calculate that they will make money overall when more people upgrade to full internet plans. Any site entering the walled garden must be approved by both Facebook *and* the operator in question. Also, it isn't really free, just bundled with certain voice plans that users must pay for - operators also benefit because it might get people switch to them from their competitors. [All this is from the linked article.]

People think the alternative to Internet.org is no bundled internet. That isn't necessarily true - 1Mb of an internet.org site costs operators exactly the same to carry as 1Mb of some other website, and they have demonstrated that there is some number of Mbs/user/month that is *profitable* for them to offer for free to sell more data plans. Whatever this number is, they can offer a free internet plan with this as a data cap if India gets a net neutrality law.

Note that internet.org app + service would still exist and likely be very popular in this scenario, as it helps users conserve data. The only thing it does *not* prevent is Google bundling its own data compression proxy in Android and competing with internet.org.

Operators aren't doing this right now because they lose the marketing that comes with having the internet.org logo. Facebook has never said why an open internet plan with data caps is incompatible with internet.org, other than a hand-wavy "poor people don't understand data caps because they don't know what megabytes are".

For the record, anyone who has a prepaid phone connection in, say, India understands how to navigate the bewildering complexity of phone plans (pay Rs. 30 to decrease the cost of calls by 50% between 10pm and 6am for 30 days). As long as users can check how many MBs they have left, they will be fine.

I suspect that the real reason facebook opposes this is because it is Facebook's attempt to offset Google's power as gatekeeper on the device (via Android) by becoming the gatekeeper at the network. This requires that net neutrality be subverted.

Submission + - India's net neutrality campaign picks up steam, sites withdraw from internet.org 2

Submitted by arvin
arvin writes: The Huffington Post reports on prominent Indian websites withdrawing from Facebook's internet.org initiative.

The net neutrality debate in the country has focused on zero-rating, where ISPs offer a free data plan which provides access to a set of websites that pay to be included. Internet.org provides free access to Facebook, Bing, Wikipedia and a few other websites. Another similar service, Airtel Zero, lost its flagship partner as e-commerce company Flipkart withdrew following a social media backlash.

Net neutrality activists believe that as these plans proliferate, access to the open internet will become extremely expensive or unavailable, innovation will slow as for startups are prevented from reaching the market, and the competitive consumer ISP market will be replaced with a cartel negotiating against internet companies.

In a campaign similar to that in the US, over 630,000 Indians sent responses to their regulator through the website savetheinternet.in.

Submission + - A Look At Orion's Launch Abort System (planetary.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the construction of Orion, NASA's new manned spacecraft, comes the creation of a new Launch Abort System — the part of the vehicle that will get future astronauts back to Earth safely if there's a problem at launch. The Planetary Society's Jason Davis describes it: "When Orion reaches the apex of its abort flight, it is allowed to make its 180-degree flip. The capsule of astronauts, who have already realized they will not go to space today, experience a brief moment of weightlessness before the capsule starts falling back to Earth, heat shield down. The jettison motor fires, pulling the LAS away from Orion. ... Orion, meanwhile, sheds its Forward Bay Cover, a ring at the top of the capsule protecting the parachutes. Two drogue chutes deploy, stabilizing the wobbling capsule. The drogues pull out Orion's three main chutes, no doubt eliciting a sigh of relief from the spacecraft's occupants."

Comment Re:Something new? (Score 5, Informative) 48

by arvin (#46365825) Attached to: Indian Space Agency Prototypes Its First Crew Capsule

It looks like it will reenter nose-first. ISRO did a capsule re-entry and recovery test a few years ago with that configuration, the SRE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Apollo-like base-first reentry causes less heating, but it's aerodynamically stable only if the capsule has a short, wide cone and low center of gravity; Nose-first reentry is more forgiving and stable with narrow, tall cones. To have sufficient space in an Apollo-like capsule, the base has to be wide, which requires a launch vehicle that can accomodate that width; ISRO's rockets are too narrow.

Source: I was an intern at ISRO during SRE preparations and I spoke with aerodynamics people on that project.
Security

Submission + - Game Theory, Antivirus Improvements Explain Rise In Mac Malware (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: Four years ago, security researcher Adam J. O'Donnell used game theory to predict in a paper for IEEE Security and Privacy when malware authors would start targeting Macs. Based on some rough assumptions and a little algebra, he found that it would only become profitable to target Apple's population of users when they reached 16% market share.

So why are we now seeing mass attacks on Macs like the Flashback trojan when Apple only has 11% market share? O'Donnell says It turns out he may have underestimated the effectiveness of the antivirus used by most Windows users, which now makes overconfident Mac users a relatively vulnerable and much more appealing target. Based on current antivirus detection rates, O'Donnell's equations now show that victimizing Macs becomes a profitable alternative to PCs at just 6.5% market share.
Politics

Submission + - US Small-scale Nuclear Reactor Industry Gains Traction in Missouri (stltoday.com)

Submitted by trichard
trichard writes: From this article on STLtoday.com:

"Ameren Missouri is vying to be the first utility in the country to seek a construction and operating license for a small-scale nuclear reactor, a technology that’s appealing to utilities because of the smaller upfront costs and shorter development lead times.

The small reactors, about a fourth or less the capacity of full-size nuclear units, are appealing to the nuclear industry because they could be manufactured at a central plant and shipped around the world. By contrast, building nuclear reactors today is a more cumbersome process that must be done largely on site and takes years."
IBM

Submission + - IBM creates "breathing" high-density lithium-air battery (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "As part of its Battery 500 project — an initiative started by IBM in 2009 to produce a battery capable of powering a car for 500 miles — Big Blue has successfully demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery. In IBM's lithium-air battery, oxygen is reacted with lithium to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy (pictured above). When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released — in the words of IBM, this is an "air-breathing" battery. While conventional batteries are completely self-contained, the oxygen used in an lithium-air battery obviously comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter. The main thing, though, is that lithium-air energy density is a lot higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries: The max energy density of lithium-air batteries is theorized to be around 12 kWh/kg, some 15 times greater than li-ion — and more importantly, comparable to gasoline."

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