Nuclear subs collide in Atlantic

A Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision with a French nuclear sub in the middle of the Atlantic, the MoD has confirmed.

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month.

First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Jonathon Band said the submarines came into contact at low speed and no injuries were reported.

Both the UK and France insisted nuclear security had not been compromised.

BBC defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt said the incident was "incredibly embarrassing" for the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

She said HMS Vanguard, with "very visible dents and scrapes", had to be towed back into its home base at Faslane on the Firth of Clyde.

The submarines are equipped with sonar to detect other vessels nearby but our correspondent said it might the case that the anti-sonar devices, meant to hide the submarines from enemies, were "too effective".

"This is clearly a one-in-a-million chance when you think about how big the Atlantic is," she said.

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Space crash called "catastrophic," lots of debris

The crash of two satellites has generated an estimated tens of thousands of pieces of space junk that could circle Earth and threaten other satellites for the next 10,000 years, space experts said Friday.

One called the collision "a catastrophic event" that he hoped would force the new U.S. administration to address the issue of debris in space.

Russian Mission Control chief Vladimir Solovyov said Tuesday's smashup of a derelict Russian military satellite and a working U.S. Iridium commercial satellite occurred in the busiest part of near-Earth space — some 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth.

"800 kilometers is a very popular orbit which is used by Earth-tracking and communications satellites," Solovyov told reporters Friday. "The clouds of debris pose a serious danger to them."

Solovyov said debris from the collision could stay in orbit for up to 10,000 years and even tiny fragments threaten spacecraft because both travel at such a high orbiting speed.

James Oberg, a NASA veteran who is now space consultant, described the crash over northern Siberia as "catastrophic event." NASA said it was the first-ever high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft — with the Iridium craft weighing 1,235 pounds (560 kilograms) and the Russian craft nearly a ton.

"At physical contact at orbital speeds, a hypersonic shock wave bursts outwards through the structures," Oberg said in e-mailed comments. "It literally shreds the material into confetti and detonates any fuels."

Most fragments are concentrated near the collision course, but Maj.-Gen. Alexander Yakushin, chief of staff of the Russian military's Space Forces, said some debris was thrown into other orbits, ranging from 300 to 800 miles (500-1,300 kilometers) above Earth.

David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security said the collision had possibly generated tens of thousands of particles larger than 1 centimeter (half an inch), any of which could significantly damage or even destroy a satellite.

Wright, in a posting on the group's Web site, said the two large debris clouds from Tuesday's crash will spread over time, forming a shell around Earth. He likened the debris to "a shotgun blast that threatens other satellites in the region."

Meanwhile, there's no global air traffic control system that tracks the position of all satellites.

The U.S. military tracks some 17,000 pieces of space debris larger than 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters), along with some 900 active satellites. But its main job is protecting the international space station and other manned spacecraft, and it lacks the resources to warn all satellite operators of every possible close call.

"With the amount of spacecraft and debris in orbit, the probability of collisions is going up more rapidly," said John Higginbotham, chief executive of Integral Systems Inc., a Lanham, Maryland-based company that runs ground support systems for satellites.

Oberg said the limited accuracy of tracking data and computer calculations makes it impossible to predict collisions, only their probability. He said most satellites also have little fuel to escape what most likely would be a false alarm.

"The collision offers a literally heaven-sent opportunity for the Obama administration to take forceful, visible and long-overdo measures to address a long-ignored issue of 'space debris,'" Oberg said.

In January 2007, China destroyed one of its own defunct satellites with a ballistic missile at an altitude close to that of Tuesday's collision, creating thousands of pieces of debris which threatened other spacecraft.

Both NASA and Russia's Roscosmos agencies said there was little risk to the international space station, which orbits 230 miles (370 kilometers) above Earth, far below the collision point. An unmanned Russian cargo ship docked smoothly Friday at the station, delivering water, food, fuel, oxygen and other supplies as well as a new Russian spacesuit for space walks.

American astronauts Michael Fincke and Sandra Magnus are aboard the station along with Russian Yuri Lonchakov. The crew size will be doubled to six members later this year.

AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson in New York and AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.

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Google Users Get Bogus Warning On Site Searches

Computer users doing Google searches during a nearly one-hour period Saturday morning were greeted with disturbing but erroneous messages that every site turned up in the results might be harmful.

The company blamed the mistake on human error and apologized for any inconvenience caused to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled.

The glitch occurred between 9:30 a.m. EST and 10:25 a.m. EST, Google Inc. said in an explanation on its company blog. Anyone who did a Google search during that time likely saw the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanying every search result, the company said.

Google said it routinely flags any search results with that message if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously, a practice aimed at protecting its users. Google said it maintains a list of suspicious sites based on criteria developed with StopBadware.org, a nonprofit project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities who research consumer complaints.

Saturday's error happened when Google erroneously applied one of its periodic list updates in such a way that the warning would apply to all URLs, the company said in a statement.

The glitch was caught by on-call staff and the file was quickly fixed, Google said. Since the updates are applied in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing at 9:27 a.m. EST and disappeared no later than 10:25 a.m. EST, with the duration for any particular user approximately 40 minutes, it said.

"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again," said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, in the statement.

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Indian govt. comes up with Rs 500($10) laptop

Indian govt. comes up with Rs 500 laptop. When three days from now Indian Minister for Human Resources Development Arjun Singh launches National Mission on Education through Information and Communication in the holy city of Tirupati it will write a new chapter in India’s quest for entering technology age.

National Mission on Education through Information and Communication is probably India’s ruling alliance United Progressive Alliance’s most ambitious plan in its five year tenure. Its decision to make available Rs 500 laptop to students and educational institutions is simply unbelievable.

The government has decided to produce rupees five hundred laptop on mass scale that has been developed by several top technical institutions in the country including Indian Institute of Technology Chennai as Vellore Institute of Technology besides a few other institutions.

As a rebuff to MIT's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, the $10 laptop from National Mission on Education will be introduced. The basic mindset behind the introduction of the low-cost gadget is to extend computer infrastructure and connectivity to over 18,000 colleges in the country.

Apart from questioning the technology of $100 laptops, the main reason for HRD ministry's resistance to MIT's Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC project was the high and the hidden cost that worked out to be $200, report The Economic Times. The ministry has entered into an agreement with four publishers, Macmillan, Tata McGraw Hill, Prentice-Hall and Vikas Publishing to upload their textbooks on 'Sakshat', a government online portal. With an 11th plan outlay of Rs.4,612 crore, the government would give Rs.2.5 lakh per institution for 10 Kbps connection and subsidize 25 percent of costs for private and state government colleges.

Google GDrive : Desktop Killer ?

Rumors as it that mighty Google is planing a service called "GDrive", which could very end the era of Desktop PC.

GDrive service would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection which could mean the end of desktop computers that rely on hard-drives. The service would require users to put their personal files on Google's own server which can be accessed via internet.

According to report published on Guardian,

The long-rumoured GDrive is expected to be launched this year, according to the technology news website TG Daily, which described it as "the most anticipated Google product so far". It is seen as a paradigm shift away from Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs inside most of the world's computers, in favour of "cloud computing", where the processing and storage is done thousands of miles away in remote data centres.

Google refused to confirm the GDrive, but acknowledged the growing demand for cloud computing. Dave Armstrong, head of product and marketing for Google Enterprise, said: "There's a clear direction ... away from people thinking, 'This is my PC, this is my hard drive,' to 'This is how I interact with information, this is how I interact with the web.'"