Jawaan!

Mexico has joined China in banning hip US content, showing yet again how censorship standards work in countries outside the USA. Mexico has become the latest nation to pull a “South Park” episode from its airwaves, The Associated Press reported.  The episode, called “Pinewood Derby,” in which a traditional racing competition accidentally leads to the discovery of extraterrestrial life, caricatures numerous world leaders, including the British prime minister Gordon Brown, the Chinese president Hu Jintao, and Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico.  MTV, which was scheduled to broadcast the episode in Mexico on Monday, said it pulled the show not because it caricatures Mr

Home Computers Around the World Unite to Map the Milky Way Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer scientists and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world’s second fastest supercomputer.The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life

China Imitates YouTube In this photo taken on Monday, Jan.

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The new Herschel Space Observatory has scored a major new milestone in its mission to discover how early galaxies formed and evolved to give rise to present-day galaxies like our own, he said.

The awesomeness of our species is exemplified in our attitudes to artificial intelligence:  we really want to build something beyond ourselves, despite how it would create an awareness utterly alien to our own, and even those who campaign against evil AIs for fear of planet-scouring SKYNETs don’t doubt for a second that some mad programmer  will build one.  There’s no better compliment for a tool-using species. Some say that we’ve already invented artificial life, with computer viruses spreading throughout their environments to replicate themselves, but there are a couple of problems with that.  The first is the broken analogy: computer viruses may act like their biological counterparts, but even those aren’t agreed on as alive – many say that they’re inert proteins which just happen to activate in the right situations.  More automatic than animate.  The second problem is bigger though: if electronic virii are alive, they’re ultimate proof that Intelligent Design doesn’t work.  Because that’s literally what they are and they can’t tolerate even the tiniest change in environmental conditions.  The infectious agents are designed to take advantage of ridiculously specific ‘environmental’ factors – tiny vulnerabilities in specific programs  – and in terms of survival they make giant pandas look like rats.  The instant anything changes – specifically, a program or antivirus update – the entire genus is exterminated.  Then their intelligent designer fires up his machine code editor and has to go back to work. It’s been argued that viruses could adapt due to copying errors, like life, but there’s never been a single example of that.  The millions of operations per second could be equivalent to the millions of years our evolution takes, but it’s only a proof that life won’t prosper in a ridiculously restrictive environment.  Living between the cracks of coded institutions doesn’t allow experimentation or competition – step off the single safe track for a second and you’re exterminated, so there actually is evolution: a massively powerful evolutionary pressure to stay exactly as you are.  Which is no kind of evolution at all

African desert rift confirmed as new ocean in the making In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial. Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea

macon.com: FORSYTH — Mary Persons High School is too small to hire someone to teach Chinese to the lone senior who wanted to take the course this year.

‘Impossible’ Device Could Propel Flying Cars, Stealth Missiles The Emdrive is an ‘impossible’ electromagnetic drive that generates thrust from a closed system. To critics, it’s flat-out junk science, not even worth  thinking about. But its inventor, Roger Shawyer, has doggedly continued his work, and, as Danger Room reported last year, Chinese scientists claimed to have validated his math and were building their own version