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This is one of the best websites to watch Bollywood movies. It contains hundreds of movies, including old movies (Tere Ghar Ke Saamne, Sholay, Aradhana), not so old movies (Khoobsurat, Chhoti Si baat) and new releases such as Drona, Hello, Kidnap).
The viewing of movie is also a pleasant experience. There is no membership or login needed. There is distraction of any online ads, flash media or spyware. The movie is arranged in 20 minute clips. You can sort movies by name, date or view. There are also regional films and filmi songs available to view.
It is surpising about how it manages to post so many movie, some of which are yet to be released. Its website says in disclaimer section: FilmiCity.in is absolutely legal and contain only links to other sites on the Internet: We do not host or upload any video, films, media files. If you have any legal issues please contact appropriate media file owners/hosters.
There is another website: http://vidgrounds.tv/
It is similar to filmicity, but it may require installing K-lite Codec pack for better viewing. It has some online ads and requires to login. It also shows moview trailers and some gossip news about Bollywood.
There is another site called TV Grounds http://www.tvgrounds.com/ . It used to show free TV programs. Now it displays “Site is down for maintenance.”
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/09/26/rocket.man.english.channel.ap/index.html
Yves Rossy makes a safe landing after successfully crossing the English Channel.
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/PM_flags_off_first_train_in_Kashmir/articleshow/3583551.cms
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurates first ever train service in the Kashmir Valley. (Reuters Photo)
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General Motors' starts, stops and occasional short circuits on the road to the Chevy Volt.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/autos/0809/gallery.gm_electric_cars/index.html
A product of the Olds Motor Co., this electric car was produced before Olds joined Buick in 1908, which was the start of General Motors.
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http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=336718&chkFlg
ISRO plans manned mission to moon in 2014
Bibhu Ranjan Mishra /
Plans to use GSLV instead of PSLV for the project.
Even as it gets set for its first unmanned mission to the moon on October 22, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) is busy making preparations for a manned mission to the moon in 2014. The proposed budget for the manned mission is around Rs 1,000 crore.
Isro is planning to use Geo-Synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) for the manned mission as Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) is not capable of launching a load of over 1,500 kg. Even as the proposal is pending clearance, Isro is in the process of identifying the team for the mission. “Our chairman is very keen on the project getting approval. He has asked us to come out with complete proposals internally,” said MC Dathan, director, Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC),
On the proposal, he said a commission had done a preliminary study and the report had been submitted for approval of the Space Commission. “The commission has cleared the proposal and it has been submitted to the government. A high-powered committee is studying the report. It is expected to be cleared in about two months,” he added.
On training the crew, Dathan said, “The Indian Air Force has the capability. But we plan to develop a full-fledged training facility in
Isro, which has two launch pads, is planning to build another for the manned mission. It will have facilities for entry into the human lunar space capsule and an escape chute for the crew if anything goes wrong.
Dathan said Isro had the technical knowhow for the launch pad. “We will have the help of Indian industry. Since the capabilities of Indian industry have reached a high-enough level, it will only need some hand-holding if we provide them the preliminary design. The project can be completed without outside help,” he said. The first launch pad is 25 years old and the second one was put into service in 2005. The launch pad for the manned mission will take three-four years to be built and the two main things it will have are the escape chute whenever there is a problem and another escape from the capsule. The launch pad will, hence, require extra facilities.
Meanwhile, the launch time for Chandrayaan-I, the unmanned mission, has been finalised. The vehicle is expected to be launched between
The four-stage launch vehicle, which uses both solid and liquid propellant, has been fully integrated and the integration of the satellite with the launch vehicle will start soon, according to Isro officials. It will take 16 hours for the lunar spacecraft to enter the moon’s orbit.
A launch authorisation board, chaired by Dathan, is at the helm of affairs of the launch. The board, in turn, reports to Isro Chairman G Madhavan Nair. Interestingly, Isro has not insured the mission. “Generally we don’t insure indigenous missions. Normally, we insure communication satellites which involve so many other people with commercial interests,” said Prasad.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7640183.stm
Huge new prime number discovered
Mathematicians in
Prime numbers can be divided only by themselves and one.
The prize was set up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to promote co-operative computing on the Internet.
The team from the
This enabled them to perform the enormous number of calculations needed to find and verify a new prime.
Thousands of people around the world linked the powers of their personal computers in the search for a higher "Mersenne" prime number - named after 17th Century French mathematician Marin Mersenne.
Mersenne primes are expressed as two to the power of P, minus one - with P being itself a prime number.
Edson Smith, the leader of the winning UCLA team, told the Associated Press news agency: "We're delighted. Now we're looking for the next one, despite the odds."
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4799369.ece
From The Times
An artist's impression of the platform of the proposed space elevator, which would climb 22,000 miles into space
Leo Lewis in
From cyborg housemaids and waterpowered cars to dog translators and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality.
Now the finest scientific minds of
For chemists, physicists, material scientists, astronauts and dreamers across the globe, the space elevator represents the most tantalising of concepts: cables stronger and lighter than any fibre yet woven, tethered to the ground and disappearing beyond the atmosphere to a satellite docking station in geosynchronous orbit above Earth.
Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables — or flat ribbons — will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.
“Just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space,” Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, said.
The vision has inspired scientists around the world and government organisations including Nasa. Several competing space elevator projects are gathering pace as various groups vie to build practical carriages, tethers and the hundreds of other parts required to carry out the plan. There are prizes offered by space elevator-related scientific organisations for breakthroughs and competitions for the best and fastest design of carriage.
First envisioned by the celebrated master of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1979 work The Fountains of Paradise, the concept has all the best qualities of great science fiction: it is bold, it is a leap of imagination and it would change life as we know it.
Unlike the warp drives in Star Trek, or H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, the idea of the space elevator does not mess with the laws of science; it just presents a series of very, very complex engineering problems.
The biggest obstacle lies in the cables. To extend the elevator to a stationary satellite from the Earth's surface would require twice that length of cable to reach a counterweight, ensuring that the cable maintains its tension.
The cable must be exceptionally light, staggeringly strong and able to withstand all projectiles thrown at it inside and outside the atmosphere. The answer, according to the groups working on designs, will lie in carbon nanotubes - microscopic particles that can be formed into fibres and whose mass production is now a focus of
According to Yoshio Aoki, a professor of precision machinery engineering at Nihon University and a director of the Japan Space Elevator Association, the cable would need to be about four times stronger than what is currently the strongest carbon nanotube fibre, or about 180 times stronger than steel. Pioneering work on carbon nanotubes in
Equally, there is the issue of powering the carriages as they climb into space. “We are thinking of using the technology employed in our bullet trains,” Professor Aoki said. “Carbon nanotubes are good conductors of electricity, so we are thinking of having a second cable to provide power all along the route.”
Stranger than fiction
“Riding silently into the sky, soon she was 100km high, higher even than the old pioneering rocket planes, the X15s, used to reach. The sky was already all but black above her, with a twinkling of stars right at the zenith, the point to which the ribbon, gold-bright in the sunlight, pointed like an arrow. Looking up that way she could see no sign of structures further up the ribbon, no sign of the counterweight. Nothing but the shining beads of more spiders clambering up this thread to the sky. She suspected she still had not grasped the scale of the elevator, not remotely.”
From Firstborn by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
Publisher: Del Ray
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/06/holographic.television/index.html
Updated
By Mike Steere
For CNN
The future of television? This image is an impression of what 3D holographic television may look like.
It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don't be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3-D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes.
The reason for renewed optimism in three-dimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the
Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university's Optical Sciences department, told CNN that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.
"This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images," he said.
The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.
To create television sets the images would need to be changing multiple times each second -- but Peyghambarian is very optimistic this can happen.
He said the
"It took us a while to make that first breakthrough, but as soon as you have the first element of it working the rest often comes more rapidly," he said. "What we are doing now is trying to make the model better. What we showed is just one color, what we are doing now is trying to use three colors. The original display was four inches by four inches and now we're going for something at least as big as a computer screen."
There are no more great barriers to overcome now, he said.
The breakthrough has made some long-time researchers of the technology believe that it could now come to fruition.
Tung H. Jeong, a retired physics professor at Lake Forest College outside Chicago who had studied holography since the 1960s told NJ.com; "When we start talking about erasable and rewritable holograms, we are moving toward the possibility of holographic TV ... It has now been shown that physically, it's possible."
And what might these holographic televisions look like?
According to Peyghambarian, they could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that shows 3-D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or it could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath.
So, if this project is realized, you really could have a football match on your coffee table, or horror-movie villains jumping out of your wall.
Peyghambarian is also optimistic that the technology could reach the market within five to ten years. He said progress towards a final product should be made much more quickly now that a rewriting method had been found.
However, it is fair to say not everyone is as positive about this prospect as Peyghambarian.
Justin Lawrence, a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at
"It's one thing to demonstrate something in a lab but it's another thing to be able to produce it cheaply and efficiently enough to distribute it to the mass market,"
Yet, there are reasons to be optimistic that more resources will be channeled into developing this technology more quickly.
The Japanese Government is pushing huge financial and technical weight into the development of three-dimensional, virtual-reality television, and the country's Communications Ministry is aiming at having such technology available by 2020.
Peyghambarian said there are no major sponsors of the technology at present, but as the breakthroughs continued, he hopes that will change.
Even if no major electronics company commit themselves, there is hope that backers could come from outside of the consumer electronics industry, he said.
"It could have some other applications. In training it's useful to show people three-dimensional displays. Also it would be good to show things in 3-D for defense command and control and for surgery," he said.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081008/ap_on_bi_ge/world_economic_outlook
Excerpts:
By JEANNINE
The International Monetary Fund, in a World Economic Outlook released Wednesday, slashed growth projections for the global economy and predicted the
"The world economy is now entering a major downturn in the face of the most dangerous shock in mature financial markets since the 1930s," the IMF said in its report.
The IMF now projects that the global economy, which grew by a hardy 5 percent last year, will lose considerable speed, slowing to 3.9 percent this year. It is forecast to weaken even more — to just 3 percent — next year, marking the worst showing since 2002. In the past, the IMF has called global growth of 3 percent or less the equivalent to a global recession.
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http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/30/magazines/fortune/varchaver_derivatives_short.fortune/index.htm
Excerpts
By Nicholas Varchaver, senior editor and Katie Benner, writer-reporter
Last Updated:
The financial crisis has put a spotlight on the obscure world of credit default swaps - which trade in a vast, unregulated market that most people haven't heard of and even fewer understand. Will this be the next disaster?
(Fortune Magazine) -- As Congress wrestles with another bailout bill to try to contain the financial contagion, there's a potential killer bug out there whose next movement can't be predicted: the Credit Default Swap.
In just over a decade these privately traded derivatives contracts have ballooned from nothing into a $54.6 trillion market. CDS are the fastest-growing major type of financial derivatives. More important, they've played a critical role in the unfolding financial crisis. First, by ostensibly providing "insurance" on risky mortgage bonds, they encouraged and enabled reckless behavior during the housing bubble.
"If CDS had been taken out of play, companies would've said, 'I can't get this [risk] off my books,'" says Michael Greenberger, a
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By Niall Ferguson
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1846450,00.html
Congress's initial rejection of the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan calls to mind an unhappy precedent. Back in 1930, the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on some 20,000 imported goods. Historians define this as one of the critical steps that led to the Great Depression — a tipping point when the world realized that partisan self-interest had trumped global leadership on Capitol Hill.
It's fair to ask whether
The
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With the US Congress giving nod to USD 700-billion aid for troubled financial institutions in the country, the
Besides, a handful of European countries have already announced packages worth a similar amount in efforts to save their troubled financial entities.
There are expectations for more such instances of helping hands coming from the governments in
However, nothing of this sort is expected in
Still, the collective bailout packages in the
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http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2008/9/25/102414/031
by rdf
Thu
Analogies are never perfect, but here's one using horse racing. Don't expect a perfect correspondence to the banking situation, but I think it is close enough for government work.
Joe goes to the track and bets $2 on a horse.
Two guys standing nearby get into a discussion and Fred says to Sam, "I'll bet you $5 that Joe wins his bet."
Next to them are Bill and Bob. Bill says: "I'll bet you $10 that Fred welshes on his bet if he loses."
Next to them is Sally. Sally says: "For $3 I'll guarantee to Bill that if Bob fails to pay off, I'll make good on the bet."
Sally then goes to Mary and borrows the $7 needed in case she has to ever pay off and promises to pay back $8. She doesn't expect to every have to pay since she believes Bob will always make good. So she expects to net $2 no matter what happens to Joe.
A quick calculation indicates that there is now 2+5+10+3+7 = $27 riding on the outcome of the horse race.
Question how much has been "invested" in the horse race?
Answer:
$50,000 by the owner of the horse who is expecting to recoup his investment from the winnings of the horse and other future deals. Everyone else is gambling, not investing.
The issue with the home market is that the only "investor" was the person who bought the home. All those engaged in the meaningless derivatives spun off from this are gambling. You can see how quickly the face value of all these side bets can exceed the underlying investment. Who is holding these side bets - not the homeowner? It is the people at the failing investment banks, hedge funds and similar enterprises. Notice that the bailout is being directed at them not the homeowners.
The real world is, of course, even more complicated. Over the last 30 years people have been allowed to place bets on everything starting with the value of stock averages. They might as well bet on the temperature in
So when you hear everybody saying this is a crisis caused by the housing collapse, be skeptical. We are in the midst of a classic pyramid or Ponzi scheme and there is no way out except for people to lose a lot of money. All that is different this time is that it is the taxpayers who are being asked for the cash.
Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi 221005, UP