US company to beam free wi-fi to entire world from space

Washington:  A US company is planning to build an 'Outernet - a global network of cube satellites broadcasting Internet data to all the people on the planet - for free.

The idea is to offer free Internet access to all people, regardless of location, bypassing filtering or other means of censorship, according to the New York based non-profit organisation, Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF).

MDIF proposes that hundreds of cube satellites be built and launched to create a constellation of sorts in the sky, allowing anyone with a phone or computer to access Internet data sent to the satellites by several hundred ground stations.

The organisation claims that 40 per cent of the people in the world today are still not able to connect to the Internet - and it's not just because of restrictive governments such as North Korea - it's also due to the high cost of bringing service to remote areas, 'phys.org' reported.

An Outernet would allow people from Siberia to parts of the western US to remote islands or villages in Africa to receive the same news as those in New York or Tokyo.

The Outernet would be one-way - data would flow from feeders to the satellites which would broadcast to all below.

MDIF plans to add the ability to transmit from anywhere as well as soon as funds become available.

MDIF has acknowledged that building such a network would not be cheap. Such satellites typically run $100,000 to $300,000 to build and launch.

The timeline for the project calls for deploying the initial cubesats as early as next summer.

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Talking parrot ‘helps’ UP Police crack murder case

AGRA: In a case that seems straight out of an Agatha Christie potboiler, a parrot turned detective and helped nab its mistress' killer.

The question of who murdered Neelam Sharma, 45, and her pet dog, had been baffling the city police for almost a week till they got a clue provided by Hercule, the parrot.

Neelam, wife of Vijay Sharma, the editor of a Hindi daily, was found murdered at her residence on February 20. Her husband noticed a change in the behaviour of the parrot whenever his nephew Ashutosh visited their house after the murder.

"During discussions too, whenever Ashutosh's name was mentioned, the parrot would start screeching. This raised my suspicion and I informed the police," said Sharma.

SSP Agra, Shalabh Mathur, told TOI that Ashutosh confessed to the crime on being interrogated.

"We checked his call details and took him in custody. He accepted his crime and informed us that he was accompanied by an accomplice. They had entered the house with the intention of taking away cash and other valuables."

Afraid that his aunt might recognize him, he stabbed her as well as the dog when he started barking. But he hadn't accounted for the parrot who was watching silently.

Robots will be smarter than us all by 2029, warns Google's director of engineering

By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google's director of engineeringRay Kurzweil. 

One of the world's leading futurologists andartificial intelligence (AI) developers, 66-year-old Kurzweil has previous form in making accurate predictions about the way technology is heading.

In 1990 he said a computer would be capable of beating a chess champion by 1998 - a feat managed by IBM's Deep Blue, against Garry Kasparov, in 1997. 

When the internet was still a tiny network used by a small collection of academics, Kurzweil anticipated it would soon make it possible to link up the whole world. 

Now, Kurzweil says than within 15 years robots will have overtaken us, having fulfilled the so-called Turing test where computers can exhibit intelligent behaviour equal to that of a human. 

Speaking in an interview with the Observer, he said that his prediction was foreshadowed by recent high-profile AI developments, and Hollywood films like Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix. 

"Today, I'm pretty much at the median of what AI experts think and the public is kind of with them," he said. 

"The public has seen things like Siri (Apple's voice recognition software), where you talk to a computer. They've seen the Google self-driving cars. My views are not radical any more." 

Though credited with inventing the world's first flat-bed scanners and text-to-speech synthesisers, Kurzweil is perhaps most famous for his theory of "the singularity" - a point in the future where humans and machines will apparently "converge". 

His decision to work for Google came after the company acquired a host of other AI developers, from the BigDog creators Boston Dynamics to the British startup DeepMind. 

And the search engine giant's co-founder Larry Page was able to convince Kurzweil to take on "his first actual job" by promising him "Google-scale resources". 

With the company's unprecedented billions to spend, and some of humanity's greatest minds already on board, it is clearly only a matter of time before we reach that point when robots can joke, learn and yes, even flirt.

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Anagrams !

( from Letters in the Economist)

SIR — Being a fan of anagrams, I enjoyed your ingenious description of research on artificial-intelligence algorithms, which you erroneously called “logarithms” (The world this week, February 1st). In the same spirit, please inform the proof dearer of your sewn paper that I eagerly anticipate more word mages the next mite I relax in my living moor and nope your electronic pap on my paid.

Harold Boas
Professor of mathematics
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas