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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
End H1-B Visas - you want to work in America, start working on becoming a citizen.
What work have you done to become a citizen?
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.