Eideard

India has launched seven satellites from a single rocket, demonstrating its growing skills in multi-satellite launches. The success comes nearly a month after India had to end its inaugural Moon mission early.

Within a space of 20 minutes, an Indian rocket placed one big satellite and six small ones into space from the Sriharikota space center in eastern India.

The big remote-sensing satellite will map fishing zones around India, measure ocean surfaces and wind speeds and track monsoons and cyclones.

The six small satellites belong to other countries – four to Germany, one to Switzerland and one to Turkey…

In the past decade, India’s 46-year space program has focused on developing rocket-launching capabilities to gain a slice of the multi-billion-dollar space-launch market. It has put an Italian satellite and an Israeli spy satellite into orbit. But India is still a relative newcomer in a field dominated by big players such as the United States, Russia and the European Space Agency…

In recent years, India has scaled up its ambitions to explore space, not wanting to be left behind by countries like China. It hopes to send a manned mission into space, in four years time.

India’s space program functions on a relatively modest budget of about $1 billion a year.

I’m trying to recall if the U.S. has done anything on a modest budget ever since management of our government became a function of the military-industrial complex.

Facebook, the world’s most successful social networking site, has officially launched in Arabic, tapping into a potentially huge market in the Middle East and beyond, the company has announced.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, already has large numbers of users in the Arab world: in Egypt, where the site has 900,000 users, it has become a highly effective tool for political mobilisation, with mass demonstrations against the goverment organised through forums. The ability to use it in Arabic is likely to make it even more popular.

In Saudi Arabia the site has more than 250,000 users and in Lebanon more than 300,000…

“It’s the first time Arabic speakers will be able to use Facebook in their own language,” said Ghassan Haddad, the Facebook director of localisation. “It’s potentially huge.”

Fifty million of the world’s 250 million Arabic speakers already use the internet, but Arabic only makes up 5% of global web content…

“Design is a…challenge, since a web page laid out from right to left looks like a mirror image of an equivalent English page. All components on the page must be changed for right-to-left languages including text alignment, ordering of tabs on pages, different fields on forms, labels, buttons and much more.”

Although Facebook has been accessible in English across the Middle East since it opened beyond the US college network in September 2006, its Arabic language version puts in in more direct competition with popular regional sites including Jeeran, Maktoob, ArabFriendz and Kalam Arab.

It’s a terrific idea. Tiptoeing past the censors in some Arabic-speaking lands will be harrowing. But, increasing communications access does nothing but good for most folks. Good luck.