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Newsgroup Spotlight: World Wide Web Internet Newsgroups

Surfing through the internet today can be sometimes confusing. It’s even more difficult if you’re job is to maintain and manage systems that coordinate with the ever changing world wide web.

USENET newsgroups, celebrating its 30th year this year, has long been a hub for all things involved about the internet. It was after all that Tim Berners-Lee, cited for creating the internet, used a USENET newsgroup to first post about the WorldWideWeb Project that would eventually lead up to be the foundation of the internet that we know and love today.

Since then, hundreds of newsgroups have been created and active on practically any topic related to the internet. From information system newsgroups that deal with technology used to connect to the world wide web to internet language newsgroups such as comp.lang.php for php coding and alt.html for html related discussions are just some samples of all of the categories and sub-categories that internet related USENET newsgroups provide.

To this day, many of these newsgroups provide insightful answers on the evolving world of the internet that eventually turn into the technologies and systems that we use today.

One of the most popular trends on the internet today as an example, cloud computing and storage, owes its source to USENET. USENET has been the oldest version of cloud computing in existence. With emerging cloud computing technologies from Google, Sun, Microsoft and Citrix, the foundation and architure for all is based on the fundamentals of USENET.

Whether just an active surfer, a professional web designer, or an IT networking administrator, USENET newsgroups are a hub for all the internet related discussions that you could possibly imagine.

“Newsgroup Spotlight: World Wide Web Internet Newsgroups ” – http://ping.fm/LQ8dO

Space Newsgroups: NASA Plans To Blow Up The Moon This Week

In an unprecedented scientific endeavor, NASA is preparing to fly a rocket booster into the moon, triggering a six-mile-high explosion that scientists hope will confirm the presence of water. Many newsgroups on the matter of space exploration and have been active on the topic.

NASA related newsgroups in particular have reported that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Spacecraft (LCROSS) will launch atop the same Atlas V rocket scheduled to launch later this week. Four days following launch, LCROSS will guide an empty upper stage on a collision course with a permanently shaded crater in an effort to find evidence of water at the moon’s poles. LCROSS itself will also impact the lunar surface during its course of study. The search for water ice in permanently shaded craters at the moon’s poles will be a principal objective of the mission.

There have been discussions and debates over the years on many space related newsgroups as to whether there is frozen water on the moon or not. Soon two NASA spacecraft, a lunar spycraft and a kamikaze probe, will help answer the question by peering into the permanent darkness of craters at the moon’s south pole.

Controversial evidence for whether there is water on the moon began appearing in 1996 on NASA related newsgroups with the Clementine probe, a joint Pentagon-NASA project. Radar scans of the lunar surface reflected back the kind of signals at the south pole that one might expect of ice and other frozen compounds.

However, pointed out in discussions on space exploration newsgroups regarding later studies using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico revealed similar reflections “even from areas exposed to sunlight, places too warm for water ice to survive”. This suggested the reflections that Clementine saw might have come not from water but from piles of rocks.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, built by Northrop Grumman Corporation for NASA Ames Research Center, is scheduled for launch on June 17 at approximately 4PM EDT, from Launch Pad 41 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. LCROSS will be launched with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on an Atlas V rocket.

Orbital properties will make analysis of Chandrayaan data from the south pole, where NASA is contemplating planting a lunar outpost that could use water ice as a resource, which will be even trickier until more time has passed.

“Space Newsgroups: NASA Plans To Blow Up The Moon This Week ” – http://ping.fm/sVuLO

WHO Declares Pandemic on H1N1 Swine Flu Virus

The World Health Organisation has stated today that it is declaring an H1N1 virus swine flu pandemic, raising its alert level to the maximum of six. The Department of Health said that the WHO announcement had no immediate implications for the public, but could prompt governments to take extra prevention measures, such as imposing travel bans and ordering increased vaccine production.

In government and politics newsgroups, many are discussing on how it’s the first global pandemic over the last 41 years. The last global flu pandemic came in 1968 over the “Hong Kong” flu, which killed about a million people worldwide. Moving to phase 6 (the highest level) means a pandemic has been confirmed and the H1N1 virus is spreading from person to person in a sustained manner outside North America, where the outbreak began in April. A pandemic declaration indicates geographic spread, not the severity of the illness.

The virus first emerged in Mexico in April and has now spread to 74 countries with a reported 27,000 cases and 141 deaths. The decision to raise its global alert level from five to six — officially signalling a pandemic — came after a day-long emergency meeting of the WHO to discuss the implications of widespread outbreaks of illness in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

As stated in press releases and various USENET newsgroups, moving to phase six will trigger a large scale production of vaccines. The WHO has been quoted stating in newsgroups that phase six would reflect the fact that the disease, widely known as swine flu, is spreading geographically, but not necessarily indicate how virulent it is. It could take up to six months before large amounts of a swine flu vaccine are available.

WHO says its pandemic announcement would not mean the situation was worsening, since no mutations have been detected in the virus to show it is getting more deadly.

“WHO Declares Pandemic on H1N1 Swine Flu Virus ” – http://ping.fm/DQF2H

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