A 21-year-old woman who lives with her brother and parents on the India side of the disputed India-Pakistani border was in her home when three gunmen burst in demanding food and lodging. The woman's father refused and was attacked and the woman, who was hiding under a bed, attacked the assailant with an ax, and then grabbed his gun as he went down, shooting him dead. Feel free to read the full story, it's pretty intense, and the guy may well have been a major Pakistani terrorist. I'll admit, this has little to do with gadgets, but even you have to agree, ax to AK is one hell of an upgrade. [Telegraph UK via a million tweets]

Speaking of upgrades, anyone who migrates to Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise or Ultimate who's still missing XP can officially virtualize that sweet old OS, says our friend Mary Jo Foley, who reports that the lauded XP Mode has been released to manufacturing, and will be present in time for the Oct. 22 Windows 7 launch. [ZDNet]

This is an example of me scratching my head at the way tech business is conducted. GigaOm reports a scoop that Lenovo will likely pre-install Skype on a bazillion new ThinkPads soon, advertising the VOIP maven in the Start menu, and allowing people to "install and sign up for Skype without downloading the software." In other words, one of these companies is taking money from the other one to turn a perfectly decent free utility into crapware, in hopes that, what, some IT guys won't just go and delete it from their deployed fleet of laptops? Sorry, but there has to be a better way to build brand equity than simply being the app people didn't delete during initial setup. [GigaOm]

Generally we love iSuppli's fat pipeline of sound manufacturer-based information, but this time, I think there's something in the pipe besides info: A report today says that by 2013, Windows Mobile will be in second place behind Symbian in world smartphone market share, following a dip where they drop to third place. Whaaaaaaa? We plan to follow this up, since iSuppli is generally a smart source, and the report seems to be measuring licenses rather than actual user base. Still, I wanted to drop it here, because it's insane-tastic. [iSuppli]

The fish he treats are ornamental—fancy ones for aquariums—so I guess there are a lot of people with exotic fish around Chandannagore. But man, how surreal is that photo of the goldfish receiving an injection? Normally when a goldfish gets sick the prescription is one dose of going down the toilet. Be sure to click through to Life to see the rest of the series of images. Amazing stuff. [Life via Notcot]

Locals use hollowed-out trunks of the betel tree to prop up the roots of the Ficus elastica (basically a rubber tree), pointing them across whatever body of water they want to cross, until the roots reach the other side and dig in. After awhile (a long while—think 10-15 years), the bridge becomes strong and sturdy enough for people to comfortable walk across. Some of these such bridges are hundreds of years old, since they just get stronger over time, being alive and all. Pretty amazing stuff. [Living Root Bridges via Reddit]

Indian defense scientists are planning to put one of the world's hottest chili powders into hand grenades.

The chili, known as Bhut Jolokia, is said to be 1,000 times hotter than commonly used kitchen chili.

So it can disperse crowds, but the real question is—can I cook dinner with it? Like a fire and forget nuclear spice bomb or something? [BBC via Geekologie Image via Flickr]

India had previously done a test pilot of the OLPC and decided they could make a better, or at least cheaper, laptop themselves, but after their $10 laptop turned out to produce a product that was not a laptop and could not be made for $10, they appear to have come back to the fold. The quarter-million OLPC XOs will go out to about 1,500 schools, though we're not sure if they'll be getting the newer versions with the upgraded processor, memory, and storage. Congrats to OLPC; they've had a rough go of it but we're always in favor of weirdly adorable computers for the less fortunate. [Ars Technica]

Kind of puts everything into perspective, doesn't it? While the US smartphone market is our main stock and trade here at Giz, no one should forget about companies like Nokia that supply a huge percentage of the rest of the world's phones. Even though they took a bit of a bath last quarter, it wasn't nearly as bad as some have hoped, and for that Nokia has nearly 16 million new phone users in India to thank. [Reuters]

According to the Borgeaud site, the watch automatically displays a daily 90-minute period called the Raju Kaal, which is believed to be a terrible time to make important decisions or start new projects.

Called "The Pachang," after one of the world's oldest almanacs, the watch will only revert back to its normal color after the Raju Kaal is over and "dark astral forces" have left the area.

Borgeaud is only producing 650 of the watches, with prices set above $2000 each. I predict they'll become a great way to weed out rich idiots. [Ananova]

The price jumps up to around $2400 when you factor in the additional costs associated with excise fees, transportation, taxes, etc—but the allure of a car that ridiculously cheap is going to be powerful not only in India, but around the world. That's why the Tata group has plans for releasing a version for the European market in 2011 and North American market beyond that (although those versions will undoubtedly be more expensive).

Of course, you get what you pay for, and $2000 isn't going to buy you even basic luxuries like air-conditioning—but it will get you over 50 mpg. The question of reliability is also an issue, but it couldn't be worse than that gas guzzling beater you are driving around right now could it? [BBC via Jalopnik]

The thing, as described by the Times of India:

A storage device containing megabytes of data info which can be accessed by a user by connecting this device to a laptop.

Oh. That description sounds an awful lot like a USB drive, observed through computer-illiterate eyes. However, the only picture available of the device shows a small white box with lots of attached cabling, indicating that there's more happening here than simple storage. You know, something exciting, like networked storage! Either way, FAIL.

This whole fiasco was compounded by a few factors: deliberate misinformation by people close to the project, the complete and utter incompetence of the Indian tech press (we still don't even have a solid idea what this thing is) and the condescending eagerness of Western news outlets to believe that such a product, which would have been dismissed as totally impossible if announced here, was inexplicably plausible because it was coming from the mysterious foreign land of India. Whatever the case, there is no $10 laptop, and there probably never will be—at least not from this project. [Times of India, photo via ITCafe]

We know nothing new, save for the name. It's called the Sakshat. It will cost $20 at launch but is promised to drop to $10 six months later. And it features 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi and ethernet while consuming just 2W of power...which we knew.

Screen size? Processor? Battery life? Software? Launch date? Pictures? Fuzzy pictures? Nah, that stuff is for real products. Right now, this is vaporware. No, it's not even that. It's some second grader sitting in the back of the bus, convincing his classmates that, really, his dad used to play basketball with Michael Jordan and that, seriously, he's totally hooking up with a seventh grader over at Parkland Middle School. [InformationWeek]

Available for $30, Country Codes of the World is a 24" by 36" representation of the globe in which each country is displayed as its corresponding country code in a font size relative to its population. So countries with big populations appear as bigger letters on the map, and small populations look tiny.

It's a neat idea that really shows you the US's place in the online world, especially as China and India (.cn and .in) both look huge here, despite having been scaled down 30% to fit within their geography. [bytelevel]

The no-optician-required glasses rely on the principle that the fatter a lens is, the more powerful it comes, so by pumping in or sucking out fluid, the glasses can be instantly tailored to the right strength. They're so simple to adjust that practically anyone can do it. So far the only complaint with the glasses is that they're kind of ginormous—which kind of goes with having specs that operate on the coke-bottle glasses principle and have a fluid-filled membrane sitting in the middle of the lens.

Silver is planning a trial in India that will distribute over 1 million of the glasses, which he hopes to have strapped to the heads over a billion of the world's poorest people—at a cost of $1 per pair—by the poetic date of 2020. Luckily for him, giant glasses are ironically cool again, so he could probably launch a Get 1, Give 10 style program funded entirely by hipsters . [Guardian via MAKE]

Naturally, this isn't the first time the girl has been in the spotlight for her talents. Thanks to her extraordinary memory, she has been breaking records since she was three—an age when most of us were concerned with toys and pooping our pants. [NDTV via Newlaunches]

About two hours of spinning would be enough to run a custom LED light source for six to seven more hours, significantly extending the amount of time families can work. Using LEDs will also help families avoid kerosene lamps, which drastically reduce air quality inside the home when they are used. The Indian government is already giving away several of the e-charkhas to Indian residents under its “Funds for Regeneration of Traditional Industries” program. A good thing, since very few of the people who need it can afford the roughly $200 it costs. [Inhabitat]

The first thing you're gonna need is an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. Engineers on shore use it to send light pulses down the cable, which reflect back at the breakage point, providing a measurable delay that can translate to distance within "tens of meters."

Once you get your location guestimation, you posse up your team of about 50 people and pile them onto—what else?—a cable ship. This ship will need remotely operated vehicles ROVs (see James Cameron) that you drive down to the sea floor, roving around until you spot your breakage.

When the ROV finds the affected cable segment, it may snip off the nasty bits (just leaving them there to become part of somebody's new habitat) and bring up the two new ends. On board the ship, operators can splice a new segment between the cleanly trimmed ends of the cable break, and drop it back down.

Sometimes the ROV can't find the segment, or can't get the right grip on it. In these cases, the technicians send down a centuries-old device called a grapnel. The grapnel snags the cable wherever it can, and yanks it up to the boat for the end trimming and the repair job.

The cable itself is a tricky fix, because it is made up of nine layers, which you can see in the BBC's diagram below. If you are an experienced undersea-cable repairman who would like to add anything to this admittedly brief primer, I encourage you. And for the love of Pete, don't try any of this cable repair stuff at home! [BBC News]

The cables, branded Flag Telecom and SEA-ME-WE 4, for "Southeast Asia, Middle East, Western Europe", were severed in their runs between Palermo, Italy and Alexandria, Egypt. Data is being rerouted, in some cases "around India and back through Asia to the U.S." Outages or lousy connections have been experienced in India as well as Egypt, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. (Insert sheik-surfing-the-porno joke here.)

According to the AP story, "There has been speculation...that an illegally or improperly anchored ship caused the problem. Our best guess is Godzilla of course, but some sort of Bond villain may be to blame. (Insert Dick-Cheney-not-ruling-out-terror joke here.)

Update: Mystery solved? This article, dated Jan. 30, seems to have clear information on the shipping debacle that caused the havoc:

"For some reason ships were asked to anchor in a different place to normal - 8.3km from the beach. One of the ship's anchors cut our cable but there are multiple cuts—we're not the only company having problems," says a Flag Telecom spokesman.