For more than 60 years, US TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer. The business model is unravelling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming. That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels – a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s. ‘Good programing is expensive,’ Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns Fox, told a shareholder meeting in the northern hemisphere autumn. ‘It can […]
Computer hackers this week said they had cracked and published the secret code that protects 80 per cent of the world’s mobile phones. The move will leave more than 3bn people vulnerable to having their calls intercepted, and could force mobile phone operators into a costly upgrade of their networks. Karsten Nohl, a German encryption expert, said he had organised the hack to demonstrate the weaknesses of the security measures protecting the global system for mobile communication (GSM) and to push mobile operators to improve their systems. ‘This shows that existing GSM security is inadequate,’ Mr Nohl told an audience of about 600 people at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a four-day conference of computer hackers. ‘We have given up hope that network operators will move to improve security on their own, but we are hoping that with this added attention, there will be increased demand from customers for them to do this,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘This vulnerability should have been fixed 15 years ago. People should now try it out at home and see how vulnerable their calls are.’ Mr Nohl was due to run a practical demonstration of the code […]
As often as socialism and communism are evoked to discredit the Obama Administration’s agenda, it can be illustrative to observe how communist governments actually behave. China’s National People’s Congress convened on Dec. 22. Three days later it passed a law requiring China’s energy companies to buy all energy generated through renewable sources-wind, solar power, hydropower, biomass, geothermal and ocean energy. What if that energy is more expensive? Buy it anyway, the legislature told the energy companies, or pay twice its cost in fines. What if that energy can’t be accessed with the existing power grid? Improve the grid, China told the energy companies. Details of the new law were published this weekend by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. Every year China will determine what percentage of its energy will come from renewable sources, and every year, China’s energy companies will be expected to make it so. In contrast, the Obama Administration is struggling to squeeze a market-based cap and trade bill laden with incentives for business through a stingy Senate, even with the enthusiastic support of Exelon, Duke, Con Ed, and other traditional American energy companies. In its latest effort the administration is […]
The new science of quantum biology is teaching us about how the actual behavior of evolution is governed by disconcertingly spooky processes – time travel being one of them. Will quantum computation finally be realized by biomimicry, in organic systems? Evolution is the new (old) computation…and we’re about to take the reins. One hundred and fifty years ago, paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley (an autodidact and philosopher who coined the term ‘agnostic and was known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog for his passionate defense of natural selection) asserted that humankind would eventually take the processes of evolution into our own hands. Within a few decades of his proclamation, a cadre of equally brilliant scientists including Werner Heisenberg, David Bohm, and Max Planck began to unravel the mysterious properties of quantum mechanics. These two theories — evolutionary and quantum dynamics — can each be considered among the most important discoveries of all time. Taken together, they have changed almost everything about the way we understand reality. However, in spite of the popularity of interdisciplinary research and unifying theories over the last hundred years (despite, even, quantum physicist Erwin Schröedinger’s 1944 book, What Is Life?), it was only recently that the relationship between […]
ROCHESTER — The ceremonial pipe organ of the 18th century was the Formula One racer of its time, a masterpiece of human ingenuity so elegant in its outward appearance that a casual observer could only guess at the complexity that lay within. Each organ was designed to fit its intended space, ranging in size from local churches where townspeople could worship to vast cathedrals fit for royalty. The builders were precision craftsmen celebrated for their skill in hand-making thousands of moving parts and in shaping and tuning metal and wooden pipes to mimic the sounds of each instrument in an orchestra. The effect was breathtaking. ‘Each instrument speaks to you in a different way, said Hans Davidsson, a concert organist, sitting before the console of the organ at the cavernous Christ Church, Episcopal, in Rochester. Dr. Davidsson began to play the Bach hymn ‘Gottes Sohn Ist Kommen (‘The Son of God Has Come), and an enormous, bell-clear sound exploded from the gleaming pipes that soared above him. The organ, the Craighead-Saunders, is a unique instrument, not only because of its lovely sound, but also because it is a nearly exact copy of a late Baroque organ built […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
