Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/c2OWlGvZPMM/130722141548.htm
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Monday, July 22, 2013
Greening of the Earth pushed way back in time
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Conventional scientific wisdom has it that plants and other creatures have only lived on land for about 500 million years, but a new study is pointing to evidence for life on land that is four times as old -- at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Helen Thomas with President Nixon, 1972
Red Grandy ?Stars and Stripes
Salzburg, Austria, May, 1972: President Richard Nixon signals an end to an impromptu press conference with United Press International's Helen Thomas and other reporters on the grounds of Klessheim Palace, where he was resting on his way to arms limitation talks in Moscow. Thomas, the only female print journalist to accompany Nixon on his trip to China earlier that year, died July 20, 2013 at age 92.
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Saturday, July 20, 2013
Microsoft shares hit hard after profit badly misses expectations
Microsoft Corp. fell the most in more than four years after fourth-quarter profit missed analysts' projections by the biggest margin in at least a decade as demand weakens for Windows-run personal computers.
Results also were hurt by a $900 million writedown of Surface tablet inventory, shaving 7 cents a share from earnings. Excluding that, profit was 66 cents a share, Microsoft said Thursday, trailing analysts' 75-cent prediction.
Stung by a Surface device that few consumers want, the company faces a shift by consumers to mobile gadgets that offer many of the same features as laptops and desktops at lower prices.
CEO Steve Ballmer's effort to focus the company on devices and services may reduce profit as both areas carry thinner margins than traditional software.
"PCs were just uglier than people thought they would be, and people also had more Surface sales in there than there were," said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York, who rates Microsoft shares outperform.
Microsoft fell 11 percent to $31.40 at Friday's close in New York, the most since January 2009. The stock has gained 18 percent this year, compared with a 19 percent increase in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.
PC shipments fell 11 percent last quarter, Framingham, Mass.-based IDC said. Surface, Microsoft's first-ever computer, shipped just 900,000 units in the last two quarters, IDC said.
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Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, others urge for greater U.S. gov't transparency
Close to two-dozen technology firms, including AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo,?have signed a letter to the U.S. government urging greater transparency?in the wake of the National Security Agency's PRISM?spying scandal.
Read this
PRISM: Here's how the NSA wiretapped the Internet
The National Security Agency's "PRISM" program is able to collect, in realtime, intelligence not limited to social networks and email accounts. But the seven tech companies accused of opening 'back doors' to the spy agency could well be proven innocent.
Since former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked a number of documents that detailed how the U.S. government and its foreign allies were spying on their citizens, many technology companies have tried to distance themselves from claims of collusion and cooperation.
The letter [PDF], which can also be read below, calls on the Obama administration to allow companies to disclose exactly how many government requests for customer and subscriber data that Internet providers, telcos and Web-based companies are handed.
Google first began this trend in early 2010, and others followed suit. Microsoft became?the latest firm to join the trend earlier this year?after pressure from privacy groups.
But companies are not allowed to disclose the full amount of?National Security Letter "gagging orders" handed down by federal authorities. Instead, they are only permitted to report the number range.
The letter also calls for the government to allow these technology firms, and others, to detail how many requests made under Section 215 of the Patriot Act?? which demands all "tangible things" including business records and private user data?? as well as under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other related statutes that currently prevent these companies from publishing these figures themselves.
The group also calls for Congress to pass laws that force the U.S. government to report these figures accurately without having to first seek permission from the FISA court.
Also, the companies have launched a group petition on the White House's "We The People" platform.
The coalition includes other technology firms but also civil liberties and privacy groups?? such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), among others.
"Democracy demands accountability, and accountability requires transparency," Yahoo general counsel Ron Bell said in a blog post on Thursday.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zdnet/BTL/~3/1G0hBzEzVO0/
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Is sexual addiction the real deal?
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Controversy exists over whether what some mental health experts call hypersexuality, or sexual addiction, is a mental disorder at all. Now researchers have measured how the brain responded in people who admitted having problems regulating their viewing of sex pictures, and found their brain responses were not predicted by any of the indicators that were proposed for a diagnosis of hypersexuality.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/cLibaeWYmbI/130719104933.htm
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5 charred bodies found in northeast Mexico
Reported in the press
We, the undersigned jurors, understand there is a great deal of interest in this case. But we ask you to remember that we are not public officials and we did not invite this type of attention into our lives.
George Zimmerman trial jurors
From a statement released by 4 jurors after the trial.
Source: http://www.texasguardian.com/index.php/sid/215923225/scat/42acbe017a594c30
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How Google or Apple Could Make Web TV a Reality ? Spend Billions on the NFL
Ezra Shaw/Getty Images Sport
Dear Tim, Larry, Steve, and Jeff,
Sorry to bother you during earnings season, but I wanted to lob in an idea from the cheap seats.
I?ve been watching closely as all of you have tinkered with television for the last few years. I can see the attraction: The TV Industrial Complex is a big, lucrative target. It hasn?t ever had real competition.
The problem: So far none of you guys have tried building something that could really shake things up.
Again, for good reason. The TV Industrial Complex is really hard to displace, even for guys like you, with your technical chops, consumer connections and billions of dollars to throw around.
Which means that right now you?re either re-selling TV?s leftovers, or floating proposals that would end up replicating the existing system.
But I have a fix! Go buy yourself some football, and stream it over the Web.
Specifically, write a check to the NFL for its ?Sunday Ticket? package, the (almost) all-you-can-eat subscription service for America?s most popular sport.
Right now those rights belong to DirecTV. But the satellite TV company?s four-year deal expires at the end of the 2014 season. Which means you should be starting negotiations now.
It won?t be cheap. DirecTV pays $1 billion a year for Sunday Ticket, and that?s up 40 percent from its previous deal. So for argument?s sake, let?s assume you may have to spend something like $1.5 billion a year.
Totally doable, for you guys.* And it?s a real business, too: DirecTV has at least 2 million subscribers for Sunday Ticket, at some $225 a pop.
I bet you could do a lot better, since you wouldn?t require your customers to stick a dish on their roof to get the games ? or get pay TV at all. All of those people who say they?d cut the cord if they could get sports? You?re their answer.**
You?ll still lose money on the deal, just like DirecTV does. But think of the upside: You instantly have your hands on the most valuable programming asset in the country, which makes you an instant player ? one that can credibly start acquiring other ?real? TV programming.
And you?ve seen this playbook work before: Ask Rupert Murdoch, who created an entire broadcast network on the back of a big-money NFL deal.
By the way, this is the only way you can get your hands on the NFL for a long time. Its other TV deals are all locked up for years, and I?m not sure the league will ever give you the ability to buy its core broadcast packages. They want those games as widely distributed as possible, which means they?re going to be very wary of giving it to someone who requires a box or a dongle or even a broadband connection to get them.
But Sunday Ticket isn?t core for the NFL, it?s supplemental. And my sense is that the league would let one of you guys have it, at a price.
Or maybe not: I ran this theory by Craig Moffett, the level-headed telco/TV analyst, and he wasn?t excited about it. He figures the league wants to keep Sunday Ticket as a niche offering, because individual teams want to lock down their local audiences.
And if lots of people in, say, Detroit had the ability to watch every game in the league, every week, instead of being stuck with a Lions-heavy diet, it could be hard to keep them on the farm.
At the very least, though, I?m pretty sure the NFL would take your bid seriously. They?re certainly not going to discourage a bidding war.
So why not give it a shot? Again, this isn?t like Hulu, where you?re buying constrained rights to show something that?s already been on TV. You?re buying the rights to show the most popular shows on TV, when they?re on TV.
That?s got to be more interesting than making a better cable settop box, right? It?s certainly more fun for me to write about. So thanks in advance for taking this under consideration.
*For perspective: 4 years at $1.5 billion is $6 billion. Which is less than Microsoft spent on aQuantive in 2007, and when it wrote off all of that deal last year, no one said boo. More perspective: It?s half a Motorola. More perspective: It?s 4 percent of Apple?s cash hoard.
**Maybe, for good measure, you invest an TV antenna business too, and offer a bundle. If you really want to take a flier, maybe you snap up Aereo, too.
??-
Thanks to Bloomberg?s Alex Sherman and Ed Lee, who have a new media kibbitzing podcast that provided the impetus for this exercise. You should be able to hear all of us talking about this stuff later today.
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