The temperatures got to as high as 46.4 and we had the joy of a small air con for a tiny bit of relief. During the hottest day on record we had a huge number of Bushfires start and the result is devastating. The fires have so far resulted in at least 181 deaths, and 100 people have been admitted to hospitals across Victoria with burns. Destroyed more than 1,834 homes across the whole of victoria.
Many stories have come out of these fires and the donations have just been outstanding with over $1 million dollars being donated so far and the amount of support strangers offer at a time of need is what we as humans do best.
Kinglake, Strathewen, St Andrews, and Marysville are just some of the towns hardest hit with the most loss of life to date. The death toll is estimated to reach as high as 300.
It’s been about 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on the back of the internet. For more than a billion people on the planet, the web today is an alternate, digital universe that is gradually overtaking the analog, physical world as a source of information and connections. Earlier this month, the Pew Research centre for the People & the Press conducted a survey that rendered two obvious conclusions: The internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of national and international news, and television, led by CNN, continues to serve as the main source.
According to the Pew survey, 40 per cent of respondents (versus 24 per cent in 2007) said the internet is their primary source for national and international news. That compares with 35 per cent (versus 34 per cent 2007) who rely on newspapers and 70 per cent (versus 74 per cent in 2007) who use television as their main source. Given the historic presidential campaign and economic woes this year, the large percentage increase year-over-year for the internet is not surprising.
Among Americans under 30, 59 per cent (versus 34 per cent in 2007) said they get most of their national and international news from the internet. Television tied with the internet at 59 per cent for that group, but that was a decline from 68 per cent in 2007 (the figures add up to more 100 percent, by the way, because people could offer multiple answers).
Television and printed newspapers are clearly stressed by financial pressures, which have been amplified by the ailing economy. While some of the newspapers have leading web sites, their financial staple – classifieds and job and real estate listings – has been dominated by independent internet services such as Craigslist, Monster.com, and Redfin. Mainstream television is competing with the likes of YouTube for eyeballs and is still trying to figure out how to swim with the internet fishes and generate revenue, which at this point is a rounding error.
Most newspapers have figured out that you create content for the web first and that the print edition is a byproduct of that output. Television programming can be viewed on a TV, PC, smartphone, or digital billboard. But as NBC’s Jeff Zucker said recently, “People had been counting on digital exposure. I had been trying to talk about the fact that even as it grew, it was not necessarily the big growth engine for legacy media companies that were trading those analog dollars for digital dimes. We’re now up to dimes. That’s an improvement. It’s still not a dollar for a dime kind of business that I would like to be in.”
While the internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn’t catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content – the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers – comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets.
New publishing entities, such as Politico, the nonprofit ProPublica, the Huffington Post, and numerous blogs are making original contributions to national and international news, and some are trying to make money while they’re at it.
As the financial pressures mount – the outlook for 2009 is dismal – and the cost cutting continues, we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty.
HAWTHORNE, CA – September 28, 2008 Elon Musk CEO and CTO of SpaceX, made history today with the successful launch of his privately developed rocket into space.
This is a huge step for Elon Musk and his workers and I am so just glad other companies are succeeding.
SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.
After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk worked all of the bugs out of their Falcon 1 launch vehicles.
The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.
As the rocket ascended, cheers rang out during every crucial step of the launch sequence, and at the final stage their headquarters in Hawthorne, California erupted in excitement.
Eight minutes after leaving the ground, Falcon 1 reached a speed of 5200 meters per second and passed above the International Space Station.
SpaceX had scrubbed its fourth launch attempt just a week earlier to swap out a liquid oxygen feed line, signaling the extreme caution of the group after three failed tries.
Falcon 1’s first flight in 2006 lasted less than a minute, the second flight in 2007 fired for 7.5 minutes, and the third flight last month encountered a staging separation anomaly just shy of three minutes.
For more information about the Falcon family of vehicles, and to watch the archived video of the Falcon 1, Flight 4 launch, visit the SpaceX website at www.spacex.com
Falcon 1 Flight 4 soars into space from its launch pad in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Central Pacific.
The Falcon 1 is the first launch vehicle of the 21st Century and became the first privately-developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.
Great to see Liberty Activist working together so well on a topic. The host’s of WKBK seem to get a little confused when SamIam from the Obscured truth network start’s to ask some difficult “and I’m sure very different” question regarding property right’s.
Two people, a man and a woman, are dead after a shooting in Napier just after midnight. They were 61 year old Stephen Webby and 39 year old Annette Pollock.
Police said they were called to Harold Holt Ave in the city at 12.25am after reports of gunshots.
The first police patrol to arrive found the body of a woman on the footpath. She had been shot dead.
Nearby was a badly hurt man who also had gunshot wounds.
He was rushed to hospital but had since died from his wounds.
A homicide inquiry began and Detective Senior Sergeant Tony Dewhirst from the Napier CIB, said police were keen to hear from anyone with information.
He said police were not looking for anyone else in connection with the shooting but would not confirm it was a murder-suicide.
Anyone with information could ring the Napier police on 06 831 0700.
