What Will iPod Do for Television?【60】
Apple’s iPod profoundly changed the way people experience music.What will it do for television?The industry was intrigued by Wednesday’s announcement that episodes of the hit ABC shows “Desperate Houwives” and “Lost” will be available for Apple’s new video iPod.
Episodes will go on sale for $1.99 on iTunes the day after they are broadcast. For ABC and its parent Walt Disney Co., the bet is that the new technology will bring in more new fans of the programs than will be taken away from watching them on traditional broadcast television. The network’s affiliates were not told the deal was in the works before Wednesday, and they’re the people most likely to be concerned about its impact. Now the iPod will join digital video recorders and DVDs as another way of eing television programs other than their regularly scheduled times on the ABC stations.
Leon Long, chairman of ABC’s affiliate board said if viewers have the choice of watching “Desperate Houwives” on their wide-screen television with surround sound or a two-inch i
Pod screen, they will almost certainly watch it on TV. The iPod option will likely be attractive to people who misd an episode ]and want to keep up with the story, he said. He noted that two of the three ries ABC is offering to iTunes are rials that require viewers to follow story lines that play out over veral months. Initially, the downloads might also appeal to techies who want to try out the new product and might not necessarily be fans of the programs,手相感情线 which could bring the shows a new audience As for the chance it will pull people away from his station, Long said, “It’s certainly a risk but I don’t think it’s a great risk.”
Man Is Altering the Balance of Nature【59】
The balance of nature is a very elaborate and very delicate system of checks and counterchecks. It is continually being altered as climates change, as new organisms evolve, as animals or plants permeate to new area.
But the alternations have in the past, for the most part, been slow, whereas with the arrival of civilized man, their speed has been multiplied many fold: From the evolutionary
time scale where change 岗位履职情况is measured by periods of ten or a hundred thousand years, they have been transferred to the human time scale in which centuries and even decades count.
Everywhere man is altering the balance of nature. He is facilitating the spread of plants and animals into new regions, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously. He is covering huge areas with new kinds of plants, or with hous, factories, slagheaps and other products of the civilization. He exterminates some species on a large scale, but favours the multiplication of others. In brief, he has done more in five thousand years to alter the biological aspect of the planet than has nature in five million. Many of the changes which he has brought about have had unforeen conquences.
Who would have thought that the throwing away of a piece of Canadian waterweed would have caud half the waterways of Britain to be blocked for a decade? Or that the provision of pot cacti for lonely ttlers’ wives would have led to Eastern Australia being overrun with forest of Prickly Pear? Who would have prophesied that the cutting down of f
orests on the Adriatic coasts, or in the parts of Central Africa, could have reached the land to mi dert, with the very soil washed away from the bare rock? Who would have thought that improved communications would have changed history by the spreading of dia—sleeping sickness into East Africa,measles into Oceania,very possibly malaria into ancient Greece?海口市面积
The are spectacular examples; but examples on a smaller scale are everywhere to be found. We make a nature sanctuary for rare birds, prescribing absolute curity for all species; and we may find that some common and hardy kind of bird multiplies beyond measure and ousts the rare kinds in which we are particularly interested. We e, owing to some little change brought about by civilization, the startling spread over the English countryside in hordes. We improve the yielding capacities of our cattle; and find that now they exhaust the pastures which sufficed for less exigent stock. We gaily t about killing the carnivores that molest our domestic animals, the hawks that eat our fowls and game-birds; and find that in so doing we are also removing the brake that restrains the multiplication of mice 海关监管货物>燃油宝是什么and other little rodents that gnaw away the farmer’s profits.宪法题库
Genetically Modified Foods—Feed the World?【58】
If you want to spark a heated debate at a dinner party, bring up the topic of genetically modified foods. For many people, the concept of genetically altered, high-tech crop production rais all kinds of environmental, health, safety and ethical questions.Particularly in countries with long agrarian traditions—and vocal green lobbies—the idea ems against nature.In fact, genetically modified foods are already very much a part of our lives. boost翻译A third of the corn and more than half the soybeans and cotton grown in the US last year were the product of biotechnology, according to the Department of Agriculture. More than 65 million acres of genetically modified crops will be planted in the US this year. The genetic is out of the bottle. The issue is simple and urgent: Do the benefits of biotech outweigh the risks?
>黄宗羲简介
