Tag Archives: phone

Going, going, gone digital — with a few exceptions

Phones at help centers across the country rang Saturday, a day after broadcasters halted the transmission of analog signals long depended on by many people without cable or satellite television. The Federal Communication Commission, on its Web site, said Friday’s switch to digital television by 971 full-power stations had prompted hundreds of thousands of calls for help “but caused no widespread disruption of free, over-the-air television broadcasts.” It said 317,450 calls had been handled on Friday alone by the commission’s help line, 1-888-CALL-FCC. “Of the calls handled by live FCC help-line agents, nearly 30 percent concerned the operation of digital converter boxes,” the FCC said

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Reshuffling the Deck Chairs on Gordon Brown’s Listing Ship

Say you were Prime Minister of Britain, waking every day to your national media proclaiming your political death, fending off challenges to your authority from a fractured and fractious Labour Party and bracing against disastrous results in municipal and European elections. You might think a government reshuffle would be the best way to reassert your authority

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Twitter’s Biggest Egos, Exposed

Jean-Paul Sartre only had it half right when he wrote that “hell is other people.” Real hell is other people on Twitter. Maybe the trendy messaging web site coaxes contributors into feeling anonymous and uninhibited. Perhaps its short-burst format encourages streams of consciousness that go tragically unedited.

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2 killed in Nepal church bombing

Two people were killed and about a dozen others were injured when a bomb exploded in a Catholic church in Kathmandu on Saturday morning, police said. The explosion in the Nepalese capital killed a 15-year-old girl and a 30-year-old woman.

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Understanding America’s Shift on Abortion

The abortion debate is a shape shifter, its contours twisted by politics, culture, timing and the very language pollsters use when they ask people how they feel. So when the folks at Gallup announced that for the first time more Americans are pro-life than pro-choice, there are all kinds of ways to misunderstand what that means. First and foremost are the labels, which cloud the issue by oversimplifying it — that’s why the advocates picked them

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