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In real dollars, i.e. corrected for inflation, it's about the same as in 1979-1980.

It's interesting, without shortages and lines at the pump, how much less threatening it seems. I remember visiting my aunt that Christmas and being quite concerned because our tank wasn't big enough to hold gas for the whole round trip, and in addition to lines, many, many gas stations had short hours--there was no certainty of being able to find a gas station open on Christmas day.

The first aircraft to fly the Atlantic...The flight began at Trepassey, New Foundland on May 16, 1919 and after 17 hours the NC-4 arrived at Horta, Azores.

Chicago is notorious for mob crimes. Only makes logic hollywood sense to start big brother there, where the FBI was focused in the 1920s...

By the way, there was also one British submarine seaplane carrier, the M2.

And how many regular German citizens have we tried as war criminals?

Not very many but we made up for that by bombing the shit out of them.

The German people paid dearly for supporting that regime.

Excuse me for asking, but what's a wire recorder ?

why stop there?

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/mary.html

You might want to try a local law university. A lot of them give free legal aid, both as a service to the community and as training to their law students. I'm sure they aren't everywhere, but it's worth taking a look.

(The University of San Diego has a free law clinic, for example. It popped up on a quick Google search.)

What world do you live in?

http://history.sandiego.edu/cdr2/WW2Pics/78903bg.j pg
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/shepherd /ottoman_dismemberment.jpg

Advent and Carver, not bad. :) I've tried a couple of things out as well, and this is on the systems in a couple of cars, as I play the original CD @ home after listening to 1 set of MP3s. 1st car - Pioneer deck from a while ago, cheesy cheap speakers - anything below 192 HQ is usually recognizable as MP3 if you knew the original CD version. Second car: much better sound system, MP3s below 256 are recognizable due to certain sound drop-offs and artifacts.

Home stereo, Denon 3803, hooked up to a Denon CD/DVD player and some old cheesy Sony tower speakers (Never got around to upgrading them - wife nixed my old Pioneer towers, and my Dynaco's died - there's an old reference for you;) Most MP3s sound pretty awful.

It really depends upon the music and waveform you're trying to compress. For instance, nice smooth waves like those from classical music actually seem to compress with less loss than heavily produced music, such as, say, Nine Inch Nails. (The Broken CD is broken in more ways than 1 if you try to compress it with MP3's codec.)

As for LPs, I have what was considered a near the top record player (Pioneer LP45D I think, it's at home...I'm not) with a Shure V15 Type IV cartridge. So unless there's some magical LP player out there, a well-produced CD is far superior to a well produced LP. LPs always have an underlying crackle/hiss that detract from the "silent" parts of a musical piece. (The S/N ratio is about 50% higher for a CD than an LP - reference here and here)
Oh, I also have a linear tracking arm for that record player. It makes no difference.

To quell the obvious troll: there are those who prefer tube to transitor or digital amplifiers, and there are those who prefer vinyl to digital. It's a preference. As for 'x' sounds better on 'y' than 'z', anything produced badly for a particular format will sound worse than a better produced product on a lesser format. Some examples: Any of the Boston albums (initial pressing) CDs sound relatively terrible compared to their LP counterparts because the masters were originally produced for vinyl and accentuated the highs, to compensate for vinyl's softening of them. This was a problem with early CDs all around, and can still occassionally be seen in a badly produced CD. Other badly produced CDs are those, like some of Rush's latest CDs, that compress the dynamic range into the upper 10% to produce "loud" CDs, in hopes that that loudness will be noticed in airplay. Doing the same on vinyl will result in the same crappy sound.

What you say is true, but HP and Varian were in Silicon Valley as second-generation startups.

The first generation was the Federal Telegraph Company, founded by Cyril Elwell in the winter of 1909-1910 (originally as the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company). Never heard of it? It was built to commercialize the arc (not spark) transmitter developed by Valdemar Poulsen, and by 1918 had succeeded in building and operating 1-megawatt continuous-wave radio transmitters.

Elwell was not only a Stanford graduate, he got his first financing for the company from Stanford faculty members, including the president of the university. So it can truly be said that Stanford itself acted as the first venture capitalist for the Valley.

Like the startups to follow, Federal people often left to do great things:

--Since it needed receivers to go with its transmitters, Federal hired a man from New York to develop a receiver for it, and set him up in a laboratory in the bay area. There, Lee DeForest would invent the triode vacuum tube (valve).

--To transfer the arc transmitter technology from Denmark to the Valley, Poulsen sent some of his employees with the equipment. One quickly became disillusioned with Federal, but liked the Valley, and started working with speakers. Soon thereafter, Peter Jensen formed his own company, Magnavox. Jensen's name lives on today in several lines of audio products.

--Leonard Fuller, longtime chief engineer of Federal, eventually ended up on the Berkeley faculty. The story goes that one day during the Great Depression, he was sitting in the faculty cafeteria when Ernest O. Lawrence was complaining that his cyclotron research was limited by the size of magnetic pole pieces he could obtain. Fuller realized that the 1-megawatt arc transmitter Federal had designed had very, very large magnetic pole pieces and, as they were too heavy (80 tons) to scrap, several had been sitting unused in a Valley warehouse since the end of World War I. A donation was quickly arranged, and the unused Federal components came to play a significant part in the development of large particle accelerators.

For those who were wondering.. the 24hour fitness location does indeed appear to be legit. It is in a shopping center at Point Loma in San Diego.

"1. Speakerless. This yielded a smaller, lighter, less fragile, and lower power package."
"2. Good quality stereo playback. "
"While one might make a case for obviousness, I don't think that any of the earlier players that I'm aware of would reasonably qualify as prior art,"

I don't think we're disagreeing, I simply think he patented a smaller cassette deck and claims it as an invention.

Bear in mind the transistor radio already existed since the 1950's:
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images/8601 6a.jpg

The one at the front ONLY HAS AN EARPIECE, it doesn't have a speaker it was later that speakers became small enough to put one in.

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/tape4.ht ml

And that the Compact Cassette (1965 Philips) was invented to make smaller players in Stereo.

I'm assuming from the other posts that the unethical journalist you're referring to Maureen O'Gara. I'm still confused though- is this her or is this her? And don't say the ugly one, because that doesn't help.

Oh and make sure you read this article about the history of Taiwan before you head over there:
"Well, Taiwan has always been a part of China.

Whatever happened to rehabilitation? When did we become a nation that values vindication over elevation?

When has the U.S. prison system ever been about rehabilitation, if by rehabilitation you mean the teaching of social, life and vocational skills? There have been a few experiments with that form rehabilitation (especially in the late 1800's), but ever since the concept of a prision started in Philadelphia in 1790, the idea was punishment, repenting and penitence (where the word penitentiary comes from). Usually this broke down into solitary confinement or free contract labor. If you add in the concept of control because of the ever increasing ratio of prisoners to guards, you have the U.S. prison system of today. While most Liberals poke fun about 'Jesusland' and such, the U.S. still holds on to a lot of its Christian puritan roots.

Check out Prison Reform for a good look at the history of prisons.

I have yet to see a private charity that disburses 99.2 percent of what it brings in.

That is not quite an accurate assessment. See Robert Genetski's essay to understand why. Summary: the SSA is actually extremely efficient at disbursing benefits, but some expenses are outsourced and are not accurately reflected in the efficiency figures you see generally bandied about. When accounting for all costs like the very low returns, the overall program's efficiency fares very poorly.

And if private charities are so hot, why did we need SS in the first place?

Statements like this without discussing the context of the Great Depression carry no weight. While it is impressive to say for example, 4 hospitals in New York reported 95 deaths from starvation, mortality surveys result in summaries that say "There was no sharp rise in deaths from starvation and disease. On the contrary, the world death-rate declined in the 1930's, and life expectancy continued to rise." As for people freezing to death, in the late 20th century in America, the CDC reported an annualized rate of 1,552 deaths from hypothermia over a 9 year period. As late as 2003, we simply expect about 600 deaths from hypothermia per year. If you want to refute the League of Nations' morbidity tables that show no statistically significant increase in malnutrition and hypothermia related deaths, then please share the source material you reference for your claim whose sum total of these deaths exceeds the per capita rate in the ten year periods immediately before and after the Great Depression.

While the nation suffered hardships, and there undoubtedly were some people who passed away because the economic impact mortally affected their nutrition or sources of heat, it was not noticeably more than any other period, and the records say it was actually less.

If the rationale for establishing Social Security was because people were starving to death and freezing to death, then we did not "need" Social Security then, and we don't need it now. It was a political football from its genesis to its current form today. You can cry all you want about "heartless extreme right wingers", but the simple fact of the matter is that as a nation, we simply lack the out of pocket funds to pay for its future liabilities as currently constituted. Billions of Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Europeans via their central banks are floating the entire American financial house of cards, which is the only reason Social Security even stands today. Dude, you have not seen heartless yet. The day Mr. Market comes to collect rent, interest, and back penalties, you'll see heartless that will take the breath away of even the spawn of Sauron and Darth Vader.

The choice is as stark as it is simple. Either let social welfare programs' fiscal demands continue to erode the nation's financial standing, and one day figure out how to deal with the aftermath of a collapse worse on senior citizens than the Soviet Union's. Or figure out today how to restructure the nation's finances to a sustainable footing while we still have the thin resources to even contemplate doing so.

They also never apologized and didn't really care that they are some of the greatest villians in modern history.

Actually Japan has done a number of things , including APOLOGISE for it's actions during World War II as well as paying reparations to countries it tried to colonise, with the exception (as far as I know) of North Korea. They also recently apologised for the 'Comfort Women' aka civilian women forced to be prostitues. At the end of the war, some of the Japanese in charge were also executed (I include this, because I am sick of hearing people saying that the Germans had war crime hearings and the Japanese didn't - the truth is, both did, and those responsible were executed).

Now, before you jump down my throat, there are some things they haven't apologise for and tried to cover over. (just to balance it out) My Great Uncle was a POW at Changi and then later on the Burma Railroad (remember that film "Bridge on the River Kwai" ... well, he was one of the Aussies who help build that railroad). After the war my Great Uncle George was head of the Aussie POW's trying to get an apology from the Japanese Government for their mistreatment of Aussie POW's. That was one thing he couldn't get, because the Japanese Government said that it wasn't covered in thier surrender. Unfortunately George died last July, so he will never get to have that apology.

Also, the Japanese Government recently censored a Manga comic because the Japanese writer refered to the Nanjing Massacre. The Japanese Government still considers this to be fake. Read more here. On top of this, a textbook which glosses over the war has now been approved for Japanese schools. (I can't be bothered looking for a link to this, I think most people may have heard about it).

From the comic book, (and the fact that I know some very well versed Japanese people), most Japanese people want the Japanese Government to apologise for these sorts of things, as they really DO care about what happened. The Average Modern Japanese person is truely ashamed and amazed that their countries forces acted in such dispicable ways. It was actually the Japanese people who got the Japanese Government to admit to the fact that Unit 731 really existed, not outside influence from China or anyone else.

Now, I am assuming that you were speaking out of ignorance with what you said, but to a Japanese who is aware of the facts I mentioned above, (as opposed to an ignorant one), your comments smack or racism. (No, I didn't call you a racist, I think you were speaking from ignorance. Re-read your comments now that you know the facts, and you will see how a person could misinterpret your comments).

I hope you take these comments on board in the spirit of how they are ment, and not as a personal attack.

This link might be of some benefit too.

I probably could have added a lot more too, because I am a little knowledgeable on Japan, knowing the language a bit and being able to read and write it.

I hope this is enough to convince you of the truth about the Japanese apologising and that the Japanese People DO care about, and are repulsed by the inhumane behaviour of the occupational forces during WWII. If you meet Japanese people who don't know much about the Japanese WW2 attrocities committed by their country, it isn't their fault. They, like you, are probably unaware of the facts. With the nature of most modern Japanese being to seek peace, so the acts of thier forces during W

KazAa is even worse as it installs a lot of ad-ware and stuff in the registry. As explained on this site, it installs multiple things that are very nasty to remove afterwards, including the onflow thing discussed in other posts.

The worst part is the newdotnet thing.

Just do a "kazaa spyware" search on google and read.