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As long as your city isn't San Francisco!

Yes, because you "can't" climb hills with a 30 HP engine.

---snip ...wasn't enough "give" for the shaking due to the quake. Two lives were lost - one by a woman who tried to drive her car across the gap and who would have survived had she waited for help. However, the rest of the bridge remained and will be used until this fall when it is destroyed...
---snip

Wow. This really stands out to me for some reason; the one fatality on the Bay Bridge wouldn't have changed had she "waited for help".

A quick google:
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist2/presidio.html
(ctrl-f for "Moala Kalushia")

A select paragraph:

SGT Mercier returned to Lesisita and began to reassure him again. "I heard the doctor behind me saying, 'Somebody start CPR' I turned around, one medic was standing over, about two feet away just looking down at her [Lesisita] like he was pretty shocked ...maybe he hadn't seen this before. I released the hand of the guy and turned around and started doing chest compressions on her. It was pretty difficult at first since her ribs were through her chest cavity. and they started to cut my hands. The doctor saw that and he gave me a cervical collar (neck brace). I put it over her chest to keep [her broken ribs] from penetrating my skin."

This "ranting engineer" annoys me. First he makes it sound like this woman "tried" to drive her car across the gap (hint: the police directed traffic the wrong direction, she didn't have enough distance to stop the hatchback she and her brother were in by the time that the missing bridge plate came into view), then he says that she died due to her not waiting for help, and he says there was a 2nd additional death as well.

Perhaps this guy is right that we are balancing the economic redundancy/cost curve a little too closely, but getting his facts wrong like this makes me look at what his saying a little more carefully.

Apparently they berthed at Pier 70 and hooked up to a power plant to provide steam to the power plant there. Interesting.

Not much on details, but some .

"Was the golden gate bridge pork? Of course not. Could those people have been served by a ferry??? Uhm...I guess... but would the ensuing economic development have occured? Of course not."

The golden gate bridge was pork, and still is. It connects a national park to another national park, along a route served by several ferries (now subsidized by bridge tolls, of all things, but previous to the bridge profitable and less expensive). If it produced a great boom of economic development, I expect there would be stuff on at least one end of the bridge, rather than a (fun to explore) former military base and some (really very pretty) woods.

on the other hand, it was at least *local* pork - paid for by the residents of the surrounding counties, in a local bond issue. here are details on the wildly inaccurate campaign for the bond measure, courtesy of the city of san francisco.

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.

1. Check housing prices. Now tell me that people are moving out of the Bay Area. You're wrong; they're arriving in droves.
2. You complainin about how the Japanes treated POWs? Check out how we treated our own citizens. By your own moral standards you should boycott the Bay Area too. Bye.

The question, to a large degree, is "Why?" Why are they collecting this data? They stated reason is to get "better information on graduation rates and what students pay for college." However, that doesn't make any sense, as A: agregate information would reveal the answer to that and B: you just don't do a sociological study by polling everyone. Attempting to get data on every individual student in the US is a terribly, terribly wasteful study. Therefore, they must be looking for something different.

And that is the fear, that the govermnet is fishing for dissidents. Lots of people subscribe to Mother Jones. But subscribing to Mother Jones, majoring in ecology at Berkeley, and flying out to Montana every 6 months? Must be a nut, they go on the TSA grey list. White, rich, and majoring in business administration? Must be OK.

And that's really one of the major problems with data mining people. It's difficult to make such generalizations without being racist or discriminatory. Even if it is statistically justified, it still goes against a lot of the ideals of this country to say that being Muslim makes you more likely to hijack a plane, or that being poor increases your chances of trying to blow something up.

There are volumes of aggregate information out there. There are huge repositories of privately-owned data that anyone can buy a piece of. But to have individual histories at such resolution and without stating the real reason you collect that data? It's a little scary.

Of course, nothing that bad could ever happen here.

I love that photo. Also interesting from the 1906 quake is mayor's attempt to restore order.

Anonymous flamer Coward, I referred to the research I saw published in the papers in the early 1990s in my original post. Some documentation while I decide whether to waste my time justifying my little anecdote to obnoxious Anonymous Cowards like you.

Yeah, our federal representatives did a great job of protecting the Japanese-American minority here in California during WW2.

Executive Order 9066

Fortunately for the Muslim Americans, they don't own large tracts of prime Californian farmland. During WW2, 200,000 acres of farmland were confiscated from Japanese Americans or sold under duress by the Farm Security Administration. If Muslim Americans had comparable real estate holdings, you can bet they'd be relieved of them "for strategic purposes" and to get them "out of harm's way".

There is a third option. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/vigil56.html

There are several groups that have done that. Many in the US base on silver or gold, as US currency is no longer based on it. There was a different European note (well before the EU) that somebody was trying to get people to use, and there have been a handful of companies that have tried to get international bills working. Plus innumerable wackos like Emperor Norton that have just declared their notes legal tender. In addition, you could almost count such corporate backed notes such as American Express Traveller's Checks.

The most popular (but still dubious) non-government blessed note in the US seems to be the Liberty Dollar. Considering I've had the cops called on me on three wonderful occasions when using US $2 bills (and in one case one cop didn't know if it was valid or not), and had many times when the manager yelled at me because I was trying to pass counterfeit money, I am pretty sure that these would not be very useful. (Yes, I used to carry $2 and dollar coins for normal use. I like odd currency. I once overheard a waitress pissed because I left her a dollar, when it was four Susan Bs. The cops were once at a Dennys and twice at a Burger King... the same one, with some of the same employees working at the time. I'm guessing that they were confused about how the first call went and thought I had been arrested and was trying the same "scam").

I wonder if you can photocopy them, though?

--
Evan

No-one was ever sent to a gulag for opposing the government, hell we didn't even have gulags in the first place!

How about the americans of japanese origin interned during WWII only because they had the wrong origins (one could also say "color", as germans and italians weren't interned, or at least not as systematically)?

It is decreed that all copyrights held on Softwares not sold as new in their original form for the span of 10 years previous to this Declaration be Null and Void. That they be reverted to the Care and Keeping of the Peoples of this Realm. That these works may Prosper and find an environment in which to Execute, it is further declared that computer technologies and operating systems also no longer in Retail Abundance may be emulated, cloned, and reproduced by any and all who are so skilled.

To commemorate this Decree, and to provide for the Joy and Entertainment of our Peoples, it is also declared that a Frogger(tm) competition be held in the Square of each Town of our Realm on each Anniversary of this Day henceforth.

From His Majesty SmokeSerpent I, Emperor of Abandonware, Protector of ROM Havens, Wherever they may Rest

(With due Reverence and Obediance to Norton I formerly of the Great City of San Francisco.)

...being beat up as a kid, many times, for being what one tormentor called a "walking dictionary"; or knowing people who have been subject to, or threatened with, violence (by the state or by private citizens) because of their personal lifestyle choices...

"Flamboyant eccentrics" does not necessarily equate to above-average-in-intelligence, socially-inept, or even non-mainstream. Some examples, perhaps, of what Brin may have been referring to are Elton John, Prince, Richard Branson, Judge Judy, Howard Stern, Ross Perot, the entire cast of the World Wrestling Federation, and anyone who's ever been on the Jerry Springer show.

While you might be eccentric, you probably aren't all that spectacularly flamboyant. Compare yourself to Emperor Norton Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. How many major bridges have you ordered to be built, and actually had it accomplished?

both Presidental front-runners describe themselves not just as Christians but as "born-again" Christians...

I did not know of this. Are you referring to Bush and Gore?

Can the Reform, Green, Libertarian, and Communist parties get .govs? Or hey, how about an anarchist "no.gov"? Or a Lenny Bruce "fuckthe.gov"? ("If you can't say `Fuck,' you can't say, `Fuck the government.")

Most importantly, can I register EmperorNorton.gov to commemorate the first and only Emperor of the United States?

The Republican and Democratic parties are private entities with no more special legal standing than other parties, or the Church of SubGenius for that matter. If a group of them in the House want a domain, the house.gov admin can give them gop.house.gov. If the party can get a .gov, anyone should be able to.