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Nixon Tape To Reveal Secrets at Last?
jonerik writes: "As part of its inevitable 30th-anniversary-of-Watergate coverage, ABC News has this article on the National Archives' search for someone who can recover part or all of the missing 18 ½ minutes of President Nixon's Oval Office tapes, whose existence had been unknown until the Watergate hearings. The famous tape - recorded on June 20th, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in - was last examined in 1974, but Nixon tape archivist Karl Weissenbach is hoping that nearly thirty years of technological progress can make the difference this time, saying 'We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered.' Stephen St. Croix, one of several forensic audio experts who is interested in taking on the job, says 'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'" There's another article in Wired on this quest as well.
lengths to write over the tapes 20-30 times to try and ensure that data is NOT recoverable. It costs a bundle and is suppose to be totally gone from the 38k c-tape.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I read an article a few days ago about this somewhere, I dont remember where though. Anyway, appearently Nixon was going to erase ALL the tapes, but he realized there were so many of them it would take his lifetime to erase. So he chose to just erase a tiny bit of one tape. The tape was recorded over "between 7 and 11 times". The company that decodes that tape, while getting no compensation from the government, will be rich in publicity alone.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
but wouldn't it be funny if the missing minutes were just Nixon concealing from his wife the fact that he'd been yuk-yukking it up with his beer buddies about his latest sexual conquests...?
"To decipher that data, forensic experts would use "bandpass filters" and other high-tech devices that look for frequencies that they do not need within a sound."
Wow, "bandpass filters"; that _is_ high-tech! Wonder when they'll be available to consumers.
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'
This is true of pretty much any data-recording device, especially FAT hard drives or floppy disks. To mark a file as deleted, a file's FAT entry simply has the first character of the filename removed. To "undelete" it, it has to still be intact on the hard drive and then have the first character of the filename restored.
I'm interested in seeing how this concept works on video tape, I imagine the process is probably a lot more in-depth than this, so kudos to them if they pull it off.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Ooh, I want to be the first to release the deleted parts as lowercase? Do I have to pay royalties to the Nixon estate?
Would they have to make clear what the sounds constituted, then, to prove they deserved royalties?
...isn't that the long version of Inna Gadda Davida?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
"Fr15+ P05+!!!1!"
Personally, I'm fairly interested in all this, especially seeing who it's going to hurt today. Remember that 30 years ago is not ancient history. Many people who are still high-ranking members of government now were members of government then.
In the recent hooplah surrounding the new book, Pat Buchannan was named as a possible 'Deep Throat', something I seriously doubt. Still, it raises questions. Suppose that someone we respect *cough* *cough* is in actuality a criminal?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Maybe we'll here about what really happend during Clinton's presidency in 30 years. Maybe we dont want to know. Nixon had his problems just like all Polititions have. Mostly I think he was just dumb.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
...that this 18 1/2 minute gap is exactly enough time for Nixon, et al. to listen to Alice's Restaurant.
Nixon wasn't impeached.
Haldeman recounts in his now out-of-print book, The Ends of Power, that Nixon struggled with the most basic functions of cassette recorders.
They go on to detail how they had to mark the buttons so that Nixon could use a tape recorder. Wow.
There has been a lot of talk about people complaining that in the digital age most information will get lost. As long as techno-idiots like this are drawn to public service I doubt that there will be any problem in keeping track of what they say and write. I seriously doubt these folks are going to be able to get rid of information.
Even if they have high priced people to handle things for them, I can't help but think that they are going to leave behind really stupid stuff.
There were some other juicy parts released not too long ago.
Yea, and Clinton "was" imepached. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
Hey, maybe if more "terrible secrets" get revealed, they can impeach him today. Weren't they going to try that with Clinton? heh.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Blah... I don't like Nixon
I liked him. Graduated in '74 - right after he stopped the draft!
Also, he wasn't impeached. He resigned. Clinton was impeached but stayed in office.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Nixon's distinctive voice can clearly be heard in a conversation that can only be described as other-worldly. In one recovered fragment, fear can be heard in Nixon's quivering response to an imposing sounding unknown figure who states clearly: "All Your Base Are Belong To Us". It is unknown who the co-conspirator was, yet the effect on Nixon was quite alarming as he begins to weep softly, seemingly resigned to his ( and possibly our) fate.
Interesting guy. Here's a link to his company's webpage.
Okay, so it wasn't the greatest film. But I thought their explanation for the missing eighteen minutes and the whole Deep Throat thing was pretty damned amusing. The dream sequence between Michelle Williams and Dan Hedaya was hilarilous. Incidentally, Hedaya is one of the better Nixons I've seen.
And wouldn't it be a crack up if the missing minutes really were the confessions of a lovesick teenager?
|>
Here be Dragons
I realize the technical merits of the article, but why is the general media still harping on something that happened 30 years ago? Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...? These things are much more current and still have real implications to people in power (not to mention someone is dead).
You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.
I have a blowtorch that says magnetic tape can be erased.
Not to mention that he is dead. Are they really that important? Let sleeping dogs lie I say.
he resigned and he was pardoned.
One could hardly say that justice was done, or that the whole truth was revealed.
Uh, Nixon is dead. Want to dig him up to do that?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Arlo Guthrie knows what's on the tape. His flagship song is almost exactly
.... NOW kid!!"
8 -words-we-wanna-o f-the-crime-and-an y-other-kind-of-thing-t o-and-about-the-crime-I- want-to-know-arresting-t her-kind-of-thing-you-got ta-say", and talked for
,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get
the same length as the content. Sing it for yourself; here's the lyrics:
This song is called Alice's Restaurant, and it's about Alice, and the
restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant,
that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song Alice's
Restaurant.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on
Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the
restaurant, but Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the
church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and
Fasha the dog. And livin' in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of
room downstairs where the pews used to be in. Havin' all that room,
seein' as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn't
have to take out their garbage for a long time.
We got up there, we found all the garbage in there, and we decided it'd be
a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city dump. So
we took the half a ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW
microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed
on toward the city dump.
Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the
dump saying, "Closed on Thanksgiving." And we had never heard of a dump
closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off
into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.
We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the
side road there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the
cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile
is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we
decided to throw our's down.
That's what we did, and drove back to the church, had a thanksgiving
dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until the
next morning, when we got a phone call from officer Obie. He said, "Kid,
we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of
garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And
I said, "Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope
under that garbage."
After speaking to Obie for about fourty-five minutes on the telephone we
finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down
and pick up the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the
police officer's station. So we got in the red VW microbus with the
shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the
police officer's station.
Now friends, there was only one or two things that Obie coulda done at
the police station, and the first was he could have given us a medal for
being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and
we didn't expect it, and the other thing was he could have bawled us out
and told us never to be see driving garbage around the vicinity again,
which is what we expected, but when we got to the police officer's station
there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was
both immediately arrested. Handcuffed. And I said "Obie, I don't think I
can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on." He said, "Shut up, kid.
Get in the back of the patrol car."
And that's what we did, sat in the back of the patrol car and drove to the
quote Scene of the Crime unquote. I want tell you about the town of
Stockbridge, Massachusets, where this happened here, they got three stop
signs, two police officers, and one police car, but when we got to the
Scene of the Crime there was five police officers and three police cars,
being the biggest crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to
get in the newspaper story about it. And they was using up all kinds of
cop equipment that they had hanging around the police officer's station.
They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and
they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach,
the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to
mention the aerial photography.
After the ordeal, we went back to the jail. Obie said he was going to put
us in the cell. Said, "Kid, I'm going to put you in the cell, I want your
wallet and your belt." And I said, "Obie, I can understand you wanting my
wallet so I don't have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you
want my belt for?" And he said, "Kid, we don't want any hangings." I
said, "Obie, did you think I was going to hang myself for littering?"
Obie said he was making sure, and friends Obie was, cause he took out the
toilet seat so I couldn't hit myself over the head and drown, and he took
out the toilet paper so I couldn't bend the bars roll out the - roll the
toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape. Obie
was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice
(remember Alice? It's a song about Alice), Alice came by and with a few
nasty words to Obie on the side, bailed us out of jail, and we went back
to the church, had a another thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat,
and didn't get up until the next morning, when we all had to go to court.
We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the twenty seven eight-by-ten
colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back
of each one, sat down. Man came in said, "All rise." We all stood up,
and Obie stood up with the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy
pictures, and the judge walked in sat down with a seeing eye dog, and he
sat down, we sat down. Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the
twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows
and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog.
And then at twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry,
'cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American
blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the
judge wasn't going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy
pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each
one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. And
we was fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but thats not
what I came to tell you about.
Came to talk about the draft.
They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street,
where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected,
neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one
day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so
I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. `Cause I wanted to
look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted
to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York,
and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all
kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I waked in and sat down and they gave
me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the phsychiatrist, room 604."
And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I
wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and
guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,
KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and
he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down
yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me,
sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
Didn't feel too good about it.
Proceeded on down the hall gettin more injections, inspections,
detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they was doin' to me
at the thing there, and I was there for two hours, three hours, four
hours, I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean nasty
ugly things and I was just having a tough time there, and they was
inspecting, injecting every single part of me, and they was leaving no
part untouched. Proceeded through, and when I finally came to the see the
last man, I walked in, walked in sat down after a whole big thing there,
and I walked up and said, "What do you want?" He said, "Kid, we only got
one question. Have you ever been arrested?"
And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice's Restaurant Massacre,
with full orchestration and five part harmony and stuff like that and all
the phenome... - and he stopped me right there and said, "Kid, did you ever
go to court?"
And I proceeded to tell him the story of the twenty seven eight-by-ten
colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on
the back of each one, and he stopped me right there and said, "Kid, I want
you to go and sit down on that bench that says Group W
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's
where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after
committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly
looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father
rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And
they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the
bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest
father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly
'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me
and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay
$50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?"
And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench
there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I
said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand,
and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing,
father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the
bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of
things, until the Sargeant came over, had some paper in his hand, held it
up and said.
"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-5
know-details-of-the-crime-time-
you-gotta-say-pertaining-
officer's-name-and-any-o
forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had
fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there,
and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it
down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the
pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the
other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on
the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the
following words:
("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")
I went over to the sargent, said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to
ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm
sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench
'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women,
kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and
said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints
off to Washington."
And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a
study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm
singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar
situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a
situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into
the shrink wherever you are
anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if
one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and
they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an
organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and
walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.
And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and
all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the
guitar.
With feeling. So we'll wait for it to come around on the guitar, here and
sing it when it does. Here it comes.
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
That was horrible. If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud.
I've been singing this song now for twenty five minutes. I could sing it
for another twenty five minutes. I'm not proud... or tired.
So we'll wait till it comes around again, and this time with four part
harmony and feeling.
We're just waitin' for it to come around is what we're doing.
All right now.
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Excepting Alice
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Da da da da da da da dum
At Alice's Restaurant
42
Take that zombie Georg ^H^H^H Richard Nixon!!
(Oh, that's just such a huge target! Everyone knows he sold his soul to the devil, it only makes sense that he'd arise to walk among the undead.)
yes - all you worthless, unemployed, pot smoking hippies come here to DC post haste. That way in 6 months to a year we can find all your partly decomposed bodies in Rock Creek park; or even better, you can feed the mutant fish in the potomac.
Oh, I dunno about that. What if it turns out Nixon
made some comment that incriminated him WRT getting JFK whacked for fixing the '60 election or maybe
admitting he was one of those reptilian space aliens
or some other whacky shit?
When Gerald Ford tried to erase *his* tapes, the pencil eraser kept getting caught on the sticky side.
Best Windows Freeware
Right. He resigned because he was about to be impeached.
- Have a picture
Here is what really happened in those 18 1/2 minutes. The conspirators took a break. While they were out, a woman working as a White House aid came in and did it with Tricky Dick, right on the desk in the white house. And the act resulted in a child, who would later be known to the world as Monica Lewinsky.
It's me, the ghost of Nixon. Well, ummm.. Let me remember that day.... Ah yes, we were first talking about the bloody Jews and how to get their grip from the nation, and then...
,it was that i was talking about our threates with theqwr speace cofnfedrtation fofthe aloeicnece toe restrie thefi rpesvbucli bacfs as t gifvirng body fot the galxsry. Sfrursma sujvieor pasiltune so fu vweb vuuobjr jnzoijtik asj uutiovzlkj fiuh jhviui qiuf zxovybpwe ig9iirz ahfmbvi htwk, fuukruting as, sifuvjte, soifu. Sivhec byfhh joier aichv? Iviubhn tuucv oiuu biuiifh aol. bizxjn vio unlin voiht pabutux. Fuvkjboit hagthdot butrwoz vith! Iotif butkjj zjhhf bioit.
I remember taking about Area51 is it? Ok
fiov ivu.w
ibtrnx.
These tapes could have won Al Gore the Presidency. I heard these 18 1/2 minutes were Sen. Albert Gore Sr., introducing his son and Al Jr. discussing plans for the Internet
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
ThiS nEwS iTeM is L4M3!1!1!!!! g0 70 h311 j00 bU++w1P3!!!1
I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman...
Soccer Goal Plans
Justice Byron White's Definition: no erect penises, no intercourse, no oral or anal sodomy. For White, no erections and no insertions equaled no obscenity.
Brennan's Definition, The Limp Dick Test: no erections. He was willing to accept penetration as long as the pictures passed what his clerks referred to as the limp dick standard. Oral sex was tolerable if there was no erection.
Stewart's Definition, The Casablanca Test: . . . I know it when I see it. [Stewart] had seen in during World War II, when he served as a Navy lieutenant. In Casablanca, as watch officer for his ship, he had seen his men bring back locally produced pornography. He knew the difference between that hardest of hard core and much of what came to the Court. He called it his Casablanca Test .
"Ohhh, Ahhh, Yeah Baby! Now!!!"
Oops, no, sorry, it was the Nixon tapes.
Yes, it makes perfect sense. Nixon resigned before they could impeach him, Clinton stayed on.
Moscow in flames. Missiles headed towards Washington.
Film at 11.
Here are some links on this bit of US history. Good old Tricky Dicky made Bill Clinton look like a choir boy. At least Clinton never tried to circumvent democracy covertly or, for that matter, overtly (that we know).
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
"As history has shown, when the Congress of the United States works with the president ... whether it's winning a world war, a Cold
of the United States, no challenge is too great
War or a war on terrorism," said Tom Ridge, director of Bush's White House Office of
Homeland Security.
Tom: Except when Congress or the President violate the
Constitution of the United States of Amerika.
Thank you and have a good night's toke.
>I don't like Nixon, but I coudl care less what those "exciting" 18 minutes contain. Probably him rambling about the damn liberals again.
c / tc again.
I bet it'd be as exciting as slashbots rambling about the damn conservatives/corporations/microsoft/RIAA/DMCA/et
I think the most troubling thing about Watergate is that since then the amount of credible investigative journalism has dwindled to the point of non-existence. What is news is now determined by the corporate or political interests -- guys like the head of Fox saying that reporting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan doesn't do anyone any good, or John Ashcroft saying that criticizing the Bush administration is on par with helping the terrorists directly.
It's not just an American phenomenon. Up here in Canada two editors have been fired in last couple of years for writing editorials criticizing the Liberal government, because the two editors were working for a newspaper chain owned by Izzy Asper, a buddy of the PM. And as CNN goes international, you see them representing the conservative American viewpoint abroad, to the point of feeding a smear campaign against leaders like Pres. Chavez in Venezuela in their home country.
It's gotten so bad that the only people who openly criticize the powers that be have been largely marginalized (and then dismissed) as radical leftists -- Chomsky, Fisk, Moore, etc. These are brilliant guys with important questions, but the moment you mention their names the ad hominems commence as the argument degenerates into how big of a kook they are.
I guess the big question I have is, if a scandal like Watergate were to hit the ground, in the bustling forest of today's largely goose-stepping society, would it make a sound? I'm worried it wouldn't.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Why not tell a guy you are gay? He just might agree to fuck your ass out of pity. Technically, at least, getting a dick up your ass does qualify as "getting laid".
[insert obligatory comments about who's really running the show...]
"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him!"
- George W. Bush, September 13, 2001
"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
- George W. Bush, March 13, 2002
I thought reel to reel tape had a lifespan of under a decade until serious data loss. If the tape is already 30 years rotted, and was initially thoroughly wiped, is there much of a chance that they can recover anything? --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
mmfmfmbbff what does that Malda woman want now, her baby? Tell her to name it Robert for all I care, geez, I've got enough &$^!# to worry about, get Haldeman on the phone and tell him mfhhdfsjkf
There's a version of Alice's Restaurant that I have on MP3 where Arlo talks about exactly this. He claims that during the Carter Inauguration, Chip Carter pulled him aside and noted that they had found an LP of 'Alice's Restaurant' in the library. Arlo goes on to joke, "So, how many things can you think of that are 18 1/2 minutes long?".
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.
Bull puckey. If you record over a tape enough times you will erase the original information. Otherwise, a length of tape could hole an infinite amount of information.
OTOH, just because you 'can' erase a tape, doesn't mean that it was done in this case.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
yep,but Congress is just as eager to trample our fundamental rights in order to get re-elected for being "tough on terrorists" and the slack jawed yokels of amerika will be just as willing to re-elect them when the time comes.
We sell our rights away day by day and soon we will ALL be up against the wall.
Lest anyone think I am a red or a liberal, nay my friends I am not affiliated with any politcal ideology other than that of personal freedom. My personal freedom should go unchecked until it interferes with another persons freedom. So I should be allowed to own a friggin howitzer as long as I do not go and blow craters in my neighbors yard or endanger his kids with my test firing of said howitzer.
People might think this is Libertarian, but I rather think it is called common sense.
...that they are going to employ a beowouf cluster of audio experts?
Following up on my own post:
Nixon resigned after he was told that there were enough votes in the Senate to convict him. So he was a lot closer to the edge of the cliff than Clinton, who was impeached on a party-line vote and acquitted by the Senate. The votes in the Senate weren't even close to the 2/3 supermajority needed to convict him.
- Have a picture
Let's see, hundreds of FBI files of republicans
perused, and "no controlling authority" for
campaign finance laws. The only difference
between Clinton and Nixon is a few dozen
hacks who plead the fifth instead of one
Deep Throat.
I am not sure if this information is accurate or not -- but i know i got it from a social science course somewhere --
the tape wasn't just "erased" -- it was recorded with white noise, probabbly 20 times over. they tried to recover it but couldn't at that time. If it really is iteratively recording white noise, i doubt even today's computers will make much of a difference -- sure the computers are *faster* and what not -- but even back then, analog filters are just as good as digital filters these days -- takse a while longer, but if you do it right the quality should be similar. (and being a govn't investigation, i would bet they had the best of the best pouring over that tape.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Other theories, anyone?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
enjoy!
What will the parts of the tape that were previously "erased" say played backward? Will we hear what we've suspected all along, Nixon and Schlesinger celebrating black masses and sacrificing goats?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
At least millions of innocents didn't die.
s inger/
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/18/kis
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I recently uncovered a cache of cassette tapes that my family had recorded together 24 years ago. They all played in an old Sony Walkman I borrowed from a friend. I ripped them all to 32kbps MP3's, and they sound OK. So it's reasonable that audio tape can survive almost 30 years, not 10 years like someone was saying.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
It's 18.5 minutes of static. Nixon was in the can.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
Please.
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The movie Dick exposed this years ago.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
You geeks have the stupidest fucking humor ...totally non-sequitur...
a Beowulf cluster of those (t)Apes!!
FDR never got in trouble for putting thousands of asians in campsduring WW2.
so shut the fuck up.
Number 9... number 9... number 9... number 9...
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
There as a show on the Discovery Channel last night (17Jun02) that was talking about efforts to recover the contents of the erased tape. It was quite interesting. Not quite sure what the show was called, because I missed the first 10 minutes of it.
There was a very informative interview with somebody from one of the companies competing for the project. They used some pretty sophisticated computer processing and filtering algorithms on other tapes and actually could recover intelligible conversations.
The companies competing for the project are going to have to prove they are capable of recovering an erased tape by using a demo tape that was erased with the same tape recorder used by Nixon.
The guy they interviewed was talking about building a specialized unit with a bunch of read heads that would be used to digitize audio from the erased tape (reading the tape in DLT fashion it seemed).
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
definitely the last 50 years, i mean you cant forget FDR imprisoning thousands of asian-americans.maybe they will still talk about it after bill clintons(a.k.a the democratic version of calvin coolidge) name has faded.
are you serious? next your gonna ask if they are gonna dig Nixon up for a retry....come on!!
history is history...and its important to know and study so we dont screw up again in the future...uncovering facts no matter how long it takes or how modern of technology we have to use is nessacary to "get the story straight" as to say..you dont want to have to explain anything in detail without knowing all the facts would you?
so yea, uncovering this information is actually very important...
besides who knows whats missing on that tape..could be some really good stuff to gossip about for the next 30 years....
-Alicia
AltaVista:
Republican Scandal 49,798 hits
Democratic Scandal 258,173 hits
Google:
Republican Scandal 108,000 hits
Democratic Scandal 162,000 hits
Hehe. Reptilian space aliens. How many people know about them? All our leaders are part of the cult.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
For example, both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were members of the Nixon and Ford administrations, and lowly-ranked flunkies at that who would be more likely to draw the dirty-work assignments... Talk about poetic justice, that their attempts today to fuck the country would be foiled by their attempts to fuck the country three decades ago. :-D Death to Republicans!
The full op-ed piece can be found here
Generally, Democratic scandals center around somebody in office fucking somebody they shouldn't. Generally, Republican scandals center around somebody in office fucking the whole country. Oh, and of course the pedestrian money-centric scandals both are guilty of (the Republicans generally just on a large scale, more zeros in the amount embezzeled and from more people).
Dude, the balkans are renowned for three things: bad weather, worse terrain, and extremely grumpy natives with more surplus soviet weaponry than good sense... It's also an interesting assumption that only honest liberals would agree with your views, implicitly defining EVERY OTHER "liberal" viewpoint as dishonest. Only a mouth-breathing fucktard conservative would do something like that! ;-)
no two record/erase heads are in exact alignment with those on other machines therefore, it's almost impossible to completely erase an analog tape by recording over it unless you're using the same machine it was recorded on . Some small part of that oxide still has some tiny part of the original recording. For example, In the early 70's I had an important full track mono tape that someone had recorded over in quarter track stereo. By changing the height of the playback head on my quarter track machine, I was able to find an area on the tape that hadn't been erased. Sure it didn't sound too good, but what I wanted was the content more then the fidelity. Of course, when I was done I then had to re-align the head to make it compatible with the rest of the world.
Where can one find more information on how to execute the type of recoveries that the guy was talking about? band pass filters, etc. I'm interested in specific techniques, not generalities. Also interested in specific techniques on how to clean up bad audio (I know some but it can't hurt to know more, can it?)
The dumb thing about celebrating Watergate now, the 30th anniversary of the break-in, is that 99.999% of the public had set it aside in their minds soon after it happened. Celebrating this week is like celebrating our own stupidity. Except for two police beat reporters for the Washington Post nobody gave a shit for a good 1.5 years. We should celebrate sometime in late 2003, the 30th anniversary of when we collectively woke the fuck up.
I'd also like to direct everyone to Woodstein's fantastic book, All the President's Men. Quick & easy read, and it captures like nothing else the discovery of the thing in all its surreal glory.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
It works by using a huge capacitor bank to create an EMP pulse inside a cavity. You open up a door and put in your medium (tape, hard drive, etc.) close the door and push the button. The EMP produced erases the item to the highest security level the Govt has. Needless to say, these devices are quite expensive and the US Govt. is their largest customer.
A good analogy if someone be accused of a crime. Impeachment would be analagous to incitement and removal from office would be analoagous to being found guilty.
Nixon and Clinton were both impeached.
I don't mean to be an ass, but it is not okay for adults or even teenagers to not know this. I get mad about techies who don't know this just as I get mad when normals brag about being bad at math. Of course it is also not okay to spell as badly as I do.
Grytpype's comment should be modded down to 1; it is incorrect.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
The Foster suicide has been investigated numerous times by numerous agencies and even news organizations. In each and every case, the conclusion was the same... he committed suicide.
You might be interested to read David Brock's new book "Blinded by the right", where he goes through a lot of these stories and shows how the right-wing media worked to fabricate them, and how uncredible most of the "witnesses" really were.
What was that joke....? oh yeah... Q: Why did Nixon see the movie "Deep Throat" ? A: He wanted to get it down Pat.
Another possibility is that "CNN says whatever the government tells them to say." But calling them centrist or leftist is a bad joke.
Watergate is a big deal for the same reason that some people think Bob Dylan can sing: it's a Baby Boomer thing. First the Baby Boomers discovered color, sex, civil rights, and opposition to the war. Then they discovered political scandal, and that was Watergate. By the time Reagan came around, they had discovered cocaine, tax-free municipal bonds, and all-white neighborhoods, so they didn't notice.
And they've contributed to hundreds of years of violence in Afghanistan with their own special version of death. Those charming Americans. PS stop watching CNN, or your brain will rot - the civil war in Afghanistan is still going on, women still wear burkas, America has set up a new dictator who will probably be assassinated (but not before killing a few thousand more people), and your government is still lying to you.
it's the bold piece that everyone is constantly at war over. at least that's how it's presented to us.
ok the last one's really stretching it, but really, i agree with you. that line of interferance needs to be clearly defined and kept in check.
it makes sense if you bother to learn the definition of impeach
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go because, man, they're gone."
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Do you guys watch @discovery.ca a few weeks after it'a aired?
This story was on that show like last month.
It was Congress that stopped the draft, not Richard Nixon, when it renewed the draft for just two years in 1971. (Draft registration was re-instated in 1980.)
In any event, given the tens of thousands of Americans who died in Vietnam on Richard Nixon's watch, to like him because you escaped their fate seems, shall we say, just a bit self-centered.
Screw that, what about the scientists that say if you are in the right place at the right time, you could amplify the Gettysburg Address and listen to it.
Those sound waves have to go somewhere, you just have to reconstruct them.
There are few things in this world that are 18 minutes and 30 seconds long... the missing bits of the Nixon tapes and Alro Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". Coincidence? I don't think so....
------------------- a man with a good car needs no justification '93 90S 150K
A majority of senators, in a Republican controlled senate, aquitted him.
Play Command HQ online
I do think that some low-level filtering software a la csound would do wonders; however, linux is sorely lacking in audio tools. Wintel and MacOS are where it's at, and I wouldn't even think about Macs for this kind of situation.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
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In practice people don't erase/record over a tape enough to erase the original information. The effort and time involved in doing so is non-negligable so in practice people don't do it.
If the data on the tape were that important, if you had the opportunity and if you knew that recording over the top would not work unless you did it a lot and with the right sort of sounds you'd simply destroy the tape, ie by converting it to a pile of ash and smoke, dissolving it in acid or otherwise rendering it chemically different from it's original state.
It may be possible to record over a tape to the degree that the original data becomes unrecoverable with any degree of certainty, but it remains impractical to do so.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The archivists should use a high-res data acquisition card to sample the 18.5 minutes on the tape, then make the data available online or on CD-ROMs so hackers can take a crack at it.
www.baudline.com has a selection of Mystery Signals for you to try and identify what they are. Help is provided on how to use the program [called, appropriately enough, 'Baudline'] to isolate, filter, and massage the sound in various ways to figure out what it really is.
It is a sound analysis toolkit that is very flexible and is targeted at audio signal analysis, not editing. See more details here.
Anyway, their Mystery Signals are pretty fun to play with and try to figure out. Hints are provided, as are answers if you choose to look. The explanation provided for this file is:
This mystery signal is the sound of the harmonic oscillations of a surf board strapped to the roof of a rental car that is slowly accelerating. There are two signals of interest here. Let's break it down. The 4 cylinder rental car accelerates from about 30 MPH at the start to about 50 MPH at the end of the file. Switching to a 16384 point FFT size will help bring out the detail. The first signal starts at 80 Hz and it slowly increases in a linear fashion to 88 Hz at the 12 second mark. Using the harmonic helper bars, the 3rd harmonic is the strongest, but the 2nd and 4th are faintly visble. This is the sound of the car engine reving from 2400 to 2640 RPM. Then at the 12 second mark a transition that takes about 3/4 of a second occurs, this is the gear shift of the automatic transmission. The new new fundemental is about 70 Hz and it slowly increases again in a linear fashion to 74 Hz where the file ends. This equates to an increase in engine rev speed from 2100 RPM to 2220 RPM. The acceleration was slow and the RPM calculations match the behavior one would expect from a low performance 4 cylinder rental car with an automatic transmission. The second signal of interest starts at 128 Hz and time zero. Things are fairly calm and the coupled surf board, springy strap, and rental car roof speaker cone are just starting to hum and oscillate. The harmonic helper bars show that the fundamental and the 2nd thru the 6th harmonic are all related. Tracking the wiggles of the fundamental over time show that and they match the variations in the harmonics perfectly. As the car speeds up the lift and the wind force on the surf board increases and the wild harmonic oscillations increase in strength and frequency. There could be some chaos here, it looks like some bifurcation of modulation modes are happening, but some further measurements and analysis is required to say for sure. This mystery signal was recorded on a Canon S110 digital camera in low resolution movie mode. Baudline can read the Canon .AVI movie files and automatically extract the audio. In 160x120 low res mode the S110 can record for 30 seconds which which when coupled with baudline makes it an excellent portable sound recording device. The Canon S110 sound samples are 8-bit at a 11024 sample rate. Looking at the histogram you can see the huge negative DC offset lopsidedness and that every other bin is zero. The even odd bin holes show that the signal originally was 8 bit sampled. The DC offset is most likely caused by a firmware bug in the camera. In the frequency domain this DC offset equates to a strong 0 Hz tone which can visually ignored or corrected with the equalization window.
Program Features: .wav, .aiff, .au, .al, .snd, .voc, .rmd, . pvf, .mp3, ID3, .ogg, .gsm, .sah, raw, .avi, .mov
o channels: mono, stereo, ... up to 9 channels
o data formats: ASCII decimal, A-law, u-law, 1-bit (msb & lsb), 8-bit (signed & unsigned), 16/24/32-bit integer (little & big endian), float, double
o compression
+ lossless suffixes: .gz, .bz2, .Z, .zip, .flac
+ codecs: ADPCM, GSM, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis
* 192 kHz real-time bandwidth * 96 dB dynamic range * Multiple sound card support * Input stream DC offset correction and delay line equalization * Configurable input channels that can perform various operations * Frequency, time, amplitude, and sample probability distribution analysis * High speed displays * Test signal generation * Drift Integration "de-chirping" * Audio player o looping o speed control with multirate resampling o pitch scaling o heterodyning (frequency shifting) o 2D matrix surround panning o notch, high, and low pass filters * File loading o file formats:
Grab the latest binary(only) here or find it in the BSD Ports.
Why in hell didn't he simply burn them?
You're using her as bait, Master!
On CBC the other night (paraphrased): One Legacy of Watergate has been an easy way to name political scandals.
15 years ago the old-timers there said they were the folks who analyzed that tape a decade-plus earlier, and there was no indication they were not successful...
"You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't."
This is wrong. You can't erase a tape completly very easily with a tape recorder, but you can with a bulk tape eraser.
18 1/2 minutes of tape missing....
Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie ) 18 1/2 minutes...
Hmmmmm......... I wonder if brownies were the White House snack that day?
He's been a very busy fellow.
The reality of free software.
...thanks to a top secret DARPA project, unknown till now.
;)
Here's a look at what it's been recording recently in the Oval Office...
...thanks to a top secret DARPA project, unknown till now.
;)
Here's a look at what they've picked up recently in the Oval Office...
Though, after 30 years, physics erases it for you.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Buddy, your tinfoil-hat rantings about the whole Iran-Contra scandal and Nixon's saintliness seem to suggest that you've been in the GOP's Orbital Mind Control Laser Test Range a little too long.
Seriously, you seem to miss the gist of Watergate, namely that it was a huge shakeup of political faith, where Nixon and his associates were suddenly viewed as corrupt, paranoid and willing to commit major crimes to stay in power. It was the first such scarring of the American psyche, and the reason why all other scandals carry "-gate" as a pseudo-clever suffix.
Iran-Contra is remembered not only because it was undeniably illegal (don't forget that Ollie North was convicted), but because of how it became a lose-lose situation for Reagan in the long run: either he wasn't aware of what his aides were planning, or he knowingly broke the law. His presidency is now often regarded as "asleep at the wheel" by pundits because of this.
Clinton's scandals are notable because they dealt with relatively trivial matters being used as political weapons. The bitterness of the attackers and the defenders is said to have eroded public trust in both parties (and played a direct role in the last presidential election). It is also noted for eroding the world's view of the US, for who else but the prudish Americans would make a national crisis out of a person's sex life?
I suppose I've given you more of an answer than you deserve, but you need to realise that the rest of this planet doesn't quite think like you do. Watergate was a grand drama, to which the Clinton scandals are merely petty soap opera.
This is the only mention of Linda Lovelace in the entire thread. How is that redundant?
A poll of people born after 1965 found that only 16% knew the main facts of Watergate. The same poll increased to 60% for those born earlier.
Almost any major historical event has a similar recognition depending on whether one has lived through it or not.
I have just two words: "Deep throat".
For example, all of the reported allegations of intimidation or corruption in the florida 2000 elections were found to be false. But the mainstream press never reported that (or at least never reported it loudly).
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
They did tell me that if a hard drive was put into this that all the semicondictors within said unit would also likely be destroyed....