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Sound Bites of the 1908 Presidential Candidates
roncosmos writes "Science News has up a feature on the first use of sound recording in a presidential campaign. In 1908, for the first time, presidential candidates recorded their voices on wax cylinders. Their voices could be brought into the home for 35 cents, equivalent to about $8 now. In that pre-radio era, this was the only way, short of hearing a speech at a whistle stop, that you could hear the candidates. The story includes audio recordings from the 1908 candidates, William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft. Bryan's speech, on bank failures, seems sadly prescient now. Taft's, on the progress of the Negro, sounds condescending to modern ears but was progressive at the time. There are great images from the campaign; lots of fun."
sounds condescending to modern ears but was progressive at the time
As opposed to the non-condescending progressives of today.
Isn't the whole reason you got the greenback dollar because Lincoln didn't want to get the US govt into hock with the banks?
I was under the impression that there was always a significant distrust of banks in the US, until recently that is. I am astonished that a country which refuses to pay for a national 'free at point of provision' health service, supported by taxes, yet they happily hand over the entire country's income tax to the banking system, and now 700 billion because they stayed greedy for a bit too long.
That also puzzles me. Why not, just to throw a wild idea out, take a portion of the bad dept on for the people who are getting kicked out. I mean like buy 1/2 or 2/3 of the dept from the citizens affected, so they aren't evicted.
Surely that would work just as well.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I'm surprised that the inflation rate is so low for what had to be cutting edge technology of the era. Considering that a modern music CD that costs literal pennies to press sells (or attempts to sell, considering recent sales figures) for up to twice that price I wonder what figure was used for the amount of inflation over the last century.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's nice, but why the hell couldn't they just link to them directly? Why do they go out of their way to make their site completely unusable to those of us who don't use flash? It's so easy to do it right, why do so many places get it wrong?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There's a purpose to having tags?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yes, and some day my "why can't all sites work the same without javascript" campaign will catch on, too.
Why can't all sites work the same without javascript! I shouldn't have to use that trash!
Your argument seems to be that the government forced companies to take on loans from 'minorities and the poor'. You didn't quite work yourself into a froth about liberalism, affirmative action or whatever else you think is wrong with left but it seems like you were heading in that direction.
If you look at the people who are defaulting on mortgages it's not really minorities and the poor (I guess in your mind minority = poor?) but mostly middle class Americans who took out loans that they couldn't afford to pay back. Just look at where these defaulters live and you'll see that suburban middle class (white, black, hispanic, etc.) enclaves are most effected.
I won't disagree with you that some of this crisis has it's roots during the Clinton era or that the government is partially to blame. I'd blame the government for not regulating the lending industry enough rather then accusing them of forcing risky loans on companies. These companies, as well as the housing industry, wanted to take on these loans because they saw green and more importantly, other institutions wanted the securities these loans were wrapped up in because they thought it would make them money.
Please don't use this crisis as some sort of attack against the poor and/or minorities. It just makes you sound ignorant.
Really? Flash is pretty easy to use, too. You just install the plugin, and bam, it works. Amazingly enough, this is relevant to Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Wow. Technology.
It's amazing. A few years ago, people would whine about using RealAudio to distribute. Then they'd whine about WMA, because it wasn't cross platform. Then they'd whine about MP3 because of licensing. Now, sites are using a cross platform, semi open distribution method that is nearly ubiquitous, and now people want to make things up to whine about. Just install Flash.
- oZ
// i am here.
Really? Flash is pretty easy to use, too.
How easy? Can you use it with your eyes closed? For sake of argument, I'll allow you to have a braille display.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Not nearly as ignorant as you would believe. Ever heard of the Community Reinvestment Act and its amendments? It played an important role in dropping the standards on accounting to make this problem possible. I admit that I came across as blaming only the poor and minorities in that first paragraph (such is the result of fast posting). The middle class certainly has its large share of the blame too for overspending on housing. However, let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this environment would have happened the way it did if banks didn't face the threat of legal action under the CRA if they denied someone a mortgage when that person could, *ahem*, theoretically make the payments on their current income.
The CRA only applies to banks.
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/barr021308.pdf
The CRA is only at worst 50% responsible (an additional 30% of the subprime loans were made by "affiliates" of banks, and therefore partially covered by CRA, the remaining 20% of all loans were made directly by banks... and the worst case scenario is that the regulators were there twisting the banks' arms for every single loan). The other 50% of the mortgages were irrefutably made of the originators' free will.
Secondly, the CRA doesn't call for Option ARMs or interest-only loans or giving people money with zero down or piggybacking another mortgage for the down payment or liar loans... those are entirely the invention of the banks and mortgage companies that offered them.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
why can't all sites work the same without javascript
Because people don't know how to code. Some javascript is needed and useful, but 99% of it isn't. My old Quake site used javascript, but if you didn't have javascript it degraded gracefully. The Stroggs still danced, but mousing over the one on the right didn't have Sonic the Hedgehog running past and getting squished. With javascript the nav buttons were animated when you moused over them, without they just sat there with the arrow cursor turning into a hand pointer.
"Dopey Smurf" was a medical student who had a rat he was dissecting wake up and bite him once. When he decided to close his site, I "sent him a box of invisible rats". Actually we set it up with a news item on his site that I'd sent a box of invisible rats, so whatever you do FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T CLICK THIS LINK!!! or the invisible rats would escape and eat his site. If you clicked the link, invisible rats actually did come out and eat his site; there was a GIF animation of teeth marks, yellow rat shapes covering the page, which left it just like Joost Shuur's Slipgate Central after it closed. We didn't use a single line of javascript, just an HTML link and an animated GIF.
You young folks missed it, the internet was lots of fun back then. Now it's all javascript, flash, and advertising.
Free Martian Whores!
Like Phil Gramm, McCain's economic advisor, who calls people "whiners" if they think the economy is doing badly?
Heck, conservatives are most of the elite---Bush beat Kerry by huge margins among people making $200k+, even in states that Kerry otherwise won handily (he won 64-35% among that demographic in California). Rich liberals are a fairly small subset of overall rich people---even in California, conservative aerospace/defense industry, real-estate, and import/export businessmen far outnumber Hollywood actors and tech bosses.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Biden does a fine job of making himself look stupid, he doesn't need our help. Though surprisingly he did manage to cry in the debate...
He was speaking of his wife and daughter who were killed as I understand it.
What sort of heartless fuck are you? Will you laugh when your family is killed, or will you just not care?"
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Maybe because this is 2008, and they're not trying to cater to the teeny-tiny, incredibly miniscule number of Slashdot whiners who still live in the Dark Ages and refuse to use any Flash whatsoever even though it's the most popular cross-platform web solution for delivering multimedia content.
"Sufferin' succotash."
While almost every poll shows Biden winning the debate, they also pretty much universally show that Palin exceeded expectations much more so than Biden. In that regard, it was a win for the Republicans.
If you consider that there were many Americans who went into that debate thinking that they'd like to Vote for McCain, but couldn't on the possible chance that a 72-76 year old would keel over and die and we'd be left with Palin who would make the Bush years seem like an enlightened era. But with her performance, she's upgraded her status from "can't construct sentences" to "wholly unqualified" in many people's eyes. And that frees them up to vote for McCain if they feel he'd make the better president.
I'd say that in this election, more than any other that I've been alive to see, the issue of the vice president's competency is important. Normally, the VP does very little, and that wouldn't much change for the two VP candidates. But with one candidate being 72 years old and the other candidate being an African-American (nothing against him personally, but there are a lot of racist nut-jobs out there that could resort to violence rather than live with having a black President), the importance of who would take over the office of President in the event of the elected President's death will factor into people's decision making.
And in that regard, Palin did well enough that she may be considered, if not yet an asset to McCain, at least not a large a liability as she seemed to be going into the debate.