It could have been worse, it could have been something like "produces 300,000 volts of power, which in watts per second is larger than an aircraft carrier and enough to burn down the entire Library of Congress..."
Adding basic overcurrent protection to the boost converter would be a pretty easy mod that might address what Ancient Hacker is talking about - a current sense resistor in series with the switching transistor and an optocoupler could be used to pull down the drive line to ground if the BOOST line gets stuck high. There would have to be a current limiting resistor in series with the BOOST line, which wouldn't be a problem as a FET is being used as the switching device. This would also provide some measure of output overcurrent protection as the average current through the inductor and FET tracks the output current.
They're not rare in Soviet Russia! Joking aside, these VFDs are not that rare. Like some kind of state-sponsored labor monster run amuck, these (and all kinds of other vacuum tubes) were produced by the trainload during the heyday of the Cold War. They can now be picked up for a few dollars on eBay from sellers in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Of course the US produced its fair share of tubes as well, but the vacuum tube era seems to have lasted much longer in Eastern Europe than here (particularly in military applications), and lots of the common NOS tubes in the US have been used up in guitar and stereo amps. In the strange world of vintage vacuum electronics it is often the more exotic looking items covered in Cyrillic that are cheap and cheerful, and the US and UK parts that are rare and coveted.
It would be interesting to know what product these VFD tubes were initially intended for; maybe they were used in calculators given the number of digits. The US pretty much jumped directly from Nixies and Numitrons right to LEDs and LCDs, but I'm betting that in Eastern Europe the adoption of LED technology was more slow and there needed to be a display technology to fill the gap. I think my suspicions may be correct given this eBay aucion where a Russian manufactured VFD clock is for sale - the description says it supposedly was manufactured in 1982 when a similar product in the US would be LED for sure.
No effort is spared in government to protect the dishonest business practices of these sheisters, and no effort is spared in the media to disguise it as the parent companies of the major media outlets benefit greatly from keeping the public in the dark.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. research analyst Marc Irizarry's published rating on mutual-fund manager Janus Capital Group Inc. was a lackluster "neutral" in early April 2008. But at an internal meeting that month, the analyst told dozens of Goldman's traders the stock was likely to head higher, company documents show.
Nothing like selling bonds out the front door and shorting them on your prop desk, right? Oh wait, Goldman did that too!
Securities laws require firms like Goldman to engage in "fair dealing with customers," and prohibit analysts from issuing opinions that are at odds with their true beliefs about a stock. Steven Strongin, Goldman's stock research chief, says no one gains an unfair advantage from its trading huddles, and that the short-term-trading ideas are not contrary to the longer-term stock forecasts in its written research.
It's touching that you care so much about your brothers and sisters in the global village - as an American you can rest assured that they couldn't give a fuck less about you. The "citizen of the world" mindset is a predominantly White American/European peculiarity that I imagine is the result of both relatively long term economic prosperity, the underlying Christian ideology that America was founded on, and the rise in power of predominately left-wing philosophies that came to the forefront post 1960.
Unfortunately, take away one of these elements, and the house of cards collapses. Outside of the Western world there are essentially two things that matter: Nation and Race. When you are competing with people whose belief structures center around those concepts (and you will compete with them, as bringing up the standard of living in those nations to that of the West is impossible given the Earth's finite resources), having the "citizen of the world" mindset is effective suicide. Interestingly, every time there is an economic downturn in the developed world those nasty nationalistic ideas seem to be rediscovered: for example the recent election of members of the UK's BNP to the EU parliament and the uproar that went along with it. Why should this be so? In the developing world, every political party is a nationalist party, essentially by definition. The 21st century as I see it will hardly be a century of the fruition of the "global citizen" ideal, but because of declining resources the first element of the house of cards, economic prosperity, will start to be dismantled. The defining characteristic of the 21st century will be the rise of ethnopolitics and hypernationalism.
But the "no tariff open free market" game has rules that only the US appears to be playing by: South American countries, Southeast Asian countries, Mexico, and the EU have tariffs many times higher than the US on all sorts of products. These nations do this, obviously, to protect their own domestic industries - the problem is that since the US began its transition from a producer nation to a consumer nation in the 1960s we're now in a position where we effectively have no significant domestic industry (outside of agriculture) to protect any longer. In this position tariffs certainly hurt us, but I think the issue of whether they hurt more than help nations with a strong production base is less clear.
As if US corporations ever actually pay anywhere near what the rates actually are - any corporation can find innumerable tax loopholes while setting up offshore holding companies to cut the effective rate down to nearly nothing. Goldman Sachs paid an effective 1% tax rate in 2008, many US corporations manage to get an effective rate of 0% and pay no taxes at all. I'm all for reducing corporate tax rates, if the loopholes are closed so that the rates set down have some actual fiscal meaning.
I learned everything I know about UK culture from watching "The Vicar of Dibley" and "Are You Being Served" reruns on PBS, and based on my extensive research I'd say no.
1 acre is actually 43560 square feet, or 6,272,640 square inches, and there are 640 acres in a square mile.
Also, you have to remember that for volume the quantity "ounce" comes in two varieties, the fluid ounce and the solid ounce. The solid ounce is defined as exactly 1/16th of a pound of any substance, but since the fluid ounce is a measure of volume (about 29 ml), not weight, the weight of a fluid ounce in pounds will vary with the density of the substance, but it's exactly 1/128th of a gallon. I've seen tall cans of beer advertised using both weight and volume measurements at the same time: a can of beer advertised as being 24 ounces and above the store display reads "$1.79 per pound!" If you didn't know there were two definitions you might get confused. At least we don't have to spend a lot of time calculating how many gills are in a hogshead anymore.
Why exactly do the participants at Burning Man need and deserve extra protection from "exploitation" over and above the protection afforded to any other citizen in any other circumstance under the law? People are exploited for profit in any number of different ways including through print, photographic, and television mediums day in and day out. Life is hard and unfair. Just declaring that "we are a special community in need of special protective measures because we do things that we can't do elsewhere but we want to be able to do them here without interference because we're us" hardly seems like suitable justification.
Here is my experience with Linux-Folks see the lower price, go "oooh pretty!" and no matter how you try to steer them they end up going to Walmart, or Best Buy, or Staples and going "oohhhh sale!" and putting something in their cart with ZERO research. And without research the odds of getting something from a retailer like Walmart that works in Linux is less than 20%. Then they bring it back because the PC is "broken" and expect you to "fix it", which of course you can't. So you either burn the customer, who then spreads the word at what a shitty shop you have and soon you are out of business, or take the product back and eat the difference between the new price and what you can get for it used.
When I worked for an internet electronics retailer I was amazed at just how often situations like this would happen. A typical call would go something like this:
"You idiots! You sent me the wrong item! Take this piece of junk back and send me what I want!"
"I'm sorry about that, it says on your order form you ordered a Widget ABC dash 9. What did you receive instead?
"Oh, I got a Widget ABC dash 9 alright. Why did you send me this thing?"
"Because you, um, ordered it?"
"Yeah, I ordered it, but it's not what I want.What's wrong with you guys that you can't send me what I want?
This would happen at least a couple of times a week - apparently for some customers a "Sale" banner with a low price on some item is just too much to resist, and they'll order it having absolutely no notion of what they're buying. We called this "I don't know what this thing is but I want it" syndrome. In their minds apparently it was the job of the retailer to somehow divine after the fact what the customer actually desired.
the AM3 CPU's work with both DDR2/AM2+ motherboards and DDR2/AM3 and DDR3/AM3 motherboards.
The AM3 CPUs only work with AM2+ motherboards if your motherboard vendor decides to provide a BIOS update to support them, and certain motherboard manufacturers (cough ASUS) have been reluctant to provide BIOS updates to upgrade "obsolete products" for obvious reasons.
If you think hard enough about the first one, you'll discover the purpose of the RIAA equalization curve for cutting and playback of records: a record is cut with constant linear velocity, so the size of the grooves being cut are inversely proportional to the frequency of the sound. If the gain of the recording device is boosted to the point where the signal to noise ratio of the high frequency sounds becomes acceptable, the grooves of the low frequency sounds will become too large. So a record is cut with the low frequencies cut and the high frequencies boosted to keep the groove size within a certain range. On playback, the low frequencies are boosted, and the high frequencies are cut by the RIAA equalization circuitry.
One of the RIAA's few useful contributions to society!
It's not just you, I've heard it said that the next bubble of the 21st century, after the tech bubble and the housing bubble, will be the carbon credit bubble. There is a new government-created "commodity" in carbon credits, which are government-mandated to decrease in number over time, and are therefore government-mandated to increase in value over time. Sounds like something that's right up Goldman Sachs' alley. I might even guess that the collapse of such a bubble would occur when rampant speculation on carbon credits drives the prices of said credits up high enough that corporations who are able to do so start shifting their industry to nations where the carbon credit regulations are unenforced or unenforceable, nations which would gain enormous financial benefit by being "carbon credit havens." The value of carbon credits could only be propped up for as long as investors felt secure that everyone was playing by the same rules, and we know how often that happens.
For a moment I thought you were going to say "Maybe you'd like to be a grad student in civil engineering and make hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of dollars!"
Real men don't need no stinkin' simulators! We just write down the equivalent circuit models, use Kirchoff's current law and apply Cramer's rule! Nothing's more exciting than spending a leisurely weekend computing the determinant of a 258 element matrix in the s-plane by hand. Frequency response sometimes takes a bit longer....:)
What confuses me is why there is even a "health insurance" system at all, for something which absolutely everyone needs? At some point in a person's life, to a greater or lesser degree, they are going to need health care - it's a fact as simple as the fact that everyone is eventually going to be disabled at some point in their lifetime, it's just a question of when and for how long. By the same logic I should be able to go and pay into a "Food Insurance" fund that will buy me sammiches on the off chance I should get hungry at some point in my life.
Every generation believes that it knows better than the previous generation, and that certain social institutions are the way that they are simply because no one has ever tried anything different. History of course tells a different story, but those uncomfortable facts are conveniently overlooked. Would a society which is informationally "transparent" really lead to a society which is more polite? As an anecdotal experience, I had a violent childhood where the number of people whom I could trust could be counted on one hand with fingers to spare. Now, did I have "dirt" on the people and groups whom I was in conflict with? Of course I did - anyone who in conflicts for long enough gets to know their enemy. Did it matter that I did? Not a whit - because it was in the interests of the powers that be to ignore that any conflict was taking place. Information about me was easy ammunition, but I could have shouted on the streetcorner all day about the misdeeds of people I was dealing with and it wouldn't have mattered a whit. Information is only useful when you have the power to act on it, and in a "transparent society" it will me made damn sure that the capability to actually act on the wealth of information available is designated only to the select few. The powerful will always find a way to exploit the weak and there is absolutely no way around it. It's genetic, it's human, it's who we are.
"Gender neutral" and "color blind" are just a new set of weapon-words that play their part in the struggle of group against group - who would really want such a society if there weren't some advantage in it for them? A society which is totally transparent and has no refuge for one's individual experiences, thoughts, and actions may be a useful vehicle for those attempting to obtain this "gender and color-blind society" (to their own advantage, as always) but it is not a society built upon freedom, it is the antithesis of a free society.
Did the government just allow for the companies to grow so large, or could one say that the government actively encouraged the growth of oligopolies in certain sectors due to effective lobbying by those sectors? Corporations love competition when they are on the offensive, but they hate it when they are on the defensive, and many American corporations (for numerous reasons) have been on the defensive of late. So, the FedGov hates competition, large corporations hate competition - sounds like a match made in heaven! It seems only when this two peas in a pod arrangement goes sour, and the screwups of the corporate siblings threaten their government brother, that there is realization (too late of course) that this match may not have been for the best.
I'll admit that I don't know a great deal about Libertarian philosophy, but how anyone who works in an economic capacity for the U.S. government can perform their job and say that the government upholds free-market capitalist ideals with a straight face is beyond me. Free market rhetoric must be just some kind of obfuscation to deflect the fact that the much of the US economic system is really a kind of corporate-socialist hybrid, and has been for quite some time (perhaps beginning truly in earnest after World War 2, and the incredible increase in economic power the U.S. was able to obtain when the government and industry joined forces). It appears to be the logical and efficient solution when it works (look at what China has managed to do under this kind of arrangement in the span of only about 20 years!), but watch out when it falters.
As a resident of New England, I feel I can say from my own anecdotal experience that the "excess" of single women in this area are single for reasons that do not in any way assist an average tech-inclined guy in getting a date. Add to this the general innate hostility of a large number of New Englanders and the general disinterest (outside of Cambridge, perhaps) of doing any activities that don't involve sports and/or drinking, and I have had much better luck with "web dating" in other parts of the country, however less attractive the odds may appear on the surface.
In the case of music copyrights, one can also thank the Gershwin estate among others for lobbying on behalf of copyright extension - Gershwin's music is big business and the copyright holders would like to make sure that American Airlines (as one past example) would have to keep paying large sums of money for the rights to use "An American in Paris" for as long as possible.
The problem with the Theremin is that to make a working example based on the principle of the original (capacitive coupling between the hands and antennas changing the frequency of an LC oscillator) is actually a fairly complex project - you have to understand about how LC oscillators work, the superheterodyne principle (the pitch oscillator is the difference frequency between a fixed and variable RF oscillator), transistor amplifier principles, etc. Of course, they can be built from kits, but just building from a kit doesn't really provide any insight into the functioning of the circuit.
A project that maintains the spirit of the original but might be easier for 9th graders to get a handle on might be the optical theremin. It only uses a few parts, and the basic operation of the 555 timer and light dependent resistance should be approachable for newcomers to electronics.
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Please define "hate speech" in a way that is objective and clear and does not require knowing what is going on inside the mind of the person using it.
Anything a white male says which indicates that they don't have the requisite level of self-loathing or consider themselves 9th class citizens.
It could have been worse, it could have been something like "produces 300,000 volts of power, which in watts per second is larger than an aircraft carrier and enough to burn down the entire Library of Congress..."
Adding basic overcurrent protection to the boost converter would be a pretty easy mod that might address what Ancient Hacker is talking about - a current sense resistor in series with the switching transistor and an optocoupler could be used to pull down the drive line to ground if the BOOST line gets stuck high. There would have to be a current limiting resistor in series with the BOOST line, which wouldn't be a problem as a FET is being used as the switching device. This would also provide some measure of output overcurrent protection as the average current through the inductor and FET tracks the output current.
They're not rare in Soviet Russia! Joking aside, these VFDs are not that rare. Like some kind of state-sponsored labor monster run amuck, these (and all kinds of other vacuum tubes) were produced by the trainload during the heyday of the Cold War. They can now be picked up for a few dollars on eBay from sellers in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Of course the US produced its fair share of tubes as well, but the vacuum tube era seems to have lasted much longer in Eastern Europe than here (particularly in military applications), and lots of the common NOS tubes in the US have been used up in guitar and stereo amps. In the strange world of vintage vacuum electronics it is often the more exotic looking items covered in Cyrillic that are cheap and cheerful, and the US and UK parts that are rare and coveted.
It would be interesting to know what product these VFD tubes were initially intended for; maybe they were used in calculators given the number of digits. The US pretty much jumped directly from Nixies and Numitrons right to LEDs and LCDs, but I'm betting that in Eastern Europe the adoption of LED technology was more slow and there needed to be a display technology to fill the gap. I think my suspicions may be correct given this eBay aucion where a Russian manufactured VFD clock is for sale - the description says it supposedly was manufactured in 1982 when a similar product in the US would be LED for sure.
No effort is spared in government to protect the dishonest business practices of these sheisters, and no effort is spared in the media to disguise it as the parent companies of the major media outlets benefit greatly from keeping the public in the dark.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. research analyst Marc Irizarry's published rating on mutual-fund manager Janus Capital Group Inc. was a lackluster "neutral" in early April 2008. But at an internal meeting that month, the analyst told dozens of Goldman's traders the stock was likely to head higher, company documents show.
Nothing like selling bonds out the front door and shorting them on your prop desk, right? Oh wait, Goldman did that too!
Securities laws require firms like Goldman to engage in "fair dealing with customers," and prohibit analysts from issuing opinions that are at odds with their true beliefs about a stock. Steven Strongin, Goldman's stock research chief, says no one gains an unfair advantage from its trading huddles, and that the short-term-trading ideas are not contrary to the longer-term stock forecasts in its written research.
Riiiight. And I'm the Easter Bunny.
It's touching that you care so much about your brothers and sisters in the global village - as an American you can rest assured that they couldn't give a fuck less about you. The "citizen of the world" mindset is a predominantly White American/European peculiarity that I imagine is the result of both relatively long term economic prosperity, the underlying Christian ideology that America was founded on, and the rise in power of predominately left-wing philosophies that came to the forefront post 1960.
Unfortunately, take away one of these elements, and the house of cards collapses. Outside of the Western world there are essentially two things that matter: Nation and Race. When you are competing with people whose belief structures center around those concepts (and you will compete with them, as bringing up the standard of living in those nations to that of the West is impossible given the Earth's finite resources), having the "citizen of the world" mindset is effective suicide. Interestingly, every time there is an economic downturn in the developed world those nasty nationalistic ideas seem to be rediscovered: for example the recent election of members of the UK's BNP to the EU parliament and the uproar that went along with it. Why should this be so? In the developing world, every political party is a nationalist party, essentially by definition. The 21st century as I see it will hardly be a century of the fruition of the "global citizen" ideal, but because of declining resources the first element of the house of cards, economic prosperity, will start to be dismantled. The defining characteristic of the 21st century will be the rise of ethnopolitics and hypernationalism.
But the "no tariff open free market" game has rules that only the US appears to be playing by: South American countries, Southeast Asian countries, Mexico, and the EU have tariffs many times higher than the US on all sorts of products. These nations do this, obviously, to protect their own domestic industries - the problem is that since the US began its transition from a producer nation to a consumer nation in the 1960s we're now in a position where we effectively have no significant domestic industry (outside of agriculture) to protect any longer. In this position tariffs certainly hurt us, but I think the issue of whether they hurt more than help nations with a strong production base is less clear.
As if US corporations ever actually pay anywhere near what the rates actually are - any corporation can find innumerable tax loopholes while setting up offshore holding companies to cut the effective rate down to nearly nothing. Goldman Sachs paid an effective 1% tax rate in 2008, many US corporations manage to get an effective rate of 0% and pay no taxes at all. I'm all for reducing corporate tax rates, if the loopholes are closed so that the rates set down have some actual fiscal meaning.
I learned everything I know about UK culture from watching "The Vicar of Dibley" and "Are You Being Served" reruns on PBS, and based on my extensive research I'd say no.
1 acre is actually 43560 square feet, or 6,272,640 square inches, and there are 640 acres in a square mile.
Also, you have to remember that for volume the quantity "ounce" comes in two varieties, the fluid ounce and the solid ounce. The solid ounce is defined as exactly 1/16th of a pound of any substance, but since the fluid ounce is a measure of volume (about 29 ml), not weight, the weight of a fluid ounce in pounds will vary with the density of the substance, but it's exactly 1/128th of a gallon. I've seen tall cans of beer advertised using both weight and volume measurements at the same time: a can of beer advertised as being 24 ounces and above the store display reads "$1.79 per pound!" If you didn't know there were two definitions you might get confused. At least we don't have to spend a lot of time calculating how many gills are in a hogshead anymore.
Why exactly do the participants at Burning Man need and deserve extra protection from "exploitation" over and above the protection afforded to any other citizen in any other circumstance under the law? People are exploited for profit in any number of different ways including through print, photographic, and television mediums day in and day out. Life is hard and unfair. Just declaring that "we are a special community in need of special protective measures because we do things that we can't do elsewhere but we want to be able to do them here without interference because we're us" hardly seems like suitable justification.
Here is my experience with Linux-Folks see the lower price, go "oooh pretty!" and no matter how you try to steer them they end up going to Walmart, or Best Buy, or Staples and going "oohhhh sale!" and putting something in their cart with ZERO research. And without research the odds of getting something from a retailer like Walmart that works in Linux is less than 20%. Then they bring it back because the PC is "broken" and expect you to "fix it", which of course you can't. So you either burn the customer, who then spreads the word at what a shitty shop you have and soon you are out of business, or take the product back and eat the difference between the new price and what you can get for it used.
When I worked for an internet electronics retailer I was amazed at just how often situations like this would happen. A typical call would go something like this:
"You idiots! You sent me the wrong item! Take this piece of junk back and send me what I want!"
"I'm sorry about that, it says on your order form you ordered a Widget ABC dash 9. What did you receive instead?
"Oh, I got a Widget ABC dash 9 alright. Why did you send me this thing?"
"Because you, um, ordered it?"
"Yeah, I ordered it, but it's not what I want.What's wrong with you guys that you can't send me what I want?
This would happen at least a couple of times a week - apparently for some customers a "Sale" banner with a low price on some item is just too much to resist, and they'll order it having absolutely no notion of what they're buying. We called this "I don't know what this thing is but I want it" syndrome. In their minds apparently it was the job of the retailer to somehow divine after the fact what the customer actually desired.
the AM3 CPU's work with both DDR2/AM2+ motherboards and DDR2/AM3 and DDR3/AM3 motherboards.
The AM3 CPUs only work with AM2+ motherboards if your motherboard vendor decides to provide a BIOS update to support them, and certain motherboard manufacturers (cough ASUS) have been reluctant to provide BIOS updates to upgrade "obsolete products" for obvious reasons.
If you think hard enough about the first one, you'll discover the purpose of the RIAA equalization curve for cutting and playback of records: a record is cut with constant linear velocity, so the size of the grooves being cut are inversely proportional to the frequency of the sound. If the gain of the recording device is boosted to the point where the signal to noise ratio of the high frequency sounds becomes acceptable, the grooves of the low frequency sounds will become too large. So a record is cut with the low frequencies cut and the high frequencies boosted to keep the groove size within a certain range. On playback, the low frequencies are boosted, and the high frequencies are cut by the RIAA equalization circuitry. One of the RIAA's few useful contributions to society!
It's not just you, I've heard it said that the next bubble of the 21st century, after the tech bubble and the housing bubble, will be the carbon credit bubble. There is a new government-created "commodity" in carbon credits, which are government-mandated to decrease in number over time, and are therefore government-mandated to increase in value over time. Sounds like something that's right up Goldman Sachs' alley. I might even guess that the collapse of such a bubble would occur when rampant speculation on carbon credits drives the prices of said credits up high enough that corporations who are able to do so start shifting their industry to nations where the carbon credit regulations are unenforced or unenforceable, nations which would gain enormous financial benefit by being "carbon credit havens." The value of carbon credits could only be propped up for as long as investors felt secure that everyone was playing by the same rules, and we know how often that happens.
For a moment I thought you were going to say "Maybe you'd like to be a grad student in civil engineering and make hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of dollars!"
Real men don't need no stinkin' simulators! We just write down the equivalent circuit models, use Kirchoff's current law and apply Cramer's rule! Nothing's more exciting than spending a leisurely weekend computing the determinant of a 258 element matrix in the s-plane by hand. Frequency response sometimes takes a bit longer....:)
What confuses me is why there is even a "health insurance" system at all, for something which absolutely everyone needs? At some point in a person's life, to a greater or lesser degree, they are going to need health care - it's a fact as simple as the fact that everyone is eventually going to be disabled at some point in their lifetime, it's just a question of when and for how long. By the same logic I should be able to go and pay into a "Food Insurance" fund that will buy me sammiches on the off chance I should get hungry at some point in my life.
Every generation believes that it knows better than the previous generation, and that certain social institutions are the way that they are simply because no one has ever tried anything different. History of course tells a different story, but those uncomfortable facts are conveniently overlooked. Would a society which is informationally "transparent" really lead to a society which is more polite? As an anecdotal experience, I had a violent childhood where the number of people whom I could trust could be counted on one hand with fingers to spare. Now, did I have "dirt" on the people and groups whom I was in conflict with? Of course I did - anyone who in conflicts for long enough gets to know their enemy. Did it matter that I did? Not a whit - because it was in the interests of the powers that be to ignore that any conflict was taking place. Information about me was easy ammunition, but I could have shouted on the streetcorner all day about the misdeeds of people I was dealing with and it wouldn't have mattered a whit. Information is only useful when you have the power to act on it, and in a "transparent society" it will me made damn sure that the capability to actually act on the wealth of information available is designated only to the select few. The powerful will always find a way to exploit the weak and there is absolutely no way around it. It's genetic, it's human, it's who we are.
"Gender neutral" and "color blind" are just a new set of weapon-words that play their part in the struggle of group against group - who would really want such a society if there weren't some advantage in it for them? A society which is totally transparent and has no refuge for one's individual experiences, thoughts, and actions may be a useful vehicle for those attempting to obtain this "gender and color-blind society" (to their own advantage, as always) but it is not a society built upon freedom, it is the antithesis of a free society.
Did the government just allow for the companies to grow so large, or could one say that the government actively encouraged the growth of oligopolies in certain sectors due to effective lobbying by those sectors? Corporations love competition when they are on the offensive, but they hate it when they are on the defensive, and many American corporations (for numerous reasons) have been on the defensive of late. So, the FedGov hates competition, large corporations hate competition - sounds like a match made in heaven! It seems only when this two peas in a pod arrangement goes sour, and the screwups of the corporate siblings threaten their government brother, that there is realization (too late of course) that this match may not have been for the best.
I'll admit that I don't know a great deal about Libertarian philosophy, but how anyone who works in an economic capacity for the U.S. government can perform their job and say that the government upholds free-market capitalist ideals with a straight face is beyond me. Free market rhetoric must be just some kind of obfuscation to deflect the fact that the much of the US economic system is really a kind of corporate-socialist hybrid, and has been for quite some time (perhaps beginning truly in earnest after World War 2, and the incredible increase in economic power the U.S. was able to obtain when the government and industry joined forces). It appears to be the logical and efficient solution when it works (look at what China has managed to do under this kind of arrangement in the span of only about 20 years!), but watch out when it falters.
It's hard to be wrong twice in the same post, but somehow I manage :)
As a resident of New England, I feel I can say from my own anecdotal experience that the "excess" of single women in this area are single for reasons that do not in any way assist an average tech-inclined guy in getting a date. Add to this the general innate hostility of a large number of New Englanders and the general disinterest (outside of Cambridge, perhaps) of doing any activities that don't involve sports and/or drinking, and I have had much better luck with "web dating" in other parts of the country, however less attractive the odds may appear on the surface.
You're right, "Rhapsody in Blue" was the song I was thinking of.
In the case of music copyrights, one can also thank the Gershwin estate among others for lobbying on behalf of copyright extension - Gershwin's music is big business and the copyright holders would like to make sure that American Airlines (as one past example) would have to keep paying large sums of money for the rights to use "An American in Paris" for as long as possible.
The problem with the Theremin is that to make a working example based on the principle of the original (capacitive coupling between the hands and antennas changing the frequency of an LC oscillator) is actually a fairly complex project - you have to understand about how LC oscillators work, the superheterodyne principle (the pitch oscillator is the difference frequency between a fixed and variable RF oscillator), transistor amplifier principles, etc. Of course, they can be built from kits, but just building from a kit doesn't really provide any insight into the functioning of the circuit.
A project that maintains the spirit of the original but might be easier for 9th graders to get a handle on might be the optical theremin. It only uses a few parts, and the basic operation of the 555 timer and light dependent resistance should be approachable for newcomers to electronics.