That wouldn't be too good for the microphone.
The switches of the hook are there to prevent that.
They connect/disconnect in such an order that the telephone exchange is signalled that you pick up the receiver so the ringer signal is switched off before the speaker and mic are connected. I once had a telephone where this dis not work properly. When you picked it up at the exact moment of a ring, a loud buzzing sound came out of the earpiece. Not nice.

If the receiver is on hook, both mic and speaker are completely disconnected, as you can see.
The capacitor is in series with the ringer, not with mic/speaker.
Please let me know from the schematic (the one I linked to, or another one if mine is not correct for the phone you have in mind) what exact signal pathway you have in mind. "Some of the signal might be affected" is too vague to be refuted or confirmed.

Yes, I know the difference.
I have disassembled T65 telephones, myself, and I did not find any difference to the schematic I linked to.
That is why I asked you to post the schematic of the telephones you disassembled that were different.
Unless you can do so, and explain how a telephone off hook can be used to eavesdrop on you, you confirm my opinion that you are a troll.
A moderately competent one, I must say: I'm still feeding you...

Yeah, the display hardware of the ZX81 was brilliant in its simplicity.
Not only did it use the program counter as the character point er for the display, but the I/R (interrupt and DRAM refresh) register pair was used as a pointer into the character ROM. These were output automatically by the processor directly after the fetch of the instruction.
And each line of the display was ended by a HALT instruction, so short lines did not need the full 32 bytes.
And, and, and... I loved that machine for its (albeit just a _little_ bit convoluted) design!

That's what I expected.
My post was mainly intended for people who might believe his claims.
For them, maybe, facts would be helpful ;-)

OK, here is the schematic of the most widely used mechanical telephone in The Netherlands: the T65.
When the telephone is on hook ("hoorn"), only the ringer (bel) is connected to the line.
I really cannot think of another arrangement: the ringer voltage is high (100V?) so you don't want that appearing over your mic or speaker.
Please share with us the schematic of the phones you disassembled, or are you really a troll?

Explaining it to the manufacturers of 900 kV stun guns will have no effect.
They know very well that their product does not reach 900 kV.
Those tasers may very well reach 90-100 kV (spark length of 3-3,5 cm), but not tenfold that.
It's just as with the 200W PMPO computer speaker sets that are supplied from a 12W transformer: pure marketing hype.

But, I agree with your main point: it is trivial to create a sufficiently high voltage in a small volume.
Even the simplest 2 kV fly swatter tennis rackets show that.

900V or 9 kV I would believe, 900 kV not so much.
You would need creeping distances of more than 300 mm just to prevent arcing and making the voltage collapse before it even reached the 900 kV.
"900 kV" and "fits into the palm of your hand" are mutually exclusive, I think.
(and yes, I've designed and built multi-kV devices myself)

Ah, the second link made things clear.
If you just compress air without adding water, it heats up.
This heat is lost over time, lowering efficiency.
When you spray in water, you take this heat loss up front, that is: if you don't re-use the heat in the water.
The brilliant thing LightSail Energy is doing is that they re-use the heat in the water on expansion.
And because the heat capacity of water is much higher than that of air, relatively little water is needed.

If you would just release the heat in the water to the environment (which I thought was what happened when you described the cooling step), efficiency would be lower than without the cooling step.

This is no workaround.
When you absorb the heat in water it is still lost. The only effect is that the temperature will be lower.

I just drank half a liter from a can marked "Beer". Paid 50 (Euro) cents for it. I'm from The Netherlands, where - the article tells me - beer is 2.48 (dollars) for half a lier. Something doesn't add up here. An average beer may be more expensive here, but five times? come on...

I still don't understand what you mean.
Vastly more water will be produced when burning gasoline than the carbon monoxide and nitreous compunds that you mention.
The main constituents of exhaust gases are carbon dioxide and water.
Compression ratio will not change that.

HUH??? Automobiles burn mainly alkanes, which are composed of carbon and hydrogen.
When you burn those, you get carbon dioxide and water.
So why you claim that automobiles produce minimal water is a mystery to me.
Most water that is produced will be in vapour form, so you don't see it, but it's there, nevertheless.

Voltage drop across a white LED is 3-4 V. Who ever heard of germanium LEDs with 0.8V drop?
And if you have a power LED used for lighting, you don't use a resistor to limit the current; you use a small switchmode power supply.
If you design a good one, you can have electrical efficiency of >90% running from 12V, wasting less than 10%.

Or, for the full version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

Would it be disabled because it is incompatible, or because you did not install it yourself?
In the latter case, you can just enable the checkmark before it, and continue using it.
Many programs install, if you don't pay attention, extensions that you may not be totally happy with ('Ask'-toolbar, anyone?)
Firefox now disables these by default, but gives you the option to keep them enabled if you want them.
I find this a useful feature.
On the other hand, there may be extensions that refuse to load after a major version number change, That is a pain, but in many cases, this will be remedied quickly.