A pretty decent bit at least. They used to own Grass Vally and Thompson Broadcast, two big players in broadcast and cable video, as well as still being apart of cinema both digital and analog. So it's not just some holding company using a once familiar brand-name, they've been a relevant company. Of course, they have sold off a lot of that stuff now so maybe this is another sign of their decline.

I would say in this case that it's satirizing something so stupid sincerity is indistinguishable from satire. I've read marketing materials that read pretty much like this.

I'm usually not one to complain about article selection, even political ones, but his one is just silly. Ron Paul's solution for -everything- is to just pull the plug.

So you think that the US constitution should be up for re-confirmation every 10 years?

Well firstly, your power company obviously knows who it is buying from and of course what it is producing itself. Here in San Diego, SDG&E gets (off the top of my head) about %50 of it's power from the San Onfre Nuclear Power plant, the next biggest portion from the two natural gas plants it operates locally, and the rest from two interconnects to the North and to the East as well as occasionally from Mexico from the south. Those outside links are a mix of hydro (hoover dam), natural gas, coal and a small amount of solar and wind. There is a break down on my power bill that pretty much lays it out just like that. So by the largest part, I picked nuclear.

Secondly though, it doesn't really matter exactly where the electromotive force coming into my house really comes from exactly. Of course it all goes into a big pool, but you are still paying the producer to add to the pool an amount equal to that I consumed.

I don't think that chart means what you think it does with "highways" listed as zero substitutes. Where do you think highways come from?

I actually did exactly that to an actor once at my community college, opps.

It's very easy to forget to mute a channel on an audio mixer when you often have dozens of them.

I just heard the news in the few short minutes of NPR top headlines on one of the public radio classical stations. They covered about as much as in the summery above.

That seems an honest and respectful amount of news.

If you could still get one for that cheap. I'd like to know where you can get them now for those closeout prices.

I think you actually hit upon the main problem with the ribbon in your defense of it. The ribbon is in fact a great replacement for the old toolbar system and so, when you sit and spend the time to customize the bar, just like when you used to customize the toolbar, you are going to work faster.

However, as a general purpose tool for finding commands it's awful. It relies on you already not just knowing the command you are looking for, but that you know what the shortcut to it looks like. Worse, sometimes those commands are buried under other commands.

I do a lot of work in autocad, and while %90 of what i do I do on the keyboard or on the tool-bars, but there are hundreds of commands, many I simply don't use on a regular basis. All I usually need to find the command is to go to the menu of related commands, and read the short descriptions of the functions there. That's what the menu is there for, to provide some insight for the available commands and that is not what the ribbon provides.

I shudder to think of having to provide me grandmother with instructions over the phone on how to do something where I have to explain to her toolbar icons rather then just telling her the command she is looking for. Fortunately, she's still on windows XP.

Perhaps that is true, but that is an experiment on the same speakers no doubt. So yes, some people might like a flat response, others might like a bump in the middle, that's true of even professional audio engineers, and every one I've met sets up their EQs slightly different in non-reference environments (such as live sound). That isn't necessarily what makes sound systems good or bad. Poor insulation, mechanical noise, distortion and clipping at normal playback levels. These are all real, measurable differences in speakers that I don't think I know anybody that hasn't preferred the speakers that lack these sorts of flaws.

One of the worst offenders is in these X.1 systems where you have massive gaps in the frequency response, especially in the mids. A simple listen and they sound "OK" and you can make a sale at Bestbuy. Listen to the same material on a pair of reference speakers and you realize how much of the audio had been missing, and it sounds like you'd taken a wad of cotton out of your ears. Again, this is real, measurable stuff, not some audiophile BS. I think I can confidently say that most people would on that kind of A/B comparison consider the truly full range speakers to be the better sounding.

I think the blame is as much on manufacturers. There is no reason you should have to buy a top-end system to get decent audio. Particle board and even plastic speakers with mid-priced drivers can sound better then most of what you find at best-buy if properly designed. I honestly think manufacturers purposefully "Dumb down" their low and mid-range systems in order to be able to charge more for the high-end stuff.

Want to shop around? Good luck with the lack of decent reviews of mid-range audio systems, utterly useless specs, and the crap audio setups at any retail store where you can give them a listen.