I was searching through a history book and it was talking about memorable events of ten years ago, but I had forgotten most of them. I have picked out some of the events of exactly ten years ago this month – January, in a word. So here are a few things that you may or probably will not remember from January 2000.
1 – on his first day as interim president, Vladimir Putin departed to visit Russian troops in Chechnya.
4 – President Clinton nominates Alan Greenspan to a fourth four year term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
5 – President Clinton rules that Elian Gonzalez, a six year old Cuban boy who survived the capsizing of a refugee boat, should be returned to his father in Cuba.
6 – much of Miami is shut down by hundreds of Cuban-Americans protesting the Gonzalez decision. – the S.E.C reports that most partners of Price, Waterhouse, Coopers, the world’s largest accounting firm, contravened regulations requiring that they may not hold shares in firms that they audit. Five partners were fired.
7 – Vice Pres. Al Gore back-tracks on his promise to ensure that all new appointees to the Joint Chiefs of Staff were sympathetic to permitting gays to serve openly in the military.
8 – AOL announces a merger with Time Warner for $165 billion: the world’s biggest ever.
11 – the British government rules that General Pinochet is medically unfit to stand trial for suspected crimes against humanity in Chile during his presidency.
13 – executives at the nation’s leading drugs companies say they want to cooperate with Clinton to institute Medicare coverage for prescription drugs this year.
15 – Arkan, the infamous Serbian paramilitary leader was shot dead in a hotel lobby in Belgrade.
18 – Helmut Kohl resigns as honorary Christian Democratic Party chairman over allegations of corruption from within the party.
24 – the Supreme Court rules that laws limiting political donations to $1,000 in Missouri are constitutional.
25 – the Congressional Budget Office reports that the flood of tax revenues resulting from the exceptionally strong economy will last for ten years.
26 – ‘The New York Times’ reports that U.S investigators have discovered links between a group of Algerians charged with plotting a terrorist strike in the U.S. and Osama Bin Laden, the exiled Saudi accused of bombing two American embassies.
31 – Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois halts all executions in the state citing a disgraceful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row. – top officials n the C.I.A. are accused of blocking an internal investigation into indications that the agency’s past director, John M. Deutsch, mishandled secret information.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with custom wall calendars If you have an interest in calendars, organizers or promotional calendars, please visit our website now at Promotional Desk Calendars
Satellite Radio Technology
Satellite radio technology is the equivalent of cable or satellite television and it is certainly here to stay. There are several reasons for this: the quality of the broadcasts is higher, the quality of the apparatus’s reception is higher and the general coverage of the station, that is to say the so-called satellite’s footprint is far greater too.
This has the effect that if you drive long distances, you will be able to stick with the same channel without having to look for a new one every forty or fifty miles as you have to do with AM or FM radio stations.
In order to reach this quality, the recording and playback speed has to be around the 384 kbps level. The music tracks are catalogued in a comparable way to the MP3 system, which uses names called ID3 tags.
Each station on satellite radio endevours to establish its own identity. A music channel may try this by playing music only of one type or from only one era or decade. This means that you might get a satellite radio station called 1970’s Punk music or Twentieth Century Classical Music.
On some stations, the music controller or disc jockey will choose, say, fifty minutes worth of music, will listen to it in order to ascertain that the quality and the order are correct and then let the computer play it over the airwaves. This allows ten minutes every hour for the news and then the programme can be repeated automatically.
Satellite broadcasting uses digital recordings and each channel is encoded on a different frequency. Similarly, each decoder, say, in your car or your home needs to recognize and decode each channel separately as well. This coding and decoding is done very quickly, in fact in what is called ‘real time’.
The resulting binary or digital code is then translated into analogue signals so that your speakers can replay it. This process produces sound which is just about of CD quality.
The broadcasting satellites are in a geo-static orbit at 23,000 miles above the Earth and have a large footprint which is the name given to the region of ground that is capable of receiving their broadcasts.
In America, for example, the two areas concentrated on at first were the densely populated east and west coasts in order to maximize potential revenue. One satellite would be incapable of covering the whole of the United States in that orbit.
In order to receive satellite transmissions, you will have to use a special antenna on your decoder. This antenna must be capable of receiving L-band transmissions for it to be of use.
These new antennas are a huge improvement on the satellite dishes (comparable to those used for satellite TV) that one used to have to have in order to take advantage of satellite radio technology
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a range of topics, but is currently involved with Bose radio alarm clocks. If you would like to kcurrently more, please visit our web site at Bose Digital Radio.
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