Free Republic

Those who once built their music-buying week around new albums coming out on Tuesdays will have to change their schedules. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry -- a trade group representing more than 1,300 international record labels -- has announced that beginning July 10, its members and a consortium of other retailers, artist reps and other groups in over 45 countries will shift to a single global Friday release date for new albums.

... In a release about his upcoming [short story] collection, [Tom] Hanks explained that he was inspired to write the stories by his typewriter collection... Take a look at some typewriters throughout history and their owners at work in the photo gallery above.

Earlier in July, German politicians said they were considering going back to old-fashioned manual typewriters for confidential documents, in order to protect national secrets from American NSA spooks. Patrick Sensburg, chair of the German parliament’s inquiry into alleged NSA spying, said committee members are considering new security measures and are seriously thinking about abandoning email and returning to old school typewriters.

German officials are considering switching from computers back to manual typewriters for sensitive documents to prevent United States’ spying, according to a July 14 statement. “Are you considering typewriters?” an interviewer asked Patrick Sensburg, head of the Bundestag’s parliamentary inquiry into the U.S. National Security Agency activity in Germany. “As a matter of fact, we have, and not electronic models either,” he replied.

Is Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate a forgery? Definitely yes, for those of us who have spent a lifetime writing and producing technical documents, and who remember how they were produced in pre-computer days, and who have the technical expertise today to produce them using computers. For us, it's been an "open secret" that the document image released by the White House on April 27, 2011 is a complete fake.

EVEN by Brooklyn standards, it was a curious spectacle: a dozen mechanical contraptions sat on a white tablecloth, emitting occasional clacks and dings. Shoppers peered at the display, excited but hesitant, as if they’d stumbled upon a trove of strange inventions from a Jules Verne fantasy. Some snapped pictures with their iPhones. “Can I touch it?” a young woman asked. Permission granted, she poked two buttons at once. The machine jammed. She recoiled as if it had bitten her. “I’m in love with all of them,” said Louis Smith, 28, a lanky drummer from Williamsburg. Five minutes later, he had...

How long would it take a monkey typing randomly to reproduce the completes works of William (great name, incidentally) Shakespeare? Once we know that, we can answer how long it would take a barrelful. If that is, we knew how many monkeys would fit in a standard barrel. In experiments conducted by your author, I can tell you the answer is eleven, but you have to press hard. A typewritten work is composed, of course, of words, and in between those words are spaces and the occasional punctuation. Separating the words are headings, themselves comprised of words and numbers. According...