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The Magic Box Hoax
Rasvar writes "Here is an interesting article from The Florida Times-Union about a high tech hoax that managed to pull in the likes of Blockbuster Video, US West, Ted Turner, Sen Orrin Hatch and numerous others. I actually attended one of the "demonstrations" of this device years back. I came away cynical becuase of the way he presented stuff. Sometimes it is good to be a cynic. This is a very good article on an impressive high tech scam."
Madison Priest was a big con-artist, true, but if Ted Turner and the rest did their research, wouldn't they have realized that there are physical limitations to a POTS line's bandwidth?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
He received a patent on his black box, so it must true and not a hoax, right?
Another reason why patents are worthless pieces of paper.
You can find the patent here. It's completely bogus. Any patent examiner with a minimum background in electrical engineering should have thrown this out, and anybody investing millions of dollars in it should have had it checked out by someone who actually knows something about electrical engineering. This is really no different from the patent and investment follies of the Internet bubble.
Is it just me, or is the "it got destroyed in a car accident / plane crash / flood / lightning bolt from Zeus" excuse the grown-up version of "my dog ate my homework"?
I can transmit video in realtime over a standard phone line -- it's called DSL. Additionally, I can even stream video over a modem, 512x512 @ 30 FPS as listed in the patent (even though TVs aren't square).
How about solid black? I'm thinking a 9600 baud modem can do that, depending on the compression.
I thought that the POTS line bandwidth was to some degree limited by other things like filtering.
Otherwise things like DSL wouldn't really work.
(off on a tangent) I recall many years (1970s?) ago how they did (and maybe still do) broadcasts in Boston of Boston Symphony concerts at TangleWood in the Berkshires, over 100 mile away. They had recordings of the original source, they had the signal at the end of the phone line, and they knew what the difference was. They merely amplified the signal at the source end to compensate for the losses, making sure to not clip the signals. Result at the end in Boston was a signal completely acceptable for FM Stereo broadcasts.
So I can see if you are not completely expert in the technology, being able to make up your own examples, and talking yourself into believing that Certain Limitations had been exceeded.
Heck, Look at the history of the dialup modem, going from teletype speeds to 56k, far exceeding original expectations.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !
This is a classic bit of snake oil - "I have this wonderful thing, and you can get a piece of it, but DON'T GO BACK THERE!"
That otherwise intelligent people fell for this just goes to show how most of us don't always act logically all the time.
Besides - pushing video over CAT-3 isn't hard: you just need enough OOMPH to deal with the attenuation, which over a few feet is not so bad. I've seen little boxes you can buy that allow you to send a VCR's output to another room over 100 feet of little thin zip-cord - all they are is a balun (balanced to unbalanced transformer) that matches the 75 ohm output of the VCR to the wire.
It's pushing that same signal over MILES of cable while somebody else is pushing a different signal over a different pair of wires in the same bundle without interfering with each other that's the tricky bit. Solve that with enough signal to noise ratio to allow multi-megabit transmission, and you will be rich. You also will be violating half a dozen laws of physics, but....
www.eFax.com are spammers
yeah, well, there is a pretty long statute of limitations on conspiracy, at least you don't have the looming threat of hard time in a federal "pound-me-in-the-ass" prison...
"Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier."
My respect for Intel just went down a notch for believing this guy who has a record like this.
-Vic
Blockbuster? Intel? Wouldn't these companies be rich enough to hire engineers and physicists who could tell you flat out that it's impossible?
So what's the real answer? Given a telephone wire and optimum conditions, what's the theoretical maxiumum speed that data can be transfered at?
Sometimes it is good to be a cynic.
No, but sometimes it is good to be a skeptic. In fact, in my own experience, it is always good to be a skeptic.
The cynics I've known were convinced that all human behavior was motivated wholly by self-interest, which, even if it is true in an ultimate sense, is an attitude guaranteed to close your mind. The skeptics, on the other hand, merely insist that all claims be testable and repeatable: they doubt, but their doubt is healthy and reasonable, and leave them with a mind-set that I think of as structured incredulity.
If more people were skeptics, charlatans like John Edwards and James Van Praagh wouldn't be able to make a living, and this "Magic Box Hoax" could have never occurred.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Madison Priest's Patent
Editorial: Bwa-hahahahahaha, Dumbasses. Maybe they should invest in Alex Chiu
-Sean
I was a spectator to a similiar case, where a guy calling himself Paul "Voss" Hinds was trying to get money to start a flight simulator game company. That story has a LOT of parallels.
He claims to be an Air Force Academy Graduate.
His AF records cannot be found by ANYONE, and he claims this is because of his involvement in secret projects.
He was out of sight for several months in 1997, and later claimed he was on death's door due to a scorpion sting under a fingernail.
He had a "fall guy" who he claimed ran off with the $10,000 he managed to get from investors.
He submitted as "proof" several SGI generated "screenshots", all of which used clearly typical demo features and openGL artifacts.
He claimed to own a P-51 Mustang and even submitted a doctored photo of a P-51 with his head cut-n-pasted into the cockpit and his name written under the canopy. The font for the canopy matched an Adobe Photoshop default.
He claimed to have shot down several Iraqi fighters in his F-16, yet no records of those shootdowns exist.
The list goes on and on, and this guy finally resurfaced using his handle "voss" in an online simulation, and he verbally attacks anyone who brings the scam up, challenging them to talk to his "astronaut general buddy". Strangely enough, this astronaut guy actually exists although I have not contacted him personally.
The parallels kept hitting me as I read the article, and I wonder if this was the same guy, or if (somehow) Paul Hinds had been set up by this same guy.
Wow, you mean that we shouldn't trust people because people in the same profession committed horrible crimes? Wow!
That does it. I can no longer trust police officers, firemen, doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, stock market folk, bankers, store managers, or anyone else. They've all got members who've committed felonies!
No, no, no need for justice for them. Their professions obviously predispose them towards criminal behavior. Let's just assume that they're all crooks--the ones who aren't are just biding their time.
I mean, heck, every priest secretly wants to coodle a young boy. And all that talk about "forgivenenss" that they've been going on about for 2,000 years really is just PR, and they don't REALLY believe that.
... or maybe you're a +5 troll, and we should think rationally about who we trust in all manners, and not make sweeping generalizations about professions who can only function if they are trusted?
Wired mag ran a story last year about a guy with a similar scam. P.T. Barnum rules!
the investors "made their decisions unhindered by the thought process". Sums it up I think.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
For all those who are outraged that the scam took in so many (i.e. "Why didn't they get some competent people to recview it before investing), the answer is that they did. The article talks about the way that many scientists reviewed the invention, but were never quite able to say that the invention was impossible. On this basis, the investor's said "it appears to work. I'll take the risk and assume it does actually work."
<p>
Why didn't the scientists say that this was completely absurd? A lot of reasons. First, they are being paid to review the invention. If they say that the invention doesn't work and it does, then they are liable for the massive losses incurred by the investor for a failed opportunity. If they say it doesn't work and it does, they get sued by the inventor. So, what do they do? They hedge their bets. They say that "more study" is needed, etc. To business types, this sounds like they are just being nerdy and cautious. Since they leave the question open, the investor (who wants to believe) goes ahead and goes for it, figuring that the 5 million dollars invested (or whatever) could well turn into billions.
<p>
In some respects, the scientiastws have failed them by not emphasizing their near-certainty that the idea was nonsense. And the businessmen failed themselves by not bothering to learn that, when a scientist says "quite improbable", he means "impossible."
<p>
sounds like everyday life to me, and should to most geeks.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Here's a story about a similar scam from the dot com era. This guy raised $20M, and spent $16M of that on a party in Las Vegas with entertainment provided by the Dixie Chicks and The Who.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
Man, it might be hoax, but this dude worked HARD to keep the hoax alive. It makes you wonder how far he would get in life he put all this energy into something worthwhile.
I hate to admire someone who's basically a thief, but anyone who goes to that much trouble almost deserves to get away with it. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Anyone else remember pixelon? You'd think investers would learn from their past mistakes...
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
According to the article, it was Teddy Turner, Ted Turner's son.
From the bottom of the patent:
+--------------+
| |
Data | YHBT | Data
=====+ YHL +=====
In | HAND | Out
| |
+--------------+
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
She was trying to cover her ass.. Her side of the story says that she was unaware of everything that's going on. Up until the Chicago event, she thought it was a legitimate invention but only realized it when you opend the computer and found a VCR. Now when all the investors start to press criminal charges on his husband, she could claim that she was not part of it and even reported it to the authorities...
My take is that she was involved from day one. I mean, if you're husband is running half a mile of cable across a river, you'd notice. You'd also notice if there were millions of dollars of unopened computer components. You'd also notice your husband very upset when these "floods, lightning, etc" destroyed the only working prototype.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Given that you say 2,000 years, I assume you're talking about the new fangled cult of Christianity. In that case, the story is "Hey! Did you hear about Original Sin? You're burning in hell, buddy. But wait! We've also got the solution! Forgiveness, at a surprisingly reasonable price."
Yeah, there are probably a few good priests, in the same way that there are probably a few good lawyers, good traffic cops, or (relevant to this story) a few good patent office clerks. But I really do believe that there are some professions where it's a good idea to keep the practitioners as far away from you as humanly possible. It's not right, but pragmatism rarely is. It's simply pragmatic.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This article pisses me off, why? This scammer has an expensive home, a few cars such as a Jaguar (ok, Jaguar sucks but it is arguably better than his Eclipse), boats, and a couple of planes --- oh, and he still has a bundle of cash.
I, or any number of us, could pull an evil-scheme like this off. But, for some reason we don't. For some reason we have ethics and values. And, for some reason, a guy like that has more money than he needs to live on. Obviously, the world is not fair.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
The investors were tricked using a VCR and lots of coax. I don't know about you, but investing hundreds of thousands of dollars (or even millions) without the chance to at least play quake over the super-fast "network" seems a little ignorant. Anyone who invested in this scam obviously let their greed get the better of them, and demonstrated that the rich are not always rich because they are extraordinarily smart.
Than anything that happened during the .com phase? Its just easier to blame one ex-con guy instead of small bands of Ivy League graduates who have rich mommy and daddy or politician parents. Just a smaller scale Enron.
Same story different scale.
The outrage at the scandals (note the use of the plural) is partly that sexual abuses happened, but mostly that the church has gone to such lengths to cover them up and keep those same priests active, in some cases returning them to positions with unsupervised contact with children. If there weren't a pattern of covering up, the innocent priests wouldn't be tainted by the guilt of their colleagues. But, by suppressing the truth, the Church has allowed uncertainty to spread, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I was deeply convinced and profoundly amazed by the magic box demonstration they have on their site.
Now click here or cliquez ici for those who speak spanish in the audience, and, yes you must have flash...everybody must have flash!
So, note, if you press the "compatibility test" you will see how the blue flows through the magic box far better than it flows through your 56k...box. Yes I know compatibility means how compatible something is, not how it compares to something else, but ignore the words...just watch the test. Again...see how the blue flooooows through the magic box box...but still crawls along on the T3!
In fact, if you press the "test" button next to the magic box box, you will note that the blue comes through sharply, clearly, quickly every time! That's how reliable *your* customers will find the magic box every single time!
[sorry...i couldn't help it...my parents were in Amway...i've seen it all before]
Perhaps this is of interest. Hal Puthoff, the "Texas physicist considered an expert in the concepts Priest said he was using", is---I believe---also known as Harold Puthoff.
Together with Russel Targ, this infamous team produced, let us say, somewhat credulous studies of spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller's remote viewing abilities. They also have the dubious distinction of having provided some of the best evidence that positive feedback improves ESP ability. Tragically, no skeptic who uses reasonable experimental controls seems to be able to duplicate their results.
The fact that Priest's box has something to do with Puthoff's area of expertise is hilarious! I wonder if the author of the article was being *intentionally* ironic.
I remember reading some of the Anarchy text files from textfiles.com about 3-4 years back, and some of the stuff they came up with was ingenious. This was childs play. How could anyone just give money to someone without any proof or analysis of the equipement? There are litterally hundreds of communications companies out there developping technology. I am sure these investors were not techs themselves. Not one of them was skeptical enough to bring someone with a little insite to these presentations? I think perhaps these companies got what was comming to them. A wake up call to reality.
Though I do remember reading a story about Cisco on slashdot, not too long ago, about a similar technology. Something about 10mbps over barb wire? Here is the previous link to that. Perhaps his so called "vision" was not completely out of the range of possibility.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
First of all, notice that there were actual experts that quoted that the invention was "implausable, but not impossible". At the same time, dsl, while not in widespread use, was definitely on the marketing tip of many a phone company. Broadband over regular phone lines was definitely possible, this guy just happened to be doing it faster. The experts weren't going to outright denounce it without at least LOOKING at the technology first.
Secondly, this was the heyday of the dotcom era. Everyone was getting rich, and there seemed to be no end in sight. However, there were a lot of investors with a sizeable amount of cash that simply hadn't gotten their piece of the preverbial dotcom pie yet. And seeing how the phone companies were developing competing technology, the sense of urgency was real.
As for criminal records, people are surprisingly lax about that sort of thing. Especially today, its so easy to run a criminal background check on someone, everyone assumes that someone has already done it, and doesn't bother. When other people are dumping multiple millions of $$$ into a company, and those people are well respected, intellegent people, it simply doesn't occur not to take the guy at his word. The only concern is getting in on it before its too late.
Scam artists, despite the vulgarity of their profession, are actually very talented and very good at what they do. They are literally experts in the art of social engineering. Anyone can scam a gullible nobody. Just send them a flyer in the mail and you'll have checks flying into your PO box. But to convince someone who's worth millions to give you a blank check with no verification that you can actually do what you say you can do. That's genius. Or it speaks very poorly for the competancy of the multimillionaires, which might just go to show that you don't need to necessarily be smart to be rich. And you don't have to be honest to get rich. And people might be too embarrased to get back at you once you're done fleecing them. Its a strange world indeed.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I'm picturing a bunch of companies with copper networks led by King Arthur galloping with a bunch of coconuts up to a castle. The man (who somehow looks like John Cleese with a peculiar french accent) at the top of the castle says that this is a castle of people with fiber networks.
King Arthur: If you give us food and shelter, you can join us on our quest for the Holy Grail.
Frenchman: Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen. He's already got one, you see?
King Arthur: What? Are you sure you've got one?
Frenchman: Oh yes, it's very nice.
King Arthur: If you don't show us the grail, we shall take this castle by force!
Frenchman: You don't frighten us you copper-based pigdogs! Go and boil your buttons you sons of silly person. I blow my nose at you so cold, Arthur King. You and all your Silly English Kniggits! I fart in your general direction.... etc
At that point, the Fiber Optic French people catapult a gigantic light-based switch at them.
King Arthur and his Men: Run Away! Run Away!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
More like "Hey that unpleasantness you're feeling? That's separation from the Creator. Happily, it's really easy to fix! No donations, no brainwashing, no obligations--just believe, and pursue a personal relationship with the Supreme Being."
Oh, wait--you're one of those people who confuses the Catholic Church with the fundamental principles of Christianity. Never mind.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Craichy and a friend gave Priest about $500,000 for a stake in VisionTek, the company the Priests formed to sell their invention.
Not that I would accuse this article of being a hoax itself, but VisionTek is a company that makes [excellent] video cards....I use them in my boxes. Poking around Google yielded no companies with similiar names....what gives?
An acquaintance of mine is particularly susceptable to these. He's a real dreamer type who made lots of money on one gamble (purchased cellular telephone bandwidth rights shortly before cellular telephones took off) and then lost it all on two others.
The scam that took most of it was a guy who was going to wire every stadium box in America with fiber and equip them with dual processor computers and 42" displays (in 1997 time frame). Basically, the idea was to let the rich simultaneously surf the Internet, see their email, get special game statistics, watch replays, etc while watching the game. Even if he did it, I never understood how he was going to make the millions of investment money back. This was an example of a scam that used plausible technology, but never had a sustainable business model. The investment capital was just being pocketed.
The other was actually a perpetual energy scam. Yes, people still fall for that one. This was some sort of device with multiple rings made of just the right metals and spinning in different directions or something. Somehow, it supposedly extracted energy from the Earth's magnetic field. I researched it a couple of years ago and found that the guy has been running the scam for over 40 years. This guy's big hook was religious based at the time. He claimed to have died in a traffic accident with a ruptured aorta and been miraculously brought back to life. When he awoke, the schematics were in his head for this device. They had been given to him directly by God. He was giving this story from the pulpit at really conservative Christian churches across the SouthEast and attracting all sorts of investors.
I wonder why there is no suspected scam site on the Internet? Maybe the legal risks would be too great...
I'm crying, I'm really crying.
"There's nothing to explain. You're trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen."
No, just give you a speeding ticket.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
...townsend didn't surpass it!
The "classic" limitation on analogue dialup modems was the quantization error introduced by the analogue to digital conversion on both ends.
However -- 56k depends on one end of the connection being DIGITAL . You're eliminating quant error on one side of the connection, thus you can get better downstream speeds. Upstream speeds, if you notice, are still limited to 33.6k due to quant error on the end user's modem.
There is no magic here. No laws are being surpassed or violated here. Shannon is still safe.
"If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !"
There was an interesting documentary on either A&E or Discovery (one of those two) based on the book Longitude. Somebody was talking about Harrison's apprehensiveness about letting others (ie. the Astronomer Royal) poke around inside of his invention and he made an interesting point: If you really did have a magic box and it did what you said it did, would you want potential competitors seeing its insides?
Just a little while back there was a thread on ESP and the paranormal. Many people there were questioning as why that sort of stuff must be called pseudo science and why science demands such rigorus proofs. THIS is why. Rigged demonstrantions, people holding their own intrests over that of science and so on. For something amazing to be accepted as real it MUST be repeatable and independantly tested. Otherwsie you have things like this happen. Crooks show people something they WANT to be real, and they believe. It is important to have well defined methods for testing such claims.
The psychics of the world are no different, they demonstrate their powers only on their own terms. They won't submit to a real scientific test because they are frauds, and they know it will fail. Anytime someone tries to sell you on something that you have no way of independantly verifying, be careful. They might be well meaning but more often than not, they are a con man.
That's not true. Read Mark Twain's perspective on the issue.
Here's a snip:
And continuing later on...
I recommend reading the whole essay, "What is Man".
If more people were cynics, the world would not only remove charlatans (though incidentally, I'm quite happy with charlatans who rob robbers; It's much better than people who aid and assist robbers for a days wages), but the world would be full of wonderful friendly people.
What is a cynic? As far as I can tell, a cynic is a person who is a realist and an idealist.
To be a cynic, you have to be a realist. You've already helped demonstrate that, when you wote "even if it is true in an ultimate sense". A realist looking at human behavior will give that serious attention, and meditate deeply on its consequences, as has Mark Twain.
But to be a cynic, you also have to be an idealist. That seems contradictory; How's that? Because in order to complain about the way things are, you have to have some idea of how things should be. You have to be an idealist.
If you are a realist but not an idealist, you become someone who is content ripping people off, or just doing whatever you need to survive, the effects of whatever it is be damned. This describes 90% of people, I believe. Perhaps 10-20% of people are content ripping others off, the other 70-80% are quite happy just doing whatever they need to do in order to survive comfortably, effects on others be damned. Being a Realist while discarding ideals is what gives the Right a bad name.
If you are an idealist but not a realist, you run the danger of trying to do good things, but failing miserably, because you are out of touch with reality. At worst, such failure can be dangerous. Being an Idealist while discarding reality is what gives the Left a bad name.
When you have both Idealism and Realism, you are a Cynic.
Incidentally, there is a name for what effective Cynics are called- that name is "SAINT".
Did Mark Twain reach Sainthood? In my eyes, Yes, because he has had a very powerful positive influence on my life, and the lives of many others, even beyond death.
so i guess this makes it a Certified Hoax...
Someone claims they can do something like that? Fine, make them come to YOU and demo it, and have your engineers look at the device. A full look, not a hands-off, across the room kind of thing.
Cisco receantly had a new DSL technology they wanted to sell us on, they call it Long Range Eithernet. Allegedly, it gets 10mbps, both directions over regular phone lines at distances of around a mile. Now Cisco is a big, reputable company, not some small time con artist and we are friends with the engineer in this city. Doesn't matter, we STILL wanted to test it for ourselves. So they sent us an LRE switch and two remote units. We tested it, and indeed it does perform as advertised.
Now we know for a fact that it works. This wasn't a smoke and mirrorrs test, it was conducted in our lab, by our people. They weren't even around (the just loaned it to us for a month and said have fun). We got to run all the tests we chose on it. All this, for a product from a reputable company. But you know what? That's how you need to do it. Don't rely on what the people who make something tell you, demand to test it yourself. See if it works as advertised in YOUR environment.
This is doubly true for new technologies. Make the inventor bring his tech to your labs, demo it on your terms, and have your people run the tests. Then you know it isn't being rigged because you can check to make sure everything is on the level. I'm not talking looking at some poorly drawn semi-plausable circut diagrams, I'm talking about having the actual prototypes in your lab and under the gun.
is where they are bringing this guy up on fraud charges and suing his ass into the ground/ruining his life.
Am I missing something?
The Keeley Motor, circa 1872, was a similar scam. That one also went on for a long time. J.P. Morgan considered investing, but brought along Edison to take a look. Edison noticed that the motor was vibrating in sync with the exhaust from a gas engine across the street, said a few words to Morgan, and Morgan declined to invest. But others did. The scam dragged on for years. After Keely's death, a team from Scientific American examined his lab, and discovered compressed-air plumbing hidden in the walls and floors, with a big tank in the basement.
"A fool and his money are soon parted" I believe.
There's those computercompanies who tell us their "magic boxes" will make our lifes better, or their software. TV-broadcasters ensuring us we couldn't live without watching their Channels every day (makes one wonder what humankind did before the invention of TV), car companies convincing us that we need a car that can drive 150 MPH although there's only very few chances to do so, ...
Also there's all these "get rich quick" schemes and whatnot, but what they all have in common: there needs to be someone gullible enough to believe all those smooth lies and greedy enough to act before thinking for the scheme to work. How's this one different from any big corporation selling their product with even bigger lies? Just because it's a single guy instead of a whole corporation thats selling hot air on lies?
If that guy get's sued i'd like to sue all that corporations who told me i could get the hottest women in town just because i wear the right sneakers, drink the correct beverage or drive the right car. Then i have some serious issues with any companies selling XXX-light products because i didn't loose a single pound despite eating tons of the stuff. And then i want a free passage to my plot on the moon.
Where exactly is the difference between a scam and "good advertising"?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
When the phone system was invented, there was no 'theoretical' limit to the quality, since it was all annolog (I mean, not counting the physical limitations of the wire, which is pretty high)
Once you start digitizing (at that rate) everything you're going to loose a lot of information.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actually, I'm doing just fine without hitting you up for cash, thanks.
Lots of people are duped every day into supporting "feel-good" scam artists. At the same time, lots of people sensibly contribute money to organizations that do real good, full time. It sounds like you're trying to say "Christianity feels good, therefore it must be a scam."
Meanwhile, prior to the 20th Century, someone wrote "For God so loved the world [bla bla bla] that whosoever believeth in him shall have eternal life." Even assuming that the whole thing is a huge conspiracy, I think it's pretty clear that the texts date from prior to 1900. So there you have it: believe in the salvation of humanity via Christ, and benefit. It doesn't get any more fundamental than that. And this principle was almost certainly formulated much earlier than you seem to think.
If you don't think the problem exists, then great! I hope that works out for you. But please don't tell me I should be charging you money for the information you've received. It's not like that at all.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
you know, from the article, it sounds more like that the "investors" were more interested in keeping his invention out of production. Particularly Blockbuster and Qwest had tremendenous motivation to supress the idea, whether legitimate or not. I seriously doubt Blockbuster was interested in obsoleting their own business model. And Qwest owns of the more miles of wire than anyone in the world. Whether they knew it was a hoax or not is kind of irrelevant, since the principle investors never intended the product to be developed anyway.
So what's the real answer? Given a telephone wire and optimum conditions, what's the theoretical maximum speed that data can be transferred at?
It depends on the length. But when you try to run it through all the existing telephone system you are limited to 64k without any A/D conversions.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In the demo, however, they were just going to do a DS-1. I took a t-berd DS-1 test set, a Navtel protocol analyzer, and some cables, including a DS-1 loopback plug (RJ-48). We met them at some hospital in Jacksonville, present were Madison Priest and Mark Strong. Mark video taped the whole thing, which made me kind of nervous.
They took us down to the communications room in the basement of the hospital. There were two Packard Bell computers sitting on the floor. They were both plugged into the same powerstrip. The interesting part was there was not one power cable, but three for each computer. I think two of them ran into one of the ISA slot openings, and were "expoxied" in by what looked like latex caulking. It was a real mess.
Each computer also had an RJ-45 for the T-1, and an internal analog modem. I plugged the t-1 test set into one computer, and a loopback plug into the other. Madison then used hyperterm or procom (I forget which) to dial from one computer to the other thru the Hospital's PBX. When the modems synced up, the T1 came up. I verified I was seeing the loopback, sent some different bit patterns, and errors. When he pulled the pots line, the T1 went down (loss of signal).
Next, they wanted to show it ran over long distances. They used one computer to dial a number in my office in xxxx which was forwarded to the number of the other computer next to us. This worked just as expected. The T-1 came right up. We let the test set run awhile to make sure the line was error free. Mark Strong made it a point to videotape him asking me if it was working. About all I could say was that "It appears to be."
We went to a conference room nearby to talk while the test ran. Madison was pretty strange. He got, what I would term, angry several times during the meeting. I stayed out of it pretty much till at what point our VP asked me what else I needed to verify to make sure that it was capable of carry a T-1. I said I wanted to put the protocol analyzer on the circuit and make a call through xxxx. Then I wanted to send frames and measure the latency of the circuit. I said I know about how much latency I should see, given that signals travel about 100 miles per millisecond.
Then all hell broke loose. They refused to allow that test, or any others. They claimed I was trying to steal their technology. We ended up packing up and going home.
Over the next several months, we heard from them about doing more tests. We wanted to do a long distance video feed, but the week that was supposed to happen, weather was not good (I think it was too icy) for their general aviation plane to make it. They started calling themselves VisionTek, and they informed us, of all things, that we wouldn't see the latency we expected because this thing could transfer a signal faster than the speed of light.
I had suspected the power cords were the actual data path, and my latency test was going to test that theory, but they never allowed it to happen. I don't think they had come up with the "faster than light" story by that time, so I believe we caught them with their pants down.
I don't think we ever invested any money in them. I always believed it to be a hoax, but was just doing my job to investiagate it. I also knew that Madison Priest was an ex-con, and after witnessing his temper, I didn't want to become any more involved than I had to. I certainly wasn't going to challenge him or do anything that would lead him to believe that I *personally* was the reason he didn't get money from my company.
As a matter of fact, I think I should post this anonymously if you don't mind...
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Why is it that Florida seems to attract so many kooks? I mean, sure, nice weather and plenty of old ladies flush with cash, but there must be something in the water to make Florida the scam capital of the world, as well as the spam capital.
Neither the wx nor the abundance of local victims fully explain it.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I started work at a private company that publishes very popular audio software for the entertainment industry in the late 90's. My first task was to incorporate a new super high digital compression audio codec the company had just licensed.
:-) The fact that this "analog" algorithm would have to be implemented in a computer never seemed to cross anyone's mind. And according to the scam artist, the secret was that he would take the output on the digital side, and run it through "winzip", not just once like the other guys, but multiple times! You can't imagine how in the world I kept from laughing as the V.P. of Technology of this company told me this on my first day of work.
Upper level management was very impressed with the algorithm because it was an "analog" audio compression algorithm, and everyone in the music industry knows that analog sounds better than digital
The story is pretty much the same-- the guy never produced a working prototype, either analog or digital. He even sent me a visual basic program which of course never actually ran.
I wasn't there to meet the guy in person, but the demo that was described to me was incredibly easy to fake. He basically had a black box, and plugged the audio source into one side, and the output from the other side into an amp. Incredibly, the output sounded just as good as the input!!!
Unfortunately the story has a sad ending (for me at least) because in order to explain why I couldn't get the algorithm to work, I hinted that perhaps just maybe the guy was running a scam. (As if the lack of working prototype wouldn't explain it.) The president of the company actually yelled at me over the phone "do you think I'm an idiot!", "do you think I'd let myself by taken by a con artist", etc, etc. Needless to say I was fired a few months later...
True, but Harrison's clocks could be verified through simple black-box testing. If the clock kept time over the course of a sea voyage (as determined through astronomical observations, using the clock's time to determine position already known through other means, or just looking at another clock) then it was genuine. If it didn't, it wasn't. Such black-box testing wouldn't have been sufficient in this case, though.
Actually, patents are anything but worthless. Patents (even if they're not completely accurate) can bring down huge right-to-practice issues on all sorts of companies. And even if you are granted a patent, your competitors can patent improvements around your patent and box you in.
It's kind of sad that patents have evolved into legal bargaining points. But that's how the game is played.
BTW, IANAL...
...I feel no pity for the greedy fools who got taken by Priest. As this Craichy character mentioned, all they had to do was request independent testing and he'd have been found out for a sham. It was their own stupidity to fork over millions without requesting such testing or even doing background checks on the "inventor".
Anyone remember the saying, "if it seems too good to be true... IT IS"?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Another reason why patents are worthless pieces of paper.
This is obviously incorrect. Priest's patent helped him make millions of dollars!! Just because it's total BS doesn't mean it's worthless, as long as some morons believe it means something.
What's funny to me is how he extracted all that money from large corporations. It'd be good if more people could swindle big greedy corporations like that. Imagine if someone could swindle MS out of part of that $40 billion they're sitting on...
If I was going to try to pull a scam like this, and I wanted to take in as many of you as possible, I'd do it this way:
That is how a scam works.
(Oh, by the way, that demo was a real person on the other end of a hidden communication channel)
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Oh, and the "all you have to do is say the I-accept-Jesus prayer" is not a fundamental principle of Christianity. In fact, I don't believe that this principle was formulated prior to the 20th century.
I believe that particular piece of dogma originated in the Renaissance, during the period of the Protestant reformation. When you've got a church that says "you need to do X, X, and X, and THEN AND ONLY THEN can you be saved," there tends to be a great big backlash against that.
Personally, I think salvation is a two-part process. Part one is getting in contact (on some level, even if it's not concious or following the paths I would follow) with the Creator. Part two is convincing the Creator to give you a mighty big break and let you off all of the sins ("bad stuff", "crimes against God", or just the roman "stuff that pisses God off") that you have committed.
Where organized religions, like the Catholic Church, go wrong is when they forget that they exist for step 1 only, and that step 2 is something that God is perfectly capable of dealing with Himself (or Herself, if you've got a more feminine view of that all-powerful, all-knowing, shy, just-like-man-but-not-split-or-finite thing I call Jesus Christ, the world's first hippie.)
drat, and you're posting anonymously, so you probably won't respond to this.
But, you wouldn't happen to have a link to collaborate your view of St. Augustine, would you?
Or is this just one of those "King Richard was Gay" things, and everyone believes it without giving evidence.
Now that the story's off the front page, it's probably safe to blow off the anonymous-posting feature, an idea dating back to a time when the churches put a lot more than Slashdot karma at stake for the heretic. :)
St. Augustine was basically the heir to St. Paul's "better chastity than marriage, better marriage than Hell" mentality. Google came up with this accurate but admittedly-one-sided summary of Christian sexual morality, http://www.al-islam.org/m_morals/chap1.htm, written by someone who has an Islamic axe to grind. I don't know much about Islam, but it's not relevant in any case: the psychosexual issues the author raises are, as far as I know, quite valid.
My understanding is that Augustine was what Christians would call a "reformed homosexual." When the object of his affection died, it prompted his own Damascene ephiphany in which he rejected the passions of the flesh in favor of immersion in a higher spiritual calling. Nowadays, we just spend a week locked in our room playing Quake when we get jilted, but things were different back then, when intellectual and moral crises lurked around every corner.
Unfortunately, just like Paul before him, Augustine proceeded to project his neuroses on the rest of Christendom. The Church has spent millennia cultivating a distorted sense of sexual morality and human nature, telling us that some of our most fundamental biological impulses are sinful and shameful, barely worthy of tolerance in limited circumstances (marriage) and only worthy of repression elsewhere. I have a problem with that.
Speaking personally, I was raised in a heavily Christian (Southern Baptist) environment, albeit in a non-churchgoing family. In my youth, I spent a lot of time reading both Testaments and looking for the answers to the usual questions that pop up during adolescence and puberty. Are women a Good Thing or not? Is it OK to ask God for a new Camaro? How many times per week can I jack off without staining either my sheets or my soul? While my childhood was short on genuine moral crises, it was saturated with contradictions: what was up with all the French kissing on the church bus on the way back from the Petra concert? Why was the state of the new girl in town's virginity the chief topic of discussion at Bible camp, along with the near-theological question of who would be the first among us to settle the issue once and for all?
The trouble was, it was easy enough for me to dismiss St. Paul as a party-pooping congenital loser, but Christ Himself was something else. He seemed like a smart guy, a fellow who really had His shit together. As the article above points out, He didn't talk much about the old in-out, in-out, but when He did, He came straight to the point. But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
That was a problem. Not much room for pubescent rationalization there, friends and neighbors.
Eventually, I came to realize that Christ demanded I choose between my own nature as a human being, or an ideal made apparently unachievable by the biological code His own Father built into me. That kind of thinking was obviously dangerous: according to the church, it was the sort of argument you could expect when someone tried to recruit you into Satan's posse. But since I had never bought into the whole organized-religion thing to begin with, it wasn't hard for me to walk away from the whole idea of Christianity with a clear conscience. I didn't have much at stake besides the fate of my soul... which, once I realized was only a metaphorical gun held to my head by people who were flesh and blood like myself, was easy enough to get past.
Priests of celibate orders, on the other hand, have more than their souls in this precarious moral balance. Their careers, lives, vows, and identities are inextricable from Pauline and Augustinian morality. That's what I meant by my flippant "2,000 years of chickens coming home to roost" remark. The human mind is a powerful thing; when you hold it to unreasonable or impossible standards, you shouldn't be too surprised to see it fail in catastrophic ways.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Interesting.
;)
:(
I've had more than my share of moral crisis since my childhood ended. After quite a lot of stress, I've found that religion makes a great guidestone when I listen to my own heart, rather than organized religion or organized religion's opponents. (I am, however, rather interested in both sides, which is why I discuss this so readilly.)
Regarding The Word's word that you quoted, I interpret it a lot differently than you did. Rather than "it's adultery to think about a woman," I think it's more like "lusting after a woman and fucking her are the same sin in the eyes of God." But God (obviously) wants mankind to have sex, so there has to be a place for it.
Thus, don't go thinking about girls in high school that don't know that you're lusting after them, and don't lust after girls that don't want you to.
Anyway, as to the article--I think the author is intentionally misnormalizing the scale of Christian sexual conduct, especially at the time of its creation.
Rather than (celebacy=0), (chastity=-1) and (forification=-2), it's more like (chastity=+1), (celebacy=0) and (forification=-1). Chastity should be the *normal* state for people who aren't saints (but make their shoes and the babies), but celebacy is a "more holy" state than chastity.
Just like it's "normal" to not rob someone, "wrong" to rob someone, and "holy" to give someone your money.
Anyway, it's one of the big faults with organized religion. Things thare a "good states to be held in high regard" become, over decades "mandatory states for everyone who's not going to hell." And, of course, that sparks the "I can't live that way, so they must not really mean it" trail of thought, that quickly empties churches and, in some of those who rebel against the entire framework, sparks everyone back to the "fornification" stage that they were in before the church showed up and said "that's wrong."
Of course, the whole issue's compounded by the fact that People Are Stupid, and so God didn't bother saying WHY the good things are good and the bad things are bad.
Anyway, my final point: Thanks for the link, I agree with the organized religion part, I disagree with the "no God"/"no soul" part, and I'm always open if you just want to kill some time to talk about religion. (or MS--those evil bastards!)
It's been 9 days since this story hit. Today I got a package in the mail from my mother --- in it was a copy of the article and a note. Turns out that she actually taught Madison in high school.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet