No. It is the proponents of the idea that the book is genuine's job to prove that it is indeed that.
This sort of thing infuriates me. Simply because one onus of proof remains unsatisfied does not absolve the speaker's own. If I claim that your mother was a walrus, and you claim that aliens forced me to make such a statement, does that I began with asininity release you from any responsibility to your suggestion of aliens?
No.
So, look. What the person which you contradicted was saying was quite valid, and quite correct. If the speaker makes the concrete statement that Foo Is A Hoax, it does not become someone else's problem to verify that in fact foo is not a hoax. It does not, in fact, become anyone's problem until they claim that foo is not a hoax.
Of course, the article was quite clear that it didn't know for sure whether the originals were a hoax, so this is my destroying an ill picked nit of an argument contradicting a statement that was never made. Still, if you're going to try to be pedantic, at least become a successful pedant.
One doesn't need to prove that something is a hoax if it is, Occam's Razor does that job.
Occam's razor by definition proves nothing. Occam's razor suggests that you haven't the faintest appreciation of the subtle touch of William of Occam.
What explanation is contains the fewest ubstantiated assumptions: That something was written a language nobody knows, containing valuable information nobody has any idea about, or that it was produced using a simple encryption technique to fool somebody to pay loads of shiny ducats?
This is much funnier if you know the history of European reaction to Linear B. Read a book.
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
I find it amazing that some people still hold this myth as true! What kind of history education have you had!?!
A proper one. Many were executed over this disputed knowledge.
Look, no scientist have never claimed the earth was flat.
This may be related to you being less than four hundred years old. I don't know any animists. Do you suggest that that means there never were any?
Here's a sort of a startling observation: you are not the sum total of views and beliefs throughout the course of the human condition.
For one thing, in every other culture than the western, it has never been claimed otherwise ("they even knew the earth was spherical"),
That's curious. I take it that the various myths about what occurs at the edge of the world were made up for saturday morning cartoons, then? Perhaps you're unaware that, for example, the Hindus taught the world as a platform supported on the backs of elephants, that the Vikings quested for the edge of the world to find the roots of Yggdrasil, that Julius Caesar, whose name you probably pronounce similarly to seizure, once claimed to have troops returned from the edge of the world at the outset of battle to inspire confidence?
but some has got the weird notion that Columbus had to argue that the earth wasn't flat.
In fact, the reason Columbus sailed for Portugal is that he was laughed out of half a dozen royal courts over this roundness bit. Maybe before saying "gee, I wonder where everyone gets this idea," try to find out if that's because they're correct. What exactly are you positing as evidence that people *didn't* believe this, mister onus man?
He didn't. The moron had the wrong numbers, and would have gotten killed if America didn't happen to be there.
I struggle to understand the relevance of this statement.
Erastostenes, measured the circumference of the earth with an error of 3%! The true circumference of the earth was known to the greeks in antiquity!
All easy jokes about New Jersey aside, that's pretty interesting. Presuming that the universe doesn't contain a mechanism for violating its own shape, I wonder if there's any significance to the shape of the universe. The bits about its growth and contraction seem likely targets, though honestly their mechanisms are above my head.
And if you can find its significance, you can determine whether it's true.;)
The moderator which marked that informative should be carefully shot in a nonfatal location, so as not to miss out on death by inferno; also, rats. I'm not sure I can sarcasm up a URL which is more obvious without knowing their full name, and possibly swearing.
As the old saying goes, work it out with a pencil.
Is that how a mathematician says "hot grits cluster?" I've made a remarkable archive of this joke used over and over again on slashdot, but there is not enough space in this Internet to write it.
No. Dimensions don't scale like that, either up or down. The concept of a knot is nonsense in 2D, as an example. Making the case for up is more difficult, as it's hard to convince someone that something done in two dimensions in a 3D system isn't therefore significant in 3D. A good case of difficulty in explaining is that of complimentary angles, which can be displayed with two sticks and a hinge, but which may never have an effect outside that of an arbitrary plane cast in a 3D space. It's harder still to explain why adding a whole new dimension (pun intended as unsubtle cluestick) to a problem invalidates earlier, simpler approaches. Reflection including for friction and spin velocity is pretty easy to calculate in 2D. Flow dynamics are pretty simple in 2D, by comparison. Et cetera.
Your post is quite stunningly insightful. I'm picking a nit with your sig.
If we are willing to become evil to fight evil, why are we fighting it?
Because one small evil to consume a thousand great evils is a net win. This is the same rationale behind surgery, prison, chemotherapy, the containment of dutch elm disease or mad cow by killing a few to save the herd, damming a river, and so on.
Whereas the platitude is laudable because it tells us not to overthrow the electoral college system in a misguided personal crusade to unseat global evils (gee, do i sound bitter?) it's also patently shallow.
This behavior is in fact ingrained in us at a deep level, one which frequently supercedes the survival impulse, which tells you a lot about how important nature thinks it is. Firemen and other rescue workers are the clean end of the spectrum; it dirties as it gets to police, and moreso to soldiers.
Is it right that we imprison a few, strip them of their freedoms and what we have banded together under as their natural rights? Because that's exactly what we do to murderers - and those which simply fail to pay their share of national upkeep (tax evasion.)
There is such a thing as a nessecary evil. I believe you will find your answer in an inspection of the reasoning behind the word nessecary.
You're the first person I'm marking myself a fan of, BTW. I find it quite elegant how you dispatched the guy who thinks it a trivial matter to solve a significant portion of modern academia.
You know, the real problem is that retailers sold boxes marked for the old price at the new price. Most retailers didn't make this mistake. Mine came across correctly, I paid the correct price, and I'm being treated well by Replay.
Maybe you guys should calm down and get your facts straight.
The article doesn't say, but I wonder how he was prepped for intervention by the authorities.
Y'know, this is certainly an issue. That said, if the FBI comes to you with hard evidence of a hundred different similar scams and data on this one, it's just time to fucking listen.:D
Some of the elderly do have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy.
So you're, what, suggesting that he believed that the police were actually smurfs from under clover hill, trying to dupe him out of his duty to collect money from individuals in another country?
I find this sort of argument infuriating. This man was warned by more than one cop and was informed that the secret service was investigating. He was offered hard evidence. He proceeded, AFTER the hard evidence, to invest a third of a million dollars, half of which was not his money, into anonymous ne'erdowells on the other side of the planet. He was willing to trust his own judgement via flat text over that of dozens of professionals with resources he can't dream of.
and sometimes it's due to having grown up and aged in an era in which normal people were not targeted by frauds.
What are you talking about? Fraud has gone *down* tremendously since his childhood. Some of it was so common that it's part of our vocabulary - snake oil shills, magic elixirs, bait and switches, lowballing, market insurance.
Maybe they were growing up in that city that the Walgreens commercials always talk about.
Look, this sort of thing makes me angry. You're being an apologist, assuming things and ignoring the facts that are handed you. If it weren't for the third-of-a-million-dollar difference, I'd accuse you of being as bad as the asshat that started this story.
Why do I feel like the real idiots in this story were the people willing to lend him the money?
Yes, because clearly banks should hesitate to loan a few thousand dollars to a man with over a third of a million dollars in independant cash, three cars and a south florida home.
However, millions of Americans are currently putting themselves into similar situations by getting deeper and deeper into debt by taking loans to buy luxury items: a new yacht, a larger house, a fancy new car, etc. The evils of debt and the mounting interest costs is well documented, but it happens time and time again.
We're not laughing at this dumbass for getting into debt. We're laughing at him for spending three times his monetary worth on something that police had already told him was fake.
While you may not have fallen victim to this particular scheme, are you certain that you have not fallen victim to the "must-have" commercialization scheme so prevalent (and legal) today?
Not to the tune of a third of a million dollars, not once the police had told me not to, and certainly not to sixteen credit cards, two sold cars and a doubly mortgaged house.
I do feel a bit dumb about my $50 electric razor. That's maybe a different caliber of dumb.
but we are all just as capable of making equally stupid mistakes (an investment in the next Enron perhaps).
Did the police tell you not to invest in Enron? Did you hear about Enron via email? Did you invest triple the amount of money you actually had, risking corporate funds loaned to you, on Enron?
If nothing else, think of his wife who has lost so much and may have had little to say in the decision.
I'm not laughing at her. I feel awful for her.
This is a heartbreaking story. Do not become so cynical that we lose sight of this.
Heartbreaking, yes. Uproariously funny, yes. I wouldn't think it was funny if he hadn't been specifically told by the fucking authorities.
Yeah, and the next time the police come to you and say "this is a scam, don't trust these people you've never seen from the other side of the planet", and you proceed to pump in a third of a million dollars, taking out sixteen credit cards, selling two cars and double mortgaging your home, we'll be laughing at you, too.
Similarly, do not attempt to generate electricity by holding up a lightning rod in a storm, and do not attempt to seem commercially productive by suing for decade-past code publicly authored by someone else.
Statistics are funny. Even if it's in your favor, you're still not going to land the sum, so it's still not worth it - unless you're willing to risk a huge amount of money.
As the old saying goes - a variation on what this was started by - the lottery is a tax on those which are bad at math.
A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service. This is one of many reason's why. Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line?
Ahem.
The FCC never required that the phone company allow you to get a line for free. What they repealed was the set of laws that said that they had to offer just DSL without telephone service.
Have a look at your phone bill. (If you have DSL, look at a friend's instead, but the author i'm replying to says he doesn't.) You already pay for the line and for phone service seperately. That's something the bells fought to be allowed to do. Then, the FCC turned around and said "hey, you're charging for the line and service seperately; now that you're offering this new version of ISDN that goes over POTS, you're not allowed to sell them the line then require phone service to run other services."
People which got unbundled DSL weren't getting free phone lines. They were not being forced to pay redundantly for phone service. That's for people which live on their cell phone, or who have alternate voice like a PBX system.
I say that they get to wholesale it, and frankly that the Baby Bell's should be like power companies, you get a contract to maintain the lines for X years, you get paid Y dollars, and have to maintain Z services.
That's exactly how it works right now, except that instead of X years, it's X months.
On top of that you get to call them "your" lines, except you have to wholesale (wholesale purchases get to pay taxes just like you do, but they just get a circuit.) At that point states/localaties get to choose competition.
You seem to be confusing the bells with AT&T. Utility companies are granted federal monopolies to prevent infrastructure redundancy. The reason you don't have an alternative to Bell Wherever (though they've all changed their names now) is that there's only one phone network.
As far as selecting competition, again, this is exactly how it currently works. The easiest example is your long distance, which didn't work that way until the early sixties. You didn't used to be able to choose between AT&T, Sprint, MCI, et cetera. That said, you can actually do this with your local line service, too. Everywhere I've lived in the united states, there's some company which advertises in beeper stores, dollar outlets and check cashing places that they'll turn your phone service on without requiring you to pay off your existing bill to someone else. They're just gambling on a high-risk crowd; anyone can, in fact, open that loop for you. It's just that the amount of leverage Bell has by putting the bulk of the cost into the loop prevents anyone from competing on economic terms; the only companies which can are the ones which can afford to charge higher rates, like risk group service providers, commercial bulk providers and high-end providers.
If I remember correctly this is the way Power lines/companies are handled in Chicago, but I could be wrong.
This is the way they're handled in about half of the country. Many states don't allow deregulated grids fearing that cost cutting will cause unacceptable risk, which was recently rubbed in our face in the northeast. It's much more common for the other utilities: water, gas, and refuse.
That or I convince everyone in the neighborhood to by in, and I set it up.
Ruby Ranch did this some years ago at surprsingly low cost, and has maintained a working and marginally profitable (it's not meant to make money; they're setting aside a war chest for upgrades to hardware, et cetera) network at prices that were for the day dirt cheap. They have extensively detailed the process, including startup and recurring costs; it's a valuable resource for planning. Do remember that these prices are years out of date, and reflect line costs to the middle of nowhere; this is a lot easier in metropolitan areas which can't get broadband, such as condominiums with antiquated PBXes and private cable systems.
You seem to be neglecting the "of 2003" part in order to karma whore. Hell, the bulk of these movies are greatly overshadowed in the run os filmmaking history (exceptions to Schindler's List, Rain Man, Amadeus and The Godfather.)
It is my opinion, to keep in your thread rather than that of the story, that film students are too quick to heap praises onto the same damn things everyone else does than to generate their own opinions. Moreover, they tend to conflate plot with fine filmmaking, and to be apologetic for the past not having some of the understanding that modern day filmmaking. Whereas I agree that it's unfair to compare things like special effects, things like direction, acting and camera work are what *makes* a film; you cannot compare the past without the present and still have an objective list of the greats.
This is why I feel most of Hitchcock's films can be largely expunged from these lists. I respect that he invented and broached much of the genre, but only a few of his films really hold up these days - rear window, 39th guest, but good god, how long has it been since you saw The Birds? It looks like a *student* film.
As such, I also feel that you can strike Casablanca and AQotWF. Yes, they're both fine films. They're not nearly what Rain Man or Amadeus is.
Why all American films?
Where's Basquiat? Ran? Kundun? Titus? Waking life? I meen, shit, man, you named Braveheart. Don't get me wrong, that's a good and fun movie, but it's no Being There, no Gummo, no Harold and Maude, Kids, or Dead Man. Why don't I see Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Silence of the Lambs, Howard's End, From Hell, Fear of a Black Hat?
Why no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? Where are Ronin and Ghost Dog? Cannibal: the Musical? The Bride with White Hair? Waiting for Guffman? Blade Runner? Army of Darkness?
How come there are no Mononoke Himes, no Spirited Aways, no Rail of the North Stars? Where are Tokyo Fist and Dark City? Why no Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Where's Fong Sai Yuk, a legend adapted to modern filmmaking so well that the average white guy doesn't realize it's not a kung-fu flick at all? why no Hameer Films, Ed Wood flicks? Where are Amistad and Freeway? Where's Tetsuo 2: Boddy hammer?
Where's The Lord of The Rings? Let's be honest, that movie is a fucking masterpiece. And from the man that made Meet the Feebles.:D
Where is the Dark Crystal? Where's Shallow Grave? How about The Full Monty, or SLC Punk? Where's the Violinist of Hameln? Empty Mirror? X (either the malcom movie or the anime?) Where's I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, or The Wall? How about some Brazil, or The Last Supper action?
Why no Kubrick films? Fuck, you could get +5: insightful just listing those, if you ignore plot wide shut.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It is the proponents of the idea that the book is genuine's job to prove that it is indeed that.
This sort of thing infuriates me. Simply because one onus of proof remains unsatisfied does not absolve the speaker's own. If I claim that your mother was a walrus, and you claim that aliens forced me to make such a statement, does that I began with asininity release you from any responsibility to your suggestion of aliens?
No.
So, look. What the person which you contradicted was saying was quite valid, and quite correct. If the speaker makes the concrete statement that Foo Is A Hoax, it does not become someone else's problem to verify that in fact foo is not a hoax. It does not, in fact, become anyone's problem until they claim that foo is not a hoax.
Of course, the article was quite clear that it didn't know for sure whether the originals were a hoax, so this is my destroying an ill picked nit of an argument contradicting a statement that was never made. Still, if you're going to try to be pedantic, at least become a successful pedant.
One doesn't need to prove that something is a hoax if it is, Occam's Razor does that job.
Occam's razor by definition proves nothing. Occam's razor suggests that you haven't the faintest appreciation of the subtle touch of William of Occam.
What explanation is contains the fewest ubstantiated assumptions: That something was written a language nobody knows, containing valuable information nobody has any idea about, or that it was produced using a simple encryption technique to fool somebody to pay loads of shiny ducats?
This is much funnier if you know the history of European reaction to Linear B. Read a book.
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
I find it amazing that some people still hold this myth as true! What kind of history education have you had!?!
A proper one. Many were executed over this disputed knowledge.
Look, no scientist have never claimed the earth was flat.
This may be related to you being less than four hundred years old. I don't know any animists. Do you suggest that that means there never were any?
Here's a sort of a startling observation: you are not the sum total of views and beliefs throughout the course of the human condition.
For one thing, in every other culture than the western, it has never been claimed otherwise ("they even knew the earth was spherical"),
That's curious. I take it that the various myths about what occurs at the edge of the world were made up for saturday morning cartoons, then? Perhaps you're unaware that, for example, the Hindus taught the world as a platform supported on the backs of elephants, that the Vikings quested for the edge of the world to find the roots of Yggdrasil, that Julius Caesar, whose name you probably pronounce similarly to seizure, once claimed to have troops returned from the edge of the world at the outset of battle to inspire confidence?
but some has got the weird notion that Columbus had to argue that the earth wasn't flat.
In fact, the reason Columbus sailed for Portugal is that he was laughed out of half a dozen royal courts over this roundness bit. Maybe before saying "gee, I wonder where everyone gets this idea," try to find out if that's because they're correct. What exactly are you positing as evidence that people *didn't* believe this, mister onus man?
He didn't. The moron had the wrong numbers, and would have gotten killed if America didn't happen to be there.
I struggle to understand the relevance of this statement.
Erastostenes, measured the circumference of the earth with an error of 3%! The true circumference of the earth was known to the greeks in antiquity!
You can't generate meaningful text out of pseudorandom algorithms.
Markhov is rolling in his grave.
Four?
. europhysicsnews.com/full/14/article5/ar ticle5.html
Lots of people think twelve, right now. Look into branes, superstrings, collapsed dimensions, rotational dimensions, the gyroverse, and so on.
http://arxiv.org/html/gr-qc/9912073
http://www
All easy jokes about New Jersey aside, that's pretty interesting. Presuming that the universe doesn't contain a mechanism for violating its own shape, I wonder if there's any significance to the shape of the universe. The bits about its growth and contraction seem likely targets, though honestly their mechanisms are above my head.
;)
And if you can find its significance, you can determine whether it's true.
The moderator which marked that informative should be carefully shot in a nonfatal location, so as not to miss out on death by inferno; also, rats. I'm not sure I can sarcasm up a URL which is more obvious without knowing their full name, and possibly swearing.
As the old saying goes, work it out with a pencil.
Is that how a mathematician says "hot grits cluster?" I've made a remarkable archive of this joke used over and over again on slashdot, but there is not enough space in this Internet to write it.
Work it out with a pencil.
No. Dimensions don't scale like that, either up or down. The concept of a knot is nonsense in 2D, as an example. Making the case for up is more difficult, as it's hard to convince someone that something done in two dimensions in a 3D system isn't therefore significant in 3D. A good case of difficulty in explaining is that of complimentary angles, which can be displayed with two sticks and a hinge, but which may never have an effect outside that of an arbitrary plane cast in a 3D space. It's harder still to explain why adding a whole new dimension (pun intended as unsubtle cluestick) to a problem invalidates earlier, simpler approaches. Reflection including for friction and spin velocity is pretty easy to calculate in 2D. Flow dynamics are pretty simple in 2D, by comparison. Et cetera.
Your post is quite stunningly insightful. I'm picking a nit with your sig.
If we are willing to become evil to fight evil, why are we fighting it?
Because one small evil to consume a thousand great evils is a net win. This is the same rationale behind surgery, prison, chemotherapy, the containment of dutch elm disease or mad cow by killing a few to save the herd, damming a river, and so on.
Whereas the platitude is laudable because it tells us not to overthrow the electoral college system in a misguided personal crusade to unseat global evils (gee, do i sound bitter?) it's also patently shallow.
This behavior is in fact ingrained in us at a deep level, one which frequently supercedes the survival impulse, which tells you a lot about how important nature thinks it is. Firemen and other rescue workers are the clean end of the spectrum; it dirties as it gets to police, and moreso to soldiers.
Is it right that we imprison a few, strip them of their freedoms and what we have banded together under as their natural rights? Because that's exactly what we do to murderers - and those which simply fail to pay their share of national upkeep (tax evasion.)
There is such a thing as a nessecary evil. I believe you will find your answer in an inspection of the reasoning behind the word nessecary.
You're the first person I'm marking myself a fan of, BTW. I find it quite elegant how you dispatched the guy who thinks it a trivial matter to solve a significant portion of modern academia.
You know, the real problem is that retailers sold boxes marked for the old price at the new price. Most retailers didn't make this mistake. Mine came across correctly, I paid the correct price, and I'm being treated well by Replay.
Maybe you guys should calm down and get your facts straight.
The article doesn't say, but I wonder how he was prepped for intervention by the authorities.
:D
Y'know, this is certainly an issue. That said, if the FBI comes to you with hard evidence of a hundred different similar scams and data on this one, it's just time to fucking listen.
$50.00 for 3 years of shaving enjoyment
You and I clearly own different electric razors.
Some of the elderly do have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy.
So you're, what, suggesting that he believed that the police were actually smurfs from under clover hill, trying to dupe him out of his duty to collect money from individuals in another country?
I find this sort of argument infuriating. This man was warned by more than one cop and was informed that the secret service was investigating. He was offered hard evidence. He proceeded, AFTER the hard evidence, to invest a third of a million dollars, half of which was not his money, into anonymous ne'erdowells on the other side of the planet. He was willing to trust his own judgement via flat text over that of dozens of professionals with resources he can't dream of.
and sometimes it's due to having grown up and aged in an era in which normal people were not targeted by frauds.
What are you talking about? Fraud has gone *down* tremendously since his childhood. Some of it was so common that it's part of our vocabulary - snake oil shills, magic elixirs, bait and switches, lowballing, market insurance.
Maybe they were growing up in that city that the Walgreens commercials always talk about.
Look, this sort of thing makes me angry. You're being an apologist, assuming things and ignoring the facts that are handed you. If it weren't for the third-of-a-million-dollar difference, I'd accuse you of being as bad as the asshat that started this story.
Why do I feel like the real idiots in this story were the people willing to lend him the money?
Yes, because clearly banks should hesitate to loan a few thousand dollars to a man with over a third of a million dollars in independant cash, three cars and a south florida home.
If you think you are too smart to be conned out of your money, you're wrong.
I'm smart enough to listen to the police telling me I'm being conned.
He comes from a simpler time, a different era
A simpler, different era where you ignored cops explaining to you that this was a scam?
Here's a hint: we didn't invent con jobs in the last 20 years.
This guy probably is a runner up for a Darwin award many times over...
Well, except for not having died, and all. The Darwin Award is for having spared the gene pool their taint, which he has not.
He's also not eligible for a Grammy.
However, millions of Americans are currently putting themselves into similar situations by getting deeper and deeper into debt by taking loans to buy luxury items: a new yacht, a larger house, a fancy new car, etc. The evils of debt and the mounting interest costs is well documented, but it happens time and time again.
We're not laughing at this dumbass for getting into debt. We're laughing at him for spending three times his monetary worth on something that police had already told him was fake.
While you may not have fallen victim to this particular scheme, are you certain that you have not fallen victim to the "must-have" commercialization scheme so prevalent (and legal) today?
Not to the tune of a third of a million dollars, not once the police had told me not to, and certainly not to sixteen credit cards, two sold cars and a doubly mortgaged house.
I do feel a bit dumb about my $50 electric razor. That's maybe a different caliber of dumb.
but we are all just as capable of making equally stupid mistakes (an investment in the next Enron perhaps).
Did the police tell you not to invest in Enron? Did you hear about Enron via email? Did you invest triple the amount of money you actually had, risking corporate funds loaned to you, on Enron?
If nothing else, think of his wife who has lost so much and may have had little to say in the decision.
I'm not laughing at her. I feel awful for her.
This is a heartbreaking story. Do not become so cynical that we lose sight of this.
Heartbreaking, yes. Uproariously funny, yes. I wouldn't think it was funny if he hadn't been specifically told by the fucking authorities.
Yeah, and the next time the police come to you and say "this is a scam, don't trust these people you've never seen from the other side of the planet", and you proceed to pump in a third of a million dollars, taking out sixteen credit cards, selling two cars and double mortgaging your home, we'll be laughing at you, too.
Similarly, do not attempt to generate electricity by holding up a lightning rod in a storm, and do not attempt to seem commercially productive by suing for decade-past code publicly authored by someone else.
The lottery is occasionally in your favor
Statistics are funny. Even if it's in your favor, you're still not going to land the sum, so it's still not worth it - unless you're willing to risk a huge amount of money.
As the old saying goes - a variation on what this was started by - the lottery is a tax on those which are bad at math.
I see the 419 scam as a form of social darwinism.
Gee, I wonder if we can guess who the villians will be.
A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service. This is one of many reason's why. Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line?
Ahem.
The FCC never required that the phone company allow you to get a line for free. What they repealed was the set of laws that said that they had to offer just DSL without telephone service.
Have a look at your phone bill. (If you have DSL, look at a friend's instead, but the author i'm replying to says he doesn't.) You already pay for the line and for phone service seperately. That's something the bells fought to be allowed to do. Then, the FCC turned around and said "hey, you're charging for the line and service seperately; now that you're offering this new version of ISDN that goes over POTS, you're not allowed to sell them the line then require phone service to run other services."
People which got unbundled DSL weren't getting free phone lines. They were not being forced to pay redundantly for phone service. That's for people which live on their cell phone, or who have alternate voice like a PBX system.
I say that they get to wholesale it, and frankly that the Baby Bell's should be like power companies, you get a contract to maintain the lines for X years, you get paid Y dollars, and have to maintain Z services.
That's exactly how it works right now, except that instead of X years, it's X months.
On top of that you get to call them "your" lines, except you have to wholesale (wholesale purchases get to pay taxes just like you do, but they just get a circuit.) At that point states/localaties get to choose competition.
You seem to be confusing the bells with AT&T. Utility companies are granted federal monopolies to prevent infrastructure redundancy. The reason you don't have an alternative to Bell Wherever (though they've all changed their names now) is that there's only one phone network.
As far as selecting competition, again, this is exactly how it currently works. The easiest example is your long distance, which didn't work that way until the early sixties. You didn't used to be able to choose between AT&T, Sprint, MCI, et cetera. That said, you can actually do this with your local line service, too. Everywhere I've lived in the united states, there's some company which advertises in beeper stores, dollar outlets and check cashing places that they'll turn your phone service on without requiring you to pay off your existing bill to someone else. They're just gambling on a high-risk crowd; anyone can, in fact, open that loop for you. It's just that the amount of leverage Bell has by putting the bulk of the cost into the loop prevents anyone from competing on economic terms; the only companies which can are the ones which can afford to charge higher rates, like risk group service providers, commercial bulk providers and high-end providers.
If I remember correctly this is the way Power lines/companies are handled in Chicago, but I could be wrong.
This is the way they're handled in about half of the country. Many states don't allow deregulated grids fearing that cost cutting will cause unacceptable risk, which was recently rubbed in our face in the northeast. It's much more common for the other utilities: water, gas, and refuse.
That or I convince everyone in the neighborhood to by in, and I set it up.
Ruby Ranch did this some years ago at surprsingly low cost, and has maintained a working and marginally profitable (it's not meant to make money; they're setting aside a war chest for upgrades to hardware, et cetera) network at prices that were for the day dirt cheap. They have extensively detailed the process, including startup and recurring costs; it's a valuable resource for planning. Do remember that these prices are years out of date, and reflect line costs to the middle of nowhere; this is a lot easier in metropolitan areas which can't get broadband, such as condominiums with antiquated PBXes and private cable systems.
of a bunch of Southerners
Worse: it's Xenia, Ohio.
Heh. Well I'm not totally surprised ya did get flamebait modded.
I am. The person I aimed it at understood that it was a joke.
You seem to be neglecting the "of 2003" part in order to karma whore. Hell, the bulk of these movies are greatly overshadowed in the run os filmmaking history (exceptions to Schindler's List, Rain Man, Amadeus and The Godfather.)
:D
It is my opinion, to keep in your thread rather than that of the story, that film students are too quick to heap praises onto the same damn things everyone else does than to generate their own opinions. Moreover, they tend to conflate plot with fine filmmaking, and to be apologetic for the past not having some of the understanding that modern day filmmaking. Whereas I agree that it's unfair to compare things like special effects, things like direction, acting and camera work are what *makes* a film; you cannot compare the past without the present and still have an objective list of the greats.
This is why I feel most of Hitchcock's films can be largely expunged from these lists. I respect that he invented and broached much of the genre, but only a few of his films really hold up these days - rear window, 39th guest, but good god, how long has it been since you saw The Birds? It looks like a *student* film.
As such, I also feel that you can strike Casablanca and AQotWF. Yes, they're both fine films. They're not nearly what Rain Man or Amadeus is.
Why all American films?
Where's Basquiat? Ran? Kundun? Titus? Waking life? I meen, shit, man, you named Braveheart. Don't get me wrong, that's a good and fun movie, but it's no Being There, no Gummo, no Harold and Maude, Kids, or Dead Man. Why don't I see Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Silence of the Lambs, Howard's End, From Hell, Fear of a Black Hat?
Why no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? Where are Ronin and Ghost Dog? Cannibal: the Musical? The Bride with White Hair? Waiting for Guffman? Blade Runner? Army of Darkness?
How come there are no Mononoke Himes, no Spirited Aways, no Rail of the North Stars? Where are Tokyo Fist and Dark City? Why no Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Where's Fong Sai Yuk, a legend adapted to modern filmmaking so well that the average white guy doesn't realize it's not a kung-fu flick at all? why no Hameer Films, Ed Wood flicks? Where are Amistad and Freeway? Where's Tetsuo 2: Boddy hammer?
Where's The Lord of The Rings? Let's be honest, that movie is a fucking masterpiece. And from the man that made Meet the Feebles.
Where is the Dark Crystal? Where's Shallow Grave? How about The Full Monty, or SLC Punk? Where's the Violinist of Hameln? Empty Mirror? X (either the malcom movie or the anime?) Where's I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, or The Wall? How about some Brazil, or The Last Supper action?
Why no Kubrick films? Fuck, you could get +5: insightful just listing those, if you ignore plot wide shut.
Where's Blazing Saddles?
Right. So, anyway, let's stick to 2003, shall we?
This was one of the best movies of its kind that I have seen since Akira Kurasawa's "Ran".
;)
You should burn out your tongue and commit seppuku for even joking like that.