You may be right about tanks, but there's no worry about regular cars, which normally use gasoline. If you try your little experiment with gasoline, you could well be headed for the hospital if you're not careful. And people drive around with enormous amounts of this stuff stored in their vehicles. Hydrogen is much less dangerous.
Switching also takes a mere software switch. The only reason you'd need a "Dvorak" keyboard is so that your keys have the same labels on them as the letter they actually produce. But since the benefits of Dvorak are totally lost if you're actually looking at the keyboard anyway, who cares? You don't need a Dvorak keyboard. Get a regular keyboard, change your OS's keymapping to Dvorak, and you're set.
In europe people generally don't give a damn how you park, as long as you're not blocking somebody's driveway or garage.
This is true and it bugs the hell out of me. I don't own a car, but I walk to work every day, and every day in both directions I have to content with people who have parked their car on the sidewalks, often creating a traffic hazard because they still block part of the road, and causing a danger to pedestrians by blocking the sidewalk and forcing them to walk in the road. In the US, you'd probably be lucky if your car wasn't towed in half an hour. Here (France), nobody cares.
It just lets you park faster and easier. Sort of like how owning a car lets you get places faster and easier. A car doesn't let you do anything fundamentally different. It only takes you places you could get without one, but faster. Contrast with, say, an airplane, boat, or spacecraft.
Is there an example of a successful nonviolent revolutionary in a land that was not owned by a modern Western democracy at the time?
Not to put MLK or Ghandi down, but I don't think either one would have had the same sort of success if they had been in North Korea or Eastern Europe under the Soviets, or even in the 18th-century British Empire. I think nonviolence is great for changing things in countries that are reasonably open, but it sucks for totalitarian states.
Had Hitler not given that one command, it is likely that the RAF would have fallen in 2-3 weeks, German landing forces would cross the channel before winter set in and Britain too would have fallen. Had this happened, the US would not have been able to get involved and the world today would be a different place.
I'm an occasional lurker in soc.history.what-if which seems to have a reasonable quantity of very smart people. The What If Sealion Succeeds (Sealion being the code name for the invasion of Britain) idea has been discussed to death. Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever come up with a reasonable change in history after the 1930s that results in Germany conquering Britain. In order for Germany to be able to pull off such an invasion, they need some heavy magic. Having a big chunk of water between you and your enemy counts for a lot. The Germans didn't have the transport capacity, nor the navy to protect it, to field anything resembling a decent army, much less supply it.
This is mostly 20/20 hindsight, as at the time it was apparently believed that invasion was possible. But from what we know today, it was incredibly unlikely.
Not to say that the British didn't do a good job; they did an incredible job standing up to the Germans. But the threat was not as great as it is often put.
[The Americans] have never won a significant military victory without superior numbers or equipment. I don't believe any other nation in history has that distinction.
Others have pointed out that this statement is incorrect. I want to point out that its very sentiment is incorrect.
The "right way" to win a battle is to use superior information to bring a superior force in superior numbers in a superior position and crush the enemy. Wars are won by logistics and strategy. Heroics are nice and they make for great films, but it's not what counts. A general who pulls off a victory while outnumbered may be brilliant in battle, but a general who never has to because he can always place superior force to counter the enemy is brilliant in war.
I spent a year in Caen, which is the largest city in Lower Normandy, about six miles inland from the east end of the landing beaches. The city was bombed totally flat by the Americans in July of 1944. They tried to warn the civilian population and get them into the largest church, which was spared from the bombings, but I can't imagine this strategy was completely successful. The city was infested with German soldiers and Caen was too important to capture to take time rooting them all out, so the obvious solution was to kill them all from the air.
Now, bombing a city flat that you are trying to "liberate" is not a terribly nice thing to do. However, did the population resent it? Hell no! There are memorials to the British and Americans all over the place. Apparently the population believed that being freed was worth a great deal of death and destruction.
In France, there is an interesting continuum from north to south. Cities in the north tend to have wide, straight streets on something that vaguely resembles a grid. Cities in the south tend to have narrow twisting streets like you'd think of in a medieval village. This is generally because cities in Normandy in particular and in the north in general were bombed flat to greater or lesser degrees by the Americans. As you progress south, the objectives become less and less important to the Americans, and the cities were, correspondingly, bombed less and less by the Americans. Despite this, we are not resented for it.
We were the good ones. Whenever a conquering army went during that war, they were feared, except for the Americans and the British. The Russians were only welcomed as far as they were less bad than the Germans.
We did do some terrible things during that particular war, and I'm not trying to claim otherwise. Our motivations were not even pure. However, we were vastly better than the other major participants in that war, in many very objective ways.
I may be misremembering, but I think the Windows 3.1 mouse cursor was an exact bit-for-bit copy of the Mac's cursor image. The fact that the cursor on Windows was white with a black border and the Mac was black with a white border is because historically the Mac and Windows have been opposite about which value is black and which is white. I think the Mac treated 0 as white and 1 as black, because the screen was treated like a sheet of paper you write to. Windows treated 0 as black ("off") and 1 as white ("on").
First, I have to admit that I browse at +1 with the show-nested-comments-on-main-page thingy set to +3, and I browse highest scores first. So I don't read very many low-rated posts.
Do posts with phrases like "I'm sure to lose karma" or "I'm sure I'll be modded down for this, but..." ever actually get modded down? I'm utterly sick of reading this phrase. It inevitably is in a post whose opinion is against "the public"'s opinion but is perfectly aligned with what all of the slashbots think. So of course it will get modded up, because it contributes to the great groupthink project. However, the poster has to imagine persecution. Even though all of his friends and everyone on this site agrees with what he's saying, he puts in a little persecution complex. "It hurts to bear the truth, and I'll lose:gasp: karma for it, but somebody has to do it!" But in reality he's just saying the exact same thing that every single other poster on the entire site has been saying since the beginning of time.
"My name is John Deaux, and my presentation tonight will be a little forced, because I've been constipated for a week...."
What makes your version something that must be said and mine something that must not be said? (Of course, you may think that my version is something that should also be said, but I think most listeners/viewers would disagree.)
When Collin Powel considered running for president, all the white people mentioned that "He speaks so well. He speaks so well". How the fuck is he supposed to speak?
Maybe they thought he would speak like that guy who actually won.
What did I say in my post that contradicts anything you said? As far as I can tell, you basically said "you're wrong" and then went and said a bunch of things I never contradicted.
I explicitly admitted social causes to the famine. However, I argued against marking the social causes as exclusive causes. It seems very obvious to me that the blight was a cause of the famine. Perhaps not "the" cause, perhaps not even the main cause, but it was certainly a cause.
Do you have anything to say otherwise? Is the blight actually irrelevant to the famine? You haven't claimed that at all, and as such you have not actually contradicted my post! And yet you claim that you are right and I am wrong.
The Irish depended on potatoes for food. When the blight killed and rotted the potatoes, the Irish starved. However, the blight was not the "cause" of the starvation.
(Yes, I deliberately left some things out.)
Ok, so the English were bastards and hated the poor, downtrodden Irish. That doesn't change the fact that the Irish were dependent on the potato. And it doesn't change the fact that when a disease came along that attacked the food that they depended on, the people starved. I hope that your Ph.D. education included the idea that things can have more than one cause! The social system may have been a large factor (I'll defer to you on this one since I don't know anything about it) but I don't see how you can go and say that the blight didn't cause the famine. It looks like both causes are right to me.
One of the candidates for the "unknodwn extra something" may be the time involved. It may well be that we can think of algorithms to simulate all the things we do, but executing them in a reasonable amount of time requires quantum parallelism.
Well, that's just an engineering problem. If that were the case, then a computer could simulate a person, just very slowly. From a theoretical point of view, the speed is not relevant. Of course a robot scientist that can come up with the GUT, but only after thinking about it for 1e42 years is not very practical.
That said, I still think there are several candidates for special things we do (unitary experience and the present moment to name two.)
I'm not sure what those are referring to. To believe that humans possess something a computer cannot simulate requires one of two things: either we have something extra-physical (like a 'soul'), or physics contains noncomputable processes. The soul thing is pretty much religious or metaphysical. You can't really argue about it, either you think we have one or you think we don't. (I don't.) The physics thing is harder. Current physics doesn't have anything that's noncomputable, but I don't think that there's anything which says the physics of the universe must be noncomputable, it's just what we've seen so far. If physics is a computable process, then you can "easily" simulate people by simply simulating the entire universe from the big bang onwards and waiting for us to show up. Again, not a practical approach, but it solves the theoretical problems. Turning it into something fast enough to talk to is just an engineering problem.
Over the past week, they managed to get it off the lander. For the entire duration of the mission, it will probably accomplish less than a single well-trained geologist could in a hard day's work if he were there in person. Robots are great, but with the current state of the art, people can still do a lot more.
I fly a lot more often than I take the train. However, on the rare occasion when I have taken the train, the train stations have been smack in the middle of the cities where I was and where I wanted to be. By car, it takes me perhaps ten minutes to get from house to station or vice versa.
About stopping in the middle, that's why I postulated "average" speed. However, unlike an airplane, a train can stop, load and unload, and start again very quickly. Passenger trains can accelerate and break reasonably well, and a realistic station stop is something like two minutes. If the train can do top speed between the stations, and the stations aren't too close together, this wouldn't affect things greatly.
And, yeah yeah, long airplane flight exist. Believe me, I know, I've flown a total of around 100,000 miles in the past two and a half years, the vast majority of it between continents. That doesn't change the fact that most airplane flights are very short. Have a look at the departures board of any major airport. Your typical list will be something like one flight to Beijing, one flight to Sydney, a few flights to South America and a bazillion flights to Podunk, Kansas.
Four wasted hours getting to and waiting inside the airport doesn't really bother me when it's around a 13 hour flight from Chicago to Beijing. It does bother me when it's wrapped around a three hour flight from Chicago to Ft. Lauderdale, and it is trips of that distance where a "slow" train could compete, time-wise, with an airplane.
It hasn't been proven that a rules-based system can't come up with new proofs. It's simply that such a system cannot be complete. There's plenty of reason to believe that people can, in the end, be simulated with Turing machines. Unless you believe that humans have some unknown extra something, then any theoretical limitations to such a machine would also apply to its human creators.
The average wasted time for an airplane trip, in my recent experience, is around four hours. This includes getting from the city to the airport, checking in, security, boarding, landing, disembarking, and getting from the airport to the city, with reasonable buffer times to avoid being late.
Trains have enormous advantages here. The train stations are usually located in convenient areas, not way out in the middle of nowhere. Checkin time is basically nil, and since you stow your own baggage, you don't have to wait for that on either end.
Given that, a 400km/h train will be faster for the entire trip than an 800km/h airplane for any trip under 3200km, in an ideal situation where 400km/h is an average and you have zero extra time on each end. 3200km is not a "short" trip by any means.
That's a pretty crazy theory, but at least it's more believable than one I heard the other day: "TSA and Homeland Security are only doing this to increase our safety!" Some people....
A small correction on the Apollo 1 fire. The fire hazard from low-pressure pure oxygen is comparable to the fire hazard from a full-pressure atmospheric mix. I believe there are physiological effects to low-pressure oxygen that make it less desirable.
What happened with Apollo 1 is that it was supposed to use low-pressure pure oxygen in flight. However, on the ground, they couldn't do that because the capsule was only meant to take pressure pushing out. If they had used low-pressure oxygen on the ground, it would have been crushed by the outside air. So they just increased the pressure. Oxygen at 3psi is ok, but oxygen at 16psi is an incredible fire hazard. Fire starts, everybody dies.
Well, no such laws exist now, and they don't seem too poised to happen. At the moment, the main threat is legal action, where the RIAA demands personal information about subscribers from an ISP. A large ISP will be in a much better position to resist something like that, because of the lawyers they can command, than a small one. Beyond that, the original poster said that big ISPs would have blocks on music downloads "instantly" which is completely foolish. (Yeah, I know, you're responding to me, not him.)
But anyway, it's kind of funny that you're the first one to bring up legality. The original poster didn't specify illegal music downloads, and I took him literally (probably too much so) as meaning all types, legal and illegal.
I may or may not be typical, but I have certainly heard of this "MSN" service. Of course, it's possible that you knew about MSN but didn't know they offered dialup internet, but what else would an ISP offer? They've been around for too long to be an ISP that is exclusively broadband.
That seems like some pretty heavy tin-foil hat thinking to me.
What incentive do these big players have to block music downloads? AOL has an incentive because it's part of a big media company, so it has a good reason to play nice with the other parts of the company. But the other two have no reason at all. AT&T doesn't care about music one way or the other as far as I can tell, and Microsoft is trying to become a big player in the online music arena, so their priorities are exactly the other way. Just because they're all big companies doesn't mean they'll automatically listen to what other big companies say. As long as there is some competition, it doesn't matter. If two of these "big three" blocked music downloads, you can bet the third one would use that as a lever to steal customers.
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You may be right about tanks, but there's no worry about regular cars, which normally use gasoline. If you try your little experiment with gasoline, you could well be headed for the hospital if you're not careful. And people drive around with enormous amounts of this stuff stored in their vehicles. Hydrogen is much less dangerous.
Switching also takes a mere software switch. The only reason you'd need a "Dvorak" keyboard is so that your keys have the same labels on them as the letter they actually produce. But since the benefits of Dvorak are totally lost if you're actually looking at the keyboard anyway, who cares? You don't need a Dvorak keyboard. Get a regular keyboard, change your OS's keymapping to Dvorak, and you're set.
In europe people generally don't give a damn how you park, as long as you're not blocking somebody's driveway or garage.
This is true and it bugs the hell out of me. I don't own a car, but I walk to work every day, and every day in both directions I have to content with people who have parked their car on the sidewalks, often creating a traffic hazard because they still block part of the road, and causing a danger to pedestrians by blocking the sidewalk and forcing them to walk in the road. In the US, you'd probably be lucky if your car wasn't towed in half an hour. Here (France), nobody cares.
It just lets you park faster and easier. Sort of like how owning a car lets you get places faster and easier. A car doesn't let you do anything fundamentally different. It only takes you places you could get without one, but faster. Contrast with, say, an airplane, boat, or spacecraft.
Is there an example of a successful nonviolent revolutionary in a land that was not owned by a modern Western democracy at the time?
Not to put MLK or Ghandi down, but I don't think either one would have had the same sort of success if they had been in North Korea or Eastern Europe under the Soviets, or even in the 18th-century British Empire. I think nonviolence is great for changing things in countries that are reasonably open, but it sucks for totalitarian states.
I would love a counterexample, however.
Had Hitler not given that one command, it is likely that the RAF would have fallen in 2-3 weeks, German landing forces would cross the channel before winter set in and Britain too would have fallen. Had this happened, the US would not have been able to get involved and the world today would be a different place.
I'm an occasional lurker in soc.history.what-if which seems to have a reasonable quantity of very smart people. The What If Sealion Succeeds (Sealion being the code name for the invasion of Britain) idea has been discussed to death. Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever come up with a reasonable change in history after the 1930s that results in Germany conquering Britain. In order for Germany to be able to pull off such an invasion, they need some heavy magic. Having a big chunk of water between you and your enemy counts for a lot. The Germans didn't have the transport capacity, nor the navy to protect it, to field anything resembling a decent army, much less supply it.
This is mostly 20/20 hindsight, as at the time it was apparently believed that invasion was possible. But from what we know today, it was incredibly unlikely.
Not to say that the British didn't do a good job; they did an incredible job standing up to the Germans. But the threat was not as great as it is often put.
[The Americans] have never won a significant military victory without superior numbers or equipment. I don't believe any other nation in history has that distinction.
Others have pointed out that this statement is incorrect. I want to point out that its very sentiment is incorrect.
The "right way" to win a battle is to use superior information to bring a superior force in superior numbers in a superior position and crush the enemy. Wars are won by logistics and strategy. Heroics are nice and they make for great films, but it's not what counts. A general who pulls off a victory while outnumbered may be brilliant in battle, but a general who never has to because he can always place superior force to counter the enemy is brilliant in war.
I spent a year in Caen, which is the largest city in Lower Normandy, about six miles inland from the east end of the landing beaches. The city was bombed totally flat by the Americans in July of 1944. They tried to warn the civilian population and get them into the largest church, which was spared from the bombings, but I can't imagine this strategy was completely successful. The city was infested with German soldiers and Caen was too important to capture to take time rooting them all out, so the obvious solution was to kill them all from the air.
Now, bombing a city flat that you are trying to "liberate" is not a terribly nice thing to do. However, did the population resent it? Hell no! There are memorials to the British and Americans all over the place. Apparently the population believed that being freed was worth a great deal of death and destruction.
In France, there is an interesting continuum from north to south. Cities in the north tend to have wide, straight streets on something that vaguely resembles a grid. Cities in the south tend to have narrow twisting streets like you'd think of in a medieval village. This is generally because cities in Normandy in particular and in the north in general were bombed flat to greater or lesser degrees by the Americans. As you progress south, the objectives become less and less important to the Americans, and the cities were, correspondingly, bombed less and less by the Americans. Despite this, we are not resented for it.
We were the good ones. Whenever a conquering army went during that war, they were feared, except for the Americans and the British. The Russians were only welcomed as far as they were less bad than the Germans.
We did do some terrible things during that particular war, and I'm not trying to claim otherwise. Our motivations were not even pure. However, we were vastly better than the other major participants in that war, in many very objective ways.
I may be misremembering, but I think the Windows 3.1 mouse cursor was an exact bit-for-bit copy of the Mac's cursor image. The fact that the cursor on Windows was white with a black border and the Mac was black with a white border is because historically the Mac and Windows have been opposite about which value is black and which is white. I think the Mac treated 0 as white and 1 as black, because the screen was treated like a sheet of paper you write to. Windows treated 0 as black ("off") and 1 as white ("on").
Not a very major copyright violation, of course.
First, I have to admit that I browse at +1 with the show-nested-comments-on-main-page thingy set to +3, and I browse highest scores first. So I don't read very many low-rated posts.
:gasp: karma for it, but somebody has to do it!" But in reality he's just saying the exact same thing that every single other poster on the entire site has been saying since the beginning of time.
Do posts with phrases like "I'm sure to lose karma" or "I'm sure I'll be modded down for this, but..." ever actually get modded down? I'm utterly sick of reading this phrase. It inevitably is in a post whose opinion is against "the public"'s opinion but is perfectly aligned with what all of the slashbots think. So of course it will get modded up, because it contributes to the great groupthink project. However, the poster has to imagine persecution. Even though all of his friends and everyone on this site agrees with what he's saying, he puts in a little persecution complex. "It hurts to bear the truth, and I'll lose
Sigh. I guess I'll go take my meds and relax now.
"My name is John Deaux, and my presentation tonight will be a little forced, because I've been constipated for a week...."
What makes your version something that must be said and mine something that must not be said? (Of course, you may think that my version is something that should also be said, but I think most listeners/viewers would disagree.)
When Collin Powel considered running for president, all the white people mentioned that "He speaks so well. He speaks so well". How the fuck is he supposed to speak?
Maybe they thought he would speak like that guy who actually won.
What did I say in my post that contradicts anything you said? As far as I can tell, you basically said "you're wrong" and then went and said a bunch of things I never contradicted.
I explicitly admitted social causes to the famine. However, I argued against marking the social causes as exclusive causes. It seems very obvious to me that the blight was a cause of the famine. Perhaps not "the" cause, perhaps not even the main cause, but it was certainly a cause.
Do you have anything to say otherwise? Is the blight actually irrelevant to the famine? You haven't claimed that at all, and as such you have not actually contradicted my post! And yet you claim that you are right and I am wrong.
To summarize your post:
The Irish depended on potatoes for food. When the blight killed and rotted the potatoes, the Irish starved. However, the blight was not the "cause" of the starvation.
(Yes, I deliberately left some things out.)
Ok, so the English were bastards and hated the poor, downtrodden Irish. That doesn't change the fact that the Irish were dependent on the potato. And it doesn't change the fact that when a disease came along that attacked the food that they depended on, the people starved. I hope that your Ph.D. education included the idea that things can have more than one cause! The social system may have been a large factor (I'll defer to you on this one since I don't know anything about it) but I don't see how you can go and say that the blight didn't cause the famine. It looks like both causes are right to me.
One of the candidates for the "unknodwn extra something" may be the time involved. It may well be that we can think of algorithms to simulate all the things we do, but executing them in a reasonable amount of time requires quantum parallelism.
Well, that's just an engineering problem. If that were the case, then a computer could simulate a person, just very slowly. From a theoretical point of view, the speed is not relevant. Of course a robot scientist that can come up with the GUT, but only after thinking about it for 1e42 years is not very practical.
That said, I still think there are several candidates for special things we do (unitary experience and the present moment to name two.)
I'm not sure what those are referring to. To believe that humans possess something a computer cannot simulate requires one of two things: either we have something extra-physical (like a 'soul'), or physics contains noncomputable processes. The soul thing is pretty much religious or metaphysical. You can't really argue about it, either you think we have one or you think we don't. (I don't.) The physics thing is harder. Current physics doesn't have anything that's noncomputable, but I don't think that there's anything which says the physics of the universe must be noncomputable, it's just what we've seen so far. If physics is a computable process, then you can "easily" simulate people by simply simulating the entire universe from the big bang onwards and waiting for us to show up. Again, not a practical approach, but it solves the theoretical problems. Turning it into something fast enough to talk to is just an engineering problem.
Over the past week, they managed to get it off the lander. For the entire duration of the mission, it will probably accomplish less than a single well-trained geologist could in a hard day's work if he were there in person. Robots are great, but with the current state of the art, people can still do a lot more.
I fly a lot more often than I take the train. However, on the rare occasion when I have taken the train, the train stations have been smack in the middle of the cities where I was and where I wanted to be. By car, it takes me perhaps ten minutes to get from house to station or vice versa.
About stopping in the middle, that's why I postulated "average" speed. However, unlike an airplane, a train can stop, load and unload, and start again very quickly. Passenger trains can accelerate and break reasonably well, and a realistic station stop is something like two minutes. If the train can do top speed between the stations, and the stations aren't too close together, this wouldn't affect things greatly.
And, yeah yeah, long airplane flight exist. Believe me, I know, I've flown a total of around 100,000 miles in the past two and a half years, the vast majority of it between continents. That doesn't change the fact that most airplane flights are very short. Have a look at the departures board of any major airport. Your typical list will be something like one flight to Beijing, one flight to Sydney, a few flights to South America and a bazillion flights to Podunk, Kansas.
Four wasted hours getting to and waiting inside the airport doesn't really bother me when it's around a 13 hour flight from Chicago to Beijing. It does bother me when it's wrapped around a three hour flight from Chicago to Ft. Lauderdale, and it is trips of that distance where a "slow" train could compete, time-wise, with an airplane.
It hasn't been proven that a rules-based system can't come up with new proofs. It's simply that such a system cannot be complete. There's plenty of reason to believe that people can, in the end, be simulated with Turing machines. Unless you believe that humans have some unknown extra something, then any theoretical limitations to such a machine would also apply to its human creators.
The trip doesn't even need to be that short.
The average wasted time for an airplane trip, in my recent experience, is around four hours. This includes getting from the city to the airport, checking in, security, boarding, landing, disembarking, and getting from the airport to the city, with reasonable buffer times to avoid being late.
Trains have enormous advantages here. The train stations are usually located in convenient areas, not way out in the middle of nowhere. Checkin time is basically nil, and since you stow your own baggage, you don't have to wait for that on either end.
Given that, a 400km/h train will be faster for the entire trip than an 800km/h airplane for any trip under 3200km, in an ideal situation where 400km/h is an average and you have zero extra time on each end. 3200km is not a "short" trip by any means.
That's a pretty crazy theory, but at least it's more believable than one I heard the other day: "TSA and Homeland Security are only doing this to increase our safety!" Some people....
Would "Scary" be +1 or -1?
A small correction on the Apollo 1 fire. The fire hazard from low-pressure pure oxygen is comparable to the fire hazard from a full-pressure atmospheric mix. I believe there are physiological effects to low-pressure oxygen that make it less desirable.
What happened with Apollo 1 is that it was supposed to use low-pressure pure oxygen in flight. However, on the ground, they couldn't do that because the capsule was only meant to take pressure pushing out. If they had used low-pressure oxygen on the ground, it would have been crushed by the outside air. So they just increased the pressure. Oxygen at 3psi is ok, but oxygen at 16psi is an incredible fire hazard. Fire starts, everybody dies.
Well, no such laws exist now, and they don't seem too poised to happen. At the moment, the main threat is legal action, where the RIAA demands personal information about subscribers from an ISP. A large ISP will be in a much better position to resist something like that, because of the lawyers they can command, than a small one. Beyond that, the original poster said that big ISPs would have blocks on music downloads "instantly" which is completely foolish. (Yeah, I know, you're responding to me, not him.)
But anyway, it's kind of funny that you're the first one to bring up legality. The original poster didn't specify illegal music downloads, and I took him literally (probably too much so) as meaning all types, legal and illegal.
I may or may not be typical, but I have certainly heard of this "MSN" service. Of course, it's possible that you knew about MSN but didn't know they offered dialup internet, but what else would an ISP offer? They've been around for too long to be an ISP that is exclusively broadband.
That seems like some pretty heavy tin-foil hat thinking to me.
What incentive do these big players have to block music downloads? AOL has an incentive because it's part of a big media company, so it has a good reason to play nice with the other parts of the company. But the other two have no reason at all. AT&T doesn't care about music one way or the other as far as I can tell, and Microsoft is trying to become a big player in the online music arena, so their priorities are exactly the other way. Just because they're all big companies doesn't mean they'll automatically listen to what other big companies say. As long as there is some competition, it doesn't matter. If two of these "big three" blocked music downloads, you can bet the third one would use that as a lever to steal customers.