I know you're just trolling, but I'll bite. I've gone through two radically different forms of mathematics education in my lifetime. The one was largely a "how to solve" system of rote numbers and formulas, and the other was proof-based calculus. None of it ever got terribly high up the latter in terms of cutting-edge math; the most difficult stuff included properties of Hilbert spaces and Dirichlet's function. Anyway, the latter sequence was all taught at the level of comprehension through the proof.
I turned out to be much better about the proof-based math and enjoyed it a lot more even though it cost more time and labor. I actually felt like I was learning something about the properties of the world and not just serving as a second-rate calculator. Anyway, my experience was that the creative and literary types were much better at comprehending math through proofs than discrete calculations. It appealed more to their abstract and critical reasoning skills, and the outcomes really reflected that.
Of course I don't mean to say that a Hemingway is automatically a Lebesgue, but I've really come to believe that the gap between the kind of thinking required for "real" math and for "real" critical reading is much smaller than anyone will admit. The real problem is pedagogy in primary and secondary education, especially the false division between the humanity and ineffability of literature and the objectiveness and determinacy of mathematics. Both are the endeavors of human beings attempting to understand and describe the world around them. They rely on different patterns of thought that develop from the same raw ability.
For the record I'm a classical philologist, a research occupation which is more literary than mathematical but intensely dependent on critical reading skills in ancient Greek and Latin. Alan Sokal is as much our hero as he is to the so-called hard sciences.
Life isn't just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies... what we've seen, heard, felt...anger, joy and sorrow... these are the things I will pass on. That's what I live for. We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light. We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with. The human race will probably come to an end some time, and new species may rule over this planet. Earth may not be forever, but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.
File sharing is the only thing keeping Usenet alive right now. If the RIAA can successfully shut down that segment of the service by targeting prominent big-pipe Usenet providers, then the whole thing will come crashing down in a couple of years at most. Looks like Oct. 1, 1993 finally arrived.
She had a good run of life; the best of the Internet's early years were spent in her company, and well before Facebook or Twitter existed Usenet was the original crowdsourcing environment on the Web. But then the Eternal September happened, and well, she was just a gibbering, incoherent wreck after that, filled with barely comprehensible screeds by Holocaust deniers and recommendations for means of male enhancement.
She'd been suffering terribly the last few years of her life, kept alive mostly by a continuous IV drip of copyrighted materials. But the government told the hospital "no more heroic measures," and she was just too weak to survive on her own after the stream of movies, porn, and cracked software was removed.
Actually, if that happens Microsoft will create a barely functional knock-off, load it down with ActiveX and whatever other proprietary horse hockey they have right now, and bundle it into Windows 7, then shriek that it's an integral part of the operating system now and they couldn't possibly remove it.
What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every JPEG, MPEG, EXE, PXE, hard drive, flash drive and floppy drive in that area. Firewalls go up on every computer. Your fugitive's name is Neeris. Go get him.
No thanks, I would actually like to be able to execute native code. Javascript or ECMAscript or whatever they call it nowadays is a pretty poor substitute for any of the dozens of much better programming languages in the universe. Plus it's write once debug everywhere to a much greater extent than even Java.
Why do you think there was such a kerfluffle over iPhone application development? Apple initially said you could just roll a Web 2.0 app that looked native to the iPhone, and exactly nobody was satisfied with that.
I have no doubt that browser devices will become more popular over the course of the next few years, but they're never ever going to replace native code.
Ho hum. Microsoft finally implemented a feature 5 years behind everyone else.
Most applications in Mac OS X get full OpenType support through the operating system. This includes Pages, Apple's very capable in-house word processor.
I'm not saying you should migrate from TeX (I use XeTeX for a lot of more complex typesetting operations), but you by no means need to look to Microsoft Word to get OpenType support. I switch between Pages for ease of use and TeX for freedom and typographic perfection.
The problem with using biomass to generate electricity to run cars is that you've got to get the electricity into the car and store it there, usually in a lithium-ion battery. That whole process probably diminishes your efficiency by an order of magnitude. If this guy's taken all that into account, well, so far so good. But I think we're going to need literally quantum advances in energy storage technology (think molten salts and carbon nanotube supercapacitors) before we can get fossil fuels completely out of our transportation system.
The real advantage of producing ethanol right now is that you can just mix it into gasoline and sell the combination fuel (E85) for use in most post-2004 model year cars. It doesn't require a total revamp of the energy distribution network for vehicles.
Nope. Hulu's in the works for iPhone and iTouch, and Pandora's already available. Streaming on iPhone OS devices is child's play -- the problem is when you try to route the streaming data over EDGE/3G instead of Wifi. Blocking media streaming over the cell network is certainly obnoxious behavior on AT&T's part but not surprising or unique amongst the providers.
Of course, had you ever used or looked into using one of these devices you would already know that.
If you were a government agency in charge of secret weapons testing, what better cover could you possibly come up with than implausibility? It may not have fooled the Soviets, but it sure fooled the American public. Nowadays Area 51 is usually mentioned in the same breath as JFK and Elvis' retirement community.
It would be interesting to check the Soviet archives and see what they thought was going on in Area 51.
I think I've heard every lexically significant variation on the name of this damn worm by now. I have no idea what "Conficker" actually means or to what it refers, but so far on this thread people have called it "Conflicker," "Cornflicker," and best of all "Cornfucker."
I think another name for it is "Downadup," which I always read as either "Downandup" or "Download a Duplicate."
Who gets to name the worms? We know that this one employs neat tricks like code signing peer-to-peer driven software updates and that it might be used for a sort of "evil Google" that people can use to data mine financial stuff and so on. Couldn't we lobby for a more rational taxonomy, so we could call this one "Cryptographically Labyrinthine Internet-Traveling ORganized Information Stumbler?"
Usually these spammers insulate themselves from the effect of negative verdicts against them by moving all their assets to offshore accounts where the fed can't touch them and neither can lawyers looking to claim their $x million in damages.
If only we could literally take the shirts off their backs in partial fulfillment of their obligations we might start to make some headway against the spam kings. Any other suggestions?
Catal Huyuk is generally thought to be one of the first human settlements in Anatolia. Also, real archaeologists date its habitation no earlier than 6500 BCE, and give its population as probably no more than 6,000 (by the way, your "for children" website agrees with me). So no, they weren't going to be fighting any wars or sinking any continents off the coast of Spain. Oh, did they have ships?
Humans didn't practice agriculture (meaning no towns, no villages, no nothing) until ca. 12,000 BCE, and they didn't live in communities with complex economies involving more than grain, livestock, and women until perhaps 7,000 BCE. Period.
> There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few.
Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard.
I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back thousands of years before the First Dynasty. In the West, it was the Greeks and Romans who built free-access libraries and made knowledge collaborative. You might almost think of it as the first open-source movement. As a result we have at least some idea of most of the major events in the Mediterranean starting from about 500 BCE down to the present day.
One last point: the Library of Alexandria contained mostly Greek books. It was kept by Greek scholars, of whom the most famous are Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius (author of the Argonautica) and Zenodotus (one of the first editors of the Iliad). By its time Egypt was run by Macedonian kings using Greek administrators and soldiers.
> floods, etc.
Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect the two using more than just correlation/causation, for instance some unusual feature of the disaster that is also mentioned in *all* of the ancient sources. If you made these claims in a paper it would never be published and even if it were it would destroy your academic reputation. We demand more proof than what your imagination can provide.
You can start fuming about how evil academics are now.
> Now refer to spun's reply where he explains how Plato's description fits pretty well with Crete and the Minoan civilization.
Except that there's a huge body of myth relating to Troy and the Trojan war that dates to at least the 8th century BCE and demonstrably includes material that had to have originated no later than the 11th century BCE. But Plato is the *only ancient source* for Atlantis, and anyone else who does mention it does so in reference to Plato. Atlantis is not mythological because it isn't in any of the myths. What's more, Plato explicitly says that Atlantis was way off in the Atlantic Ocean, which means that if he's right it was not in the Aegean, and certainly not Thera. You are cherry-picking the evidence to conform to an ideological view of the relative states of advancement of Bronze Age Greek-speakers and another poorly-understood Aegean island civilization about which we literally know almost nothing. Yes, it was way cool and had multi-story buildings and running water. But so did the Greeks of the classical age.
Please, take this from someone who knows. You've fallen prey to an overly enthusiastic hypothesis that involves a lot of hand-waving with nebulous claims of "literary license" and misrepresentations of the evidence based on an incomplete knowledge of Greek culture from the Bronze Age onward. I'm really happy that people are interested in my line of work but the idea that Plato preserves a historically authentic memory of the Thera eruption is just not supported by the evidence.
Now I know how the people over in Egyptology feel when someone says the aliens helped build the Pyramids.
2. Plato said that Atlantis was "outside the Pillars of Heracles," which means west of Spain. Both he and the Egyptians knew very well where Crete and Thera was and wouldn't have made so obvious a mistake.
3. Why doesn't the ancient mythology about Crete (Minos, Theseus, etc.) mention the apocalyptic destruction of Thera?
Why, for the love of God, do you people think that there was a civilization called Atlantis just because it's in one of Plato's dialogues? Plato isn't even the one who says it; it's a character in one of his dialogues, who claims to have got the information from the Egyptians. He also says that there was an apocalyptic war six thousand years before his own time between Atlantis and Athens, a city we know on the basis of archaeology hasn't been inhabited for much more than 3,500 years.
Ask yourselves three questions:
1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?
2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians.
3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad..." I am going to beat you repeatedly with a copy of the collected works of Milman Parry.
Plato created the fiction of Atlantis to make a point in one of his dialogues. Give it up already. If you believe in Atlantis you may as well believe it was destroyed by Captain Nemo with the help of a plucky fifteen year-old French engineer and a lion cub.
Is there anything the RIAA can do to stop copyright infringement without looking like a bunch of asses? Sure, but they've now in a deep hole dug on the unsustainable premise that they could either sue all infringers out of existence or at least enough of them to cow everyone else into staying off P2P. Turns out that wasn't working either.
Here are my proposals for ways they can get turned around:
1. Do their damnedest to promote all the usable online services. iTunes, Amazon, the whole smash. No DRM anywhere, though I think people won't mind fingerprinting. Do a mix of buy-to-own and subscription services; there are separate markets for each. Sell audio with lossless encoding (Apple Lossless and FLAC if that works in the non-Apple ecosystem). Raffle off concert tickets for buyers on the download services. Try to reach everyone -- Windows, Mac, Linux.
2. Do a "legal" P2P service that traffics purely in 128kbps MP3s of popular songs with lead-in or lead-out ads. "Weezer's Red Album -- now available from your online music store." That kind of thing.
3. Let Web radio live. I'm sure there's a reasonable profit stream there that everyone can tap into if nobody strangles the golden goose, so to speak. It also drives sales -- when I was a kid the only music I actually bought was stuff I'd already heard on the radio. Get people to actually use the "radio" function in iTunes and web browsers and whatnot. Music radio on 3G phones. The possibilities are endless here.
4. Instead of chasing homemade music videos off YouTube, get people to pay a "licensing fee" of say $5 and then let them be. There are also cross-licensing deals for advertising dollars to be had with the video services.
5. ENOUGH WITH THE MEDIA TAXES. If I pay a "tax" on recording media or my iPod's hard drive or whatever I will download everything I can for free. I'm going to assume I'm already "paid up" because guess what, I am. Besides, if we pay a media tax the music industry should be quasi-nationalized.
6. (the one they'll never accept) Deal with the fact that music is now a more distributed phenomenon and that the massive profit margins the record companies saw on audio cassettes and CDs just can't exist anymore. Make what profit you can instead of getting sucked down the toilet with the rest of the economy.
I will bet good money, though, that the RIAA won't do any one of these things over the next five years-- instead they'll just chase the phantom of infringement that they'll never be able to stop, music sales will go completely down the drain, and the world music industry will restructure around the online services being labels themselves. Cut your song in a recording studio then upload it to Amazon and iTunes. They take 35%, you take the rest. Hell, the RIAA should be very very scared of this happening, and I expect they are, but they're going to make it happen and maybe that's a good thing for all us music buyers.
I am *so* looking forward to grepping all the comments out of the source that talk about how they implemented the breathalyzer software at a drinking party.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're just trolling, but I'll bite. I've gone through two radically different forms of mathematics education in my lifetime. The one was largely a "how to solve" system of rote numbers and formulas, and the other was proof-based calculus. None of it ever got terribly high up the latter in terms of cutting-edge math; the most difficult stuff included properties of Hilbert spaces and Dirichlet's function. Anyway, the latter sequence was all taught at the level of comprehension through the proof.
I turned out to be much better about the proof-based math and enjoyed it a lot more even though it cost more time and labor. I actually felt like I was learning something about the properties of the world and not just serving as a second-rate calculator. Anyway, my experience was that the creative and literary types were much better at comprehending math through proofs than discrete calculations. It appealed more to their abstract and critical reasoning skills, and the outcomes really reflected that.
Of course I don't mean to say that a Hemingway is automatically a Lebesgue, but I've really come to believe that the gap between the kind of thinking required for "real" math and for "real" critical reading is much smaller than anyone will admit. The real problem is pedagogy in primary and secondary education, especially the false division between the humanity and ineffability of literature and the objectiveness and determinacy of mathematics. Both are the endeavors of human beings attempting to understand and describe the world around them. They rely on different patterns of thought that develop from the same raw ability.
For the record I'm a classical philologist, a research occupation which is more literary than mathematical but intensely dependent on critical reading skills in ancient Greek and Latin. Alan Sokal is as much our hero as he is to the so-called hard sciences.
Life isn't just about passing on your genes. ...anger, joy and sorrow...
We can leave behind much more than just DNA.
Through speech, music, literature and movies...
what we've seen, heard, felt
these are the things I will pass on.
That's what I live for.
We need to pass the torch,
and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.
We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with.
The human race will probably come to an end some time,
and new species may rule over this planet.
Earth may not be forever,
but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can.
Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.
File sharing is the only thing keeping Usenet alive right now. If the RIAA can successfully shut down that segment of the service by targeting prominent big-pipe Usenet providers, then the whole thing will come crashing down in a couple of years at most. Looks like Oct. 1, 1993 finally arrived.
She had a good run of life; the best of the Internet's early years were spent in her company, and well before Facebook or Twitter existed Usenet was the original crowdsourcing environment on the Web. But then the Eternal September happened, and well, she was just a gibbering, incoherent wreck after that, filled with barely comprehensible screeds by Holocaust deniers and recommendations for means of male enhancement.
She'd been suffering terribly the last few years of her life, kept alive mostly by a continuous IV drip of copyrighted materials. But the government told the hospital "no more heroic measures," and she was just too weak to survive on her own after the stream of movies, porn, and cracked software was removed.
Microsoft: charging you $629 for a developer platform worst than most of the ones that come free.
Actually, if that happens Microsoft will create a barely functional knock-off, load it down with ActiveX and whatever other proprietary horse hockey they have right now, and bundle it into Windows 7, then shriek that it's an integral part of the operating system now and they couldn't possibly remove it.
What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every JPEG, MPEG, EXE, PXE, hard drive, flash drive and floppy drive in that area. Firewalls go up on every computer. Your fugitive's name is Neeris. Go get him.
No thanks, I would actually like to be able to execute native code. Javascript or ECMAscript or whatever they call it nowadays is a pretty poor substitute for any of the dozens of much better programming languages in the universe. Plus it's write once debug everywhere to a much greater extent than even Java.
Why do you think there was such a kerfluffle over iPhone application development? Apple initially said you could just roll a Web 2.0 app that looked native to the iPhone, and exactly nobody was satisfied with that.
I have no doubt that browser devices will become more popular over the course of the next few years, but they're never ever going to replace native code.
Ho hum. Microsoft finally implemented a feature 5 years behind everyone else.
Most applications in Mac OS X get full OpenType support through the operating system. This includes Pages, Apple's very capable in-house word processor.
I'm not saying you should migrate from TeX (I use XeTeX for a lot of more complex typesetting operations), but you by no means need to look to Microsoft Word to get OpenType support. I switch between Pages for ease of use and TeX for freedom and typographic perfection.
The problem with using biomass to generate electricity to run cars is that you've got to get the electricity into the car and store it there, usually in a lithium-ion battery. That whole process probably diminishes your efficiency by an order of magnitude. If this guy's taken all that into account, well, so far so good. But I think we're going to need literally quantum advances in energy storage technology (think molten salts and carbon nanotube supercapacitors) before we can get fossil fuels completely out of our transportation system.
The real advantage of producing ethanol right now is that you can just mix it into gasoline and sell the combination fuel (E85) for use in most post-2004 model year cars. It doesn't require a total revamp of the energy distribution network for vehicles.
On top of everything else, now we have to worry about our police being knocked out by influenza!
Great.
>Streaming would rule out playback on iPod Touch.
Nope. Hulu's in the works for iPhone and iTouch, and Pandora's already available. Streaming on iPhone OS devices is child's play -- the problem is when you try to route the streaming data over EDGE/3G instead of Wifi. Blocking media streaming over the cell network is certainly obnoxious behavior on AT&T's part but not surprising or unique amongst the providers.
Of course, had you ever used or looked into using one of these devices you would already know that.
If you were a government agency in charge of secret weapons testing, what better cover could you possibly come up with than implausibility? It may not have fooled the Soviets, but it sure fooled the American public. Nowadays Area 51 is usually mentioned in the same breath as JFK and Elvis' retirement community.
It would be interesting to check the Soviet archives and see what they thought was going on in Area 51.
Barack Obama convenes the Planetary Council!
Agenda: Launch solar shade
-----
Sorry, I know that makes two SMAC references in one week, but it couldn't be helped.
If the plan worries any of you, don't think too much about it, Sister Miriam will probably veto it anyway.
What actually transpires beneath the veil of an event horizon? Decent people shouldn't think too much about that.
Academician Prokhor Zakharov
"For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
Shut up! That's why.
I think I've heard every lexically significant variation on the name of this damn worm by now. I have no idea what "Conficker" actually means or to what it refers, but so far on this thread people have called it "Conflicker," "Cornflicker," and best of all "Cornfucker."
I think another name for it is "Downadup," which I always read as either "Downandup" or "Download a Duplicate."
Who gets to name the worms? We know that this one employs neat tricks like code signing peer-to-peer driven software updates and that it might be used for a sort of "evil Google" that people can use to data mine financial stuff and so on. Couldn't we lobby for a more rational taxonomy, so we could call this one "Cryptographically Labyrinthine Internet-Traveling ORganized Information Stumbler?"
I pay the extra $500 not so much to get the Apple logo on my computer as to keep the Microsoft logo (and hence the Blue Screen of Death) off of it.
Usually these spammers insulate themselves from the effect of negative verdicts against them by moving all their assets to offshore accounts where the fed can't touch them and neither can lawyers looking to claim their $x million in damages.
If only we could literally take the shirts off their backs in partial fulfillment of their obligations we might start to make some headway against the spam kings. Any other suggestions?
> Check out Catal Huyuk as one example. 9,000 B.C, Turkey, population 10,000 http://www.smm.org/catal/introduction/
Catal Huyuk is generally thought to be one of the first human settlements in Anatolia. Also, real archaeologists date its habitation no earlier than 6500 BCE, and give its population as probably no more than 6,000 (by the way, your "for children" website agrees with me). So no, they weren't going to be fighting any wars or sinking any continents off the coast of Spain. Oh, did they have ships?
Humans didn't practice agriculture (meaning no towns, no villages, no nothing) until ca. 12,000 BCE, and they didn't live in communities with complex economies involving more than grain, livestock, and women until perhaps 7,000 BCE. Period.
> There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few.
Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard.
I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back thousands of years before the First Dynasty. In the West, it was the Greeks and Romans who built free-access libraries and made knowledge collaborative. You might almost think of it as the first open-source movement. As a result we have at least some idea of most of the major events in the Mediterranean starting from about 500 BCE down to the present day.
One last point: the Library of Alexandria contained mostly Greek books. It was kept by Greek scholars, of whom the most famous are Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius (author of the Argonautica) and Zenodotus (one of the first editors of the Iliad). By its time Egypt was run by Macedonian kings using Greek administrators and soldiers.
> floods, etc.
Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect the two using more than just correlation/causation, for instance some unusual feature of the disaster that is also mentioned in *all* of the ancient sources. If you made these claims in a paper it would never be published and even if it were it would destroy your academic reputation. We demand more proof than what your imagination can provide.
You can start fuming about how evil academics are now.
> Now refer to spun's reply where he explains how Plato's description fits pretty well with Crete and the Minoan civilization.
Except that there's a huge body of myth relating to Troy and the Trojan war that dates to at least the 8th century BCE and demonstrably includes material that had to have originated no later than the 11th century BCE. But Plato is the *only ancient source* for Atlantis, and anyone else who does mention it does so in reference to Plato. Atlantis is not mythological because it isn't in any of the myths. What's more, Plato explicitly says that Atlantis was way off in the Atlantic Ocean, which means that if he's right it was not in the Aegean, and certainly not Thera. You are cherry-picking the evidence to conform to an ideological view of the relative states of advancement of Bronze Age Greek-speakers and another poorly-understood Aegean island civilization about which we literally know almost nothing. Yes, it was way cool and had multi-story buildings and running water. But so did the Greeks of the classical age.
Please, take this from someone who knows. You've fallen prey to an overly enthusiastic hypothesis that involves a lot of hand-waving with nebulous claims of "literary license" and misrepresentations of the evidence based on an incomplete knowledge of Greek culture from the Bronze Age onward. I'm really happy that people are interested in my line of work but the idea that Plato preserves a historically authentic memory of the Thera eruption is just not supported by the evidence.
Now I know how the people over in Egyptology feel when someone says the aliens helped build the Pyramids.
You made three errors there:
1. Plato didn't speak Egyptian.
2. Plato said that Atlantis was "outside the Pillars of Heracles," which means west of Spain. Both he and the Egyptians knew very well where Crete and Thera was and wouldn't have made so obvious a mistake.
3. Why doesn't the ancient mythology about Crete (Minos, Theseus, etc.) mention the apocalyptic destruction of Thera?
Why, for the love of God, do you people think that there was a civilization called Atlantis just because it's in one of Plato's dialogues? Plato isn't even the one who says it; it's a character in one of his dialogues, who claims to have got the information from the Egyptians. He also says that there was an apocalyptic war six thousand years before his own time between Atlantis and Athens, a city we know on the basis of archaeology hasn't been inhabited for much more than 3,500 years.
Ask yourselves three questions:
1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?
2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians.
3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad..." I am going to beat you repeatedly with a copy of the collected works of Milman Parry.
Plato created the fiction of Atlantis to make a point in one of his dialogues. Give it up already. If you believe in Atlantis you may as well believe it was destroyed by Captain Nemo with the help of a plucky fifteen year-old French engineer and a lion cub.
Is there anything the RIAA can do to stop copyright infringement without looking like a bunch of asses? Sure, but they've now in a deep hole dug on the unsustainable premise that they could either sue all infringers out of existence or at least enough of them to cow everyone else into staying off P2P. Turns out that wasn't working either.
Here are my proposals for ways they can get turned around:
1. Do their damnedest to promote all the usable online services. iTunes, Amazon, the whole smash. No DRM anywhere, though I think people won't mind fingerprinting. Do a mix of buy-to-own and subscription services; there are separate markets for each. Sell audio with lossless encoding (Apple Lossless and FLAC if that works in the non-Apple ecosystem). Raffle off concert tickets for buyers on the download services. Try to reach everyone -- Windows, Mac, Linux.
2. Do a "legal" P2P service that traffics purely in 128kbps MP3s of popular songs with lead-in or lead-out ads. "Weezer's Red Album -- now available from your online music store." That kind of thing.
3. Let Web radio live. I'm sure there's a reasonable profit stream there that everyone can tap into if nobody strangles the golden goose, so to speak. It also drives sales -- when I was a kid the only music I actually bought was stuff I'd already heard on the radio. Get people to actually use the "radio" function in iTunes and web browsers and whatnot. Music radio on 3G phones. The possibilities are endless here.
4. Instead of chasing homemade music videos off YouTube, get people to pay a "licensing fee" of say $5 and then let them be. There are also cross-licensing deals for advertising dollars to be had with the video services.
5. ENOUGH WITH THE MEDIA TAXES. If I pay a "tax" on recording media or my iPod's hard drive or whatever I will download everything I can for free. I'm going to assume I'm already "paid up" because guess what, I am. Besides, if we pay a media tax the music industry should be quasi-nationalized.
6. (the one they'll never accept) Deal with the fact that music is now a more distributed phenomenon and that the massive profit margins the record companies saw on audio cassettes and CDs just can't exist anymore. Make what profit you can instead of getting sucked down the toilet with the rest of the economy.
I will bet good money, though, that the RIAA won't do any one of these things over the next five years-- instead they'll just chase the phantom of infringement that they'll never be able to stop, music sales will go completely down the drain, and the world music industry will restructure around the online services being labels themselves. Cut your song in a recording studio then upload it to Amazon and iTunes. They take 35%, you take the rest. Hell, the RIAA should be very very scared of this happening, and I expect they are, but they're going to make it happen and maybe that's a good thing for all us music buyers.
I am *so* looking forward to grepping all the comments out of the source that talk about how they implemented the breathalyzer software at a drinking party.