So how long will it take for some Kiwi IP-freedom-fighter to: [... ]
5. Watch for RIANZ-member IPs in the server logs, and
6. Issue take-down demands to their ISPs?
That only works if unbiased parties are processing the take-down demands. The AC just above me has it exactly right.
2) Contact ISP's of all lawmakers and Judges you can find
3) Get their internet cut off
4) Watch the media and political storm
If only that could work. But it won't. And I'll outline why, even though you're probably at least partly joking.
The code of practice originally suggested by a consortium of ISPs (PDF) would have appointed the ISPs as the arbiter of which infringement notices were valid and which weren't. Personally I see little problem with that, if the ISPs are willing to assume the burden, as I see no reason why an ISP would be biased in the matter.
Of course the record publishers weren't having any of that: it's pretty clear now that they won't accept any code of practice unless it gives them some kind of control over choosing arbitrators. That means that a plan like yours would simply hit a brick wall, unfortunately, as there's no way that arbitrators would ever be chosen who would ever rule against lawmakers and judges without compelling reasons.
What's unclear to me is why the ISPs need to get their code of practice pre-approved by the record publishers. I've written to my MP and he has no idea either.
The old joke goes: A conductor and his concertmaster say "Hi! See you later!" before the concert (because the concertmaster would bury his head in his sheet music and never see the conductor during the concert). It's funny because it's true.
That is neither funny nor true. If an orchestral piece was only one tempo all the way through, then a conductor could start you off and let you go. But that just isn't the way it is. There are variations in the tempo that require the conductor
I wrote this in a cousin reply, but the GP is exactly correct. An orchestra or band that depends on the conductor is not an orchestra/band that is good enough to record. Musicians in a decent orchestra do indeed work precisely by listening to each other, more than (but not to the exclusion of) watching the conductor, except when it comes to sections that are particularly rhythmically tricky.
And the joke is in fact regularly used! It's derived from a quip of Thomas Beecham's.
No, GP is right: that is exactly how top-notch orchestras work. Even a Pretty Good orchestra works more by the musicians listening to each other than by keeping their eyes pinned to the conductor. They change tempo together because they know that's how it's supposed to go. The conductor really is there for coaching; for getting everyone to start at the same time; for really tricky bits; and in case of emergency. Even in the relatively mediocre orchestra in my home town, the conductor only goes into "strict" time if a section of the orchestra repeatedly misbehaves.
Of course, it depends on the conductor. Some conductors are control freaks; but if you watch someone like Nikolaus Harnoncourt, you'll see that he does not give any kind of "beat" at all, or when he does, it's often out of synch with the orchestra -- because they know better than to follow his beat. A classical orchestra that actually depends on the conductor, in performance, for anything more than the beginning and end is probably not worth recording.
Using Swiss bank accounts may be a partial solution, but you're still going to have tax records, NHS records, driving licences, passports, etc. that you can't encrypt, and which you can't prevent inappropriate people from seeing (such as government ministers... including the unelected ones). Encryption only helps with respect to personal communication. There are lots of transactions that require more insecure types of communication, unfortunately.
Scalzi has another post here which goes into more detail about why he regards an audiobook and text-to-speech as completely separate things: in particular, he explains that while text-to-speech may eventually compete with human performances in some respects, the use of any text-specific mark-up to improve the text-to-speech performance would qualify as a derivative work. No mark-up, no derivative work. I find that reasoning persuasive.
Being Pro or Anti piracy aside I do not feel for the RIAA losing money (if in fact they did lose any money, and if that money was a substantial amount) because they blatantly starred the changing times in the face...
I think that's a key point. It really doesn't matter whether any given individual is pro- or anti-piracy; public opinion has spoken, and is continuing to speak, very loudly. In the broader perspective individual morals just don't come into it: it's a demographic thing. Copyright law has gone too far -- and so, back the pendulum swings.
I do, however, once RIAA is dead and buried, intend to dig them up once a year on the anniversary of their death just to make sure they're still dead.
Why go for the high-maintenance solution? There used to be a one-shot tactic to take care of this kind of situation: (1) put in grave and firmly affix body to ground with stake through heart; (2) stuff mouth full of garlic flowers and/or communion wafers; (3) cut off head and place between legs; (4) cover in two metres of firmly-packed soil. Or, if you're feeling more Nordic, just do step 3 and follow up with lots of fire. I hope one of those'd take care of even the RIAA.
No, you trust that it'll never go down *for long*, and that when it comes back, your data will still be there.
Over the years, GMail has had way better uptime than anything I could have constructed myself, and the cost to me has been negligible.
Hear hear. It's not just better than anything I could have done, it's also got much better uptime than the e-mail provided by my employer, which is why I collect all my work e-mail to a Gmail address. Knowing what I know of the university IT support, I would need to see many more incidents like this to shake that trust...
70% or more of the mp3 market is ipod locked into itunes. The EU should force them to sell it with the rockbox firmware with winamp too.
I'm not sure if you're an astroturfer or just lazy. Wait, I've just taken a look at your posting history. I think I know now.
I'm sure you'd love for people to ignore all the lawsuits there have been over precisely the iPod monopoly issue. Ten seconds with Google reveal several. As yet none have been successful. Not to mention the lawsuits over Apple's refusal to license FairPlay.
It's not likely to be raised in Europe, though: just because you claim the iPod has a monopoly there, that doesn't make it true. In the US they may, possibly, have a market share over 70%; it's not very easy to find figures for Europe, but here's one 2007 source quoting a figure of 20% (5th paragraph from end).
I'm sure you'd love people to believe that 20% -- or even 40%, the figure quoted for the UK -- is a monopoly if it's Apple. But that ain't gonna happen.
Oh wait, let me guess, slashdotters dont really care of freedom or justice or markets or end users or developers. They just want to stick it to MS, per usual.
Nice way to generalise, slashdotter. All slashdotters are identical to one another with yourself as the sole exception, right?
It seems to be a common move to portray Troy and Atlantis as though there's some kind of similarity between them but there really isn't. Troy:
was inhabited continuously right up to 950 BCE, or about two
centuries before writing reappeared in the Hellenic world. There is at least a chance that historical data can be transmitted orally for that long; for longer periods, say around half a millennium, you're lucky if even tiny snippets of context-free information get preserved, and then because they're context-free they're historically useless.
was an integral part of pan-Hellenic culture, that is to say, every state in the Hellenic world had stories about the Trojan War as an important part of their cultural heritage. This doesn't lend historical credibility, but a widespread phenomenon does strongly suggest a common cause. This cause could have been a historical event, or it could have been a myth that just became really really popular. Either way, you're looking at some kind of basis in earlier culture, myth, or history.
isn't nearly as historical as you think it is. There are numerous problems that make it nigh-impossible to interpret the myths as containing much that is historical. For example, (a) if we assign the mythical Trojan War to the archaeological layer Troy VIh, then where are the Hittites? (b) if we assign it to Troy VIi (a.k.a VIIa), why is Miletos on the Trojan side? (c) there are a host of problems with the Carians as well but I'm already going on too long. So, while Troy the place is a reality, it's hard to assign much historicity to anything else. Some specific geographic locations and some specific artefacts are pretty much the only things in Homer for which corroboration can be found in the archaeological record. Probably about half of the people working in the field would be less sceptical than I am, but they are generally pretty conspicuously silent about the above problems.
By contrast, Atlantis:
is reported by Plato to have ceased to exist ca. 9400 BCE. (No, you can't just divide Plato's figure of 9000 years by ten because you feel like it. That's called "making up evidence to fit the hypothesis".)
is mentioned only in a story told by characters in two of Plato's dialogues. It is known from Plato's writings that he frequently made up stories to illustrate philosophical points. Atlantis is not in any sense part of the Hellenic cultural, mythical, or historical heritage.
has pretty damning inconsistencies with reality as we know it. Apart from anything else, Plato also reports that there was a war between Athens and Atlantis. This is in spite of the facts that Athens (a) didn't become a significant settlement until the late Bronze Age (ca. 1400-1300 BCE); (b) didn't "synoecise" (become a city-state, as opposed to a settlement) until the Iron Age (probably during the period of massive population growth of the 9th and 8th centuries BCE); (c) unlike Troy (and numerous other locations around the "Mycenaean" and Hittite regions), Athens doesn't show significant archaeological evidence of violent attack prior to the Archaic Period.
Really? You think they're a bunch of litigous bastards? I wouldn't say that... maybe just a bunch of assholes with too much clout in the legal system, and not enough in the real world.
Now now, I'm sure not all of them are assholes. It may well be that some of them are merely incompetent, stupid, or idiots. You know the saying about never ascribing to malice what can be put down to stupidity... anyway, it would be simply false to accuse them of being malicious or immoral, let alone to suggest that they were associated with things like malpractice, frivolous lawsuits, or being disbarred. Because that would clearly be a lie.
For some reason, mixing up then/than and lose/loose seems very common though. Furthermore we never use "whom" and "neither...nor" and we always have a problem deciding whether to use "who", "that" or "which".:)
Just to mitigate the offence, the "who/which" vs. "that" rule, though strict in US English, doesn't really even have the status of a rule in UK English.
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.
I completely support the sentiment of your remarks, and agree with everything you say about Atlantis. But as for Troy: I'd be even a bit more sceptical. There are really only three specific things in the Iliad that can be independently shown to be a genuine reminiscence of the 11th century or earlier, and not of something later: (1) the boar's tusk helmet (Il. 10.261ff.); (2) Aias' body shield; (3) Nestor's two-handled cup (Il. 11.632ff.). Everything else could be a reminiscence of something more recent. All those Bronze Age sites in the Catalogue of Ships that no longer existed in 730 BCE? -- well, they didn't suddenly vanish in 1200; they were still inhabited for much of the Dark Age. Even Troy (perhaps especially Troy) -- Troy VIIb3 didn't come to an end until ca. 950 BCE.
It's very very likely that there are many more things that do genuinely go back to the Bronze Age than just the three I mentioned; it's just that those are the only ones that can be corroborated as definitely Bronze-Age-only.
But, it is common in ancient (especially greek for some reason) to run in to a lot of "10s". Everything in ancient greek stories takes "10 years" and "100 years" and it is easy to imagine, based on this pattern, that 900 could easily be embellished to 9000.
I'm not sure where you get this generalisation from. I just can't think of anything to back it up. Though if you can cite three to five examples from pre-Hellenistic sources, I'd be happy to change my mind.
Much more common are groups of 20 years (periods of a single person's life) or 30 years (common estimate of the years between two generations), or sometimes another number within a specific text (e.g. periods of 6 or 9 days in the Homeric Odyssey, or groups of 50 sons or daughters in a few myths).
But I know of no instances whatsoever of a situation where it can be shown that a historically accurate number has been multiplied by a particular factor, whether 10 or 100 or anything else.
In other words, unless you can actually demonstrate otherwise, I suspect you're just generalising from your own familiarity with Arabic numerals. I should be interested to be corrected.
B. The presence of ancient gold-and high-carbon-silicon steel making in almost all the coastal Mediterranean nations while their neighbors could only attain bronze. Many of these gold-and-steel-producing cultures were far-removed from each other, the only apparent link being their coastal Mediterranean location NB: metallurgical tech has always been connected with high culture. Think armor and armaments as well as jewelry.
(1) You indicate that Wells' story is set ten thousand years ago. Iron smelting wasn't a widespread technology around the Mediterranean until ca. 1300-1000 BCE.
(2) Finds of iron around the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea and up major rivers such as the Danube are much more easily explained by trade than by an unsubstantiated hypothesis about sea level 7000 years earlier. It is independently known that sea- and river-trade were extremely extensive in the latter half of the Bronze Age. (See e.g. several of the maps reproduced in this lecture by the former excavator of Troy, esp. figures 46-51.) Iron was traded by sea and river even for a few centuries before smelting became really widespread.
(3) It is hard to tell what neighbours you are referring to who only had bronze. If the neighbours you refer to dwelled at a distance from major sea/river trade routes, it wouldn't exactly be surprising if they didn't have access to a heavily traded technology. Lack of trade leads to lack of iron, not the other way round.
According to TFA he said that it was in the "Real Sea". Apparently that's typically interpreted as being the Atlantic, but sometimes is assumed to be the Mediterranean.
Plato Timaios 24e:
hê polis hymôn epausen pote dynamin hybrei poreuomenên hama epi pasan Eurôpên kai Asian, exôthen hormêtheisan ek tou Atlantikou pelagous.
I hope that's clear enough even if you don't know Greek! The phrase "Atlantic sea" refers specifically to the body of water beyond Gibraltar (see e.g. Herodotos 1.202-203).
The GPP's post is a little exaggerated. The Thera eruption may have been anywhere from simultaneous with, up to a century before, the end of the Minoan palatial period; while a causal connection has been hypothesised, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis (as yet, at least). Minoan culture continued to exist under Mycenaean control or hegemony up to the end of the Bronze Age (the "sub-Minoan period"), so saying it was "destroyed" is simply untrue.
(Disclaimer: in my view Atlantis-hunting is silly and has no historical foundation whatsoever. I find the "humor" and "idle" tags on this story entirely appropriate.)
Piracy may be grossly exagerated, but also is a real problem. The media companies may be stupid and behind the times but their concern is valid.
Yes, it is. So are the concerns of every other business out there. But as long as copyright law is as overwhelmingly partial as it is, I can't see many people shedding a tear -- except for the folks who're making a buck out of it (whether directly or by brib^W lobbying).
See, I completely agree with the two sides of the story you depict. There is wrong on both sides: definitely. It's just that where you take the media mega-corporations' side, most people won't, because people resent the injustices of tyrants far more than they resent the petty crimes of private individuals.
I guess that's what you get for buying tyrannical laws: even when you're in the right, everyone still hates you and wants to see you crash and burn. I do too -- even though I don't pirate anything except the occasional TV programme that I missed.
It's taken a loooooong time for the pendulum of public opinion to swing against copyright owners -- once upon a time it swung in their favour -- but it is swinging back. I for one hope it swings good and hard. If that were to happen, of course, we might be in for a century or two where the law is overwhelmingly in favour of pirates; in 2209 people might be having the same argument again, but with the sides swapped round. I don't say that that's a good thing. But it's no worse than the present situation.
If that's an attempt at Latin, it failed. In Latin, virus is in the fourth declension and its plural is virus (yep, just like the singular), and NOT viri or virii.
You, too, fail at Latin: it's second declension. Didn't your Latin teacher ever tell you to look at the genitive to determine which declension it is?
Don't be misled by the fact that it's neuter: it's one of three 2nd-decl. -us nouns that are neuter (the others are pelagus and vulgus). Nouns of this type do not have plurals in Latin (see Allen & Greenough p. 22).
If Copyright were only 1 year, do you really think that people wouldn't still be pirating films by aXXo the day of DVD release?
They would be pirating films much less. Not for the obvious reason that they could just wait a year and then get it free; but because if copyright were only one year, public sentiment would be the exact opposite of what it currently is. Currently copyright holders have an overwhelming, overbearing, and overweening array of privileges, in a disgustingly unbalanced way. Copyright holders have every right in the world; the public good counts for exactly nothing. It is absolutely right to resent the situation. It is less reasonable to hate copyright holders, but it's hardly surprising; no one likes a slave owner.
If copyright were for one year, the balance would be exactly reversed and public sentiment would be strongly in favour of copyright holders' rights. No one would be able to mistake piracy for a moral act. It would carry a social stigma: piracy would be uncool. That's how piracy was viewed before ridiculously unbalanced laws started being passed. This guy said it best. So yes, it would change piracy rates drastically.
A balance is needed; but we will not ever see that happen without underlying political change, for which I see no impetus currently. I don't think your last paragraph ("once BOTH the *IAAs and the pirates have a little bit of self-realization") really offers a solution; you can't expect public opinion to take a break from resenting the imbalance. Public opinion doesn't take breaks.
"Ex post facto" has a specific legal meaning, which is completely different than whatever you think it means. Copyright extensions do suck, but they don't have anything to do with "ex post facto".
Ex post facto refers to something that changes the legality of an action retroactively. The DMCA changes the nature of copyright retroactively. It's not that inappropriate. Close enough for government work, at least.
Myths can live a long time. We have stories in our culture whose origins date back five thousand years, and perhaps more. It is possible that the European stories of trolls and ogres came from...
That's kind of weak grounds for the supposition if you take into account certain other relevant facts. In particular, there's the wee point that the oldest surviving myths (from ca. 3000 BCE onwards) happen to coincide with the development of a technology that is very useful for preserving those myths in the cultures from which the myths come -- namely, writing.
There is a reasonable presumption that relatively little information is likely to be preserved for more than two or three centuries without the aid of writing, and practically nothing for more than five centuries; and then only in a form that bears next to no resemblance to historical actualities on which the information is allegedly based (as in the case of the so-called Trojan War, or the Kosovo epics). There's not much in the way of independently verifiable oral traditions that challenge this presumption. And there are 25,000 years to fill in from the last Neandertal remains to the development of writing -- five times the length of time that myths have survived with the assistance of writing. Taking a plausible model of 5000 years and then multiplying the number by six goes beyond speculation; it's more like wishful thinking.
If... you can't change national politics, why vote?
Because voting for a losing candidate (especially a third-party candidate) has a minute but positive effect on the policies advocated by candidates at the next election.
No, voting isn't the same as "New World Order" crap. Voting is how most countries elect a President/Leader/PM.
Most countries that I've lived in -- with a couple of notable exceptions -- don't elect a leader; they elect a government. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of absolute power vested permanently in one individual.
Slashdot Mirror
So how long will it take for some Kiwi IP-freedom-fighter to: ... ]
[
5. Watch for RIANZ-member IPs in the server logs, and
6. Issue take-down demands to their ISPs?
That only works if unbiased parties are processing the take-down demands. The AC just above me has it exactly right.
2) Contact ISP's of all lawmakers and Judges you can find
3) Get their internet cut off
4) Watch the media and political storm
If only that could work. But it won't. And I'll outline why, even though you're probably at least partly joking.
The code of practice originally suggested by a consortium of ISPs (PDF) would have appointed the ISPs as the arbiter of which infringement notices were valid and which weren't. Personally I see little problem with that, if the ISPs are willing to assume the burden, as I see no reason why an ISP would be biased in the matter.
Of course the record publishers weren't having any of that: it's pretty clear now that they won't accept any code of practice unless it gives them some kind of control over choosing arbitrators. That means that a plan like yours would simply hit a brick wall, unfortunately, as there's no way that arbitrators would ever be chosen who would ever rule against lawmakers and judges without compelling reasons.
What's unclear to me is why the ISPs need to get their code of practice pre-approved by the record publishers. I've written to my MP and he has no idea either.
The old joke goes: A conductor and his concertmaster say "Hi! See you later!" before the concert (because the concertmaster would bury his head in his sheet music and never see the conductor during the concert). It's funny because it's true.
That is neither funny nor true. If an orchestral piece was only one tempo all the way through, then a conductor could start you off and let you go. But that just isn't the way it is. There are variations in the tempo that require the conductor
I wrote this in a cousin reply, but the GP is exactly correct. An orchestra or band that depends on the conductor is not an orchestra/band that is good enough to record. Musicians in a decent orchestra do indeed work precisely by listening to each other, more than (but not to the exclusion of) watching the conductor, except when it comes to sections that are particularly rhythmically tricky.
And the joke is in fact regularly used! It's derived from a quip of Thomas Beecham's.
You've never played in a large concert hall then.
No, GP is right: that is exactly how top-notch orchestras work. Even a Pretty Good orchestra works more by the musicians listening to each other than by keeping their eyes pinned to the conductor. They change tempo together because they know that's how it's supposed to go. The conductor really is there for coaching; for getting everyone to start at the same time; for really tricky bits; and in case of emergency. Even in the relatively mediocre orchestra in my home town, the conductor only goes into "strict" time if a section of the orchestra repeatedly misbehaves.
Of course, it depends on the conductor. Some conductors are control freaks; but if you watch someone like Nikolaus Harnoncourt, you'll see that he does not give any kind of "beat" at all, or when he does, it's often out of synch with the orchestra -- because they know better than to follow his beat. A classical orchestra that actually depends on the conductor, in performance, for anything more than the beginning and end is probably not worth recording.
Using Swiss bank accounts may be a partial solution, but you're still going to have tax records, NHS records, driving licences, passports, etc. that you can't encrypt, and which you can't prevent inappropriate people from seeing (such as government ministers ... including the unelected ones). Encryption only helps with respect to personal communication. There are lots of transactions that require more insecure types of communication, unfortunately.
Scalzi has another post here which goes into more detail about why he regards an audiobook and text-to-speech as completely separate things: in particular, he explains that while text-to-speech may eventually compete with human performances in some respects, the use of any text-specific mark-up to improve the text-to-speech performance would qualify as a derivative work. No mark-up, no derivative work. I find that reasoning persuasive.
Being Pro or Anti piracy aside I do not feel for the RIAA losing money (if in fact they did lose any money, and if that money was a substantial amount) because they blatantly starred the changing times in the face ...
I think that's a key point. It really doesn't matter whether any given individual is pro- or anti-piracy; public opinion has spoken, and is continuing to speak, very loudly. In the broader perspective individual morals just don't come into it: it's a demographic thing. Copyright law has gone too far -- and so, back the pendulum swings.
I do, however, once RIAA is dead and buried, intend to dig them up once a year on the anniversary of their death just to make sure they're still dead.
Why go for the high-maintenance solution? There used to be a one-shot tactic to take care of this kind of situation: (1) put in grave and firmly affix body to ground with stake through heart; (2) stuff mouth full of garlic flowers and/or communion wafers; (3) cut off head and place between legs; (4) cover in two metres of firmly-packed soil. Or, if you're feeling more Nordic, just do step 3 and follow up with lots of fire. I hope one of those'd take care of even the RIAA.
No, you trust that it'll never go down *for long*, and that when it comes back, your data will still be there.
Over the years, GMail has had way better uptime than anything I could have constructed myself, and the cost to me has been negligible.
Hear hear. It's not just better than anything I could have done, it's also got much better uptime than the e-mail provided by my employer, which is why I collect all my work e-mail to a Gmail address. Knowing what I know of the university IT support, I would need to see many more incidents like this to shake that trust ...
70% or more of the mp3 market is ipod locked into itunes. The EU should force them to sell it with the rockbox firmware with winamp too.
I'm not sure if you're an astroturfer or just lazy. Wait, I've just taken a look at your posting history. I think I know now.
I'm sure you'd love for people to ignore all the lawsuits there have been over precisely the iPod monopoly issue. Ten seconds with Google reveal several. As yet none have been successful. Not to mention the lawsuits over Apple's refusal to license FairPlay.
It's not likely to be raised in Europe, though: just because you claim the iPod has a monopoly there, that doesn't make it true. In the US they may, possibly, have a market share over 70%; it's not very easy to find figures for Europe, but here's one 2007 source quoting a figure of 20% (5th paragraph from end).
I'm sure you'd love people to believe that 20% -- or even 40%, the figure quoted for the UK -- is a monopoly if it's Apple. But that ain't gonna happen.
Oh wait, let me guess, slashdotters dont really care of freedom or justice or markets or end users or developers. They just want to stick it to MS, per usual.
Nice way to generalise, slashdotter. All slashdotters are identical to one another with yourself as the sole exception, right?
Debian's branch of Firefox is Iceweasel, not "Icecat"
IceCat
I believe they said the same of Troy at one time.
It seems to be a common move to portray Troy and Atlantis as though there's some kind of similarity between them but there really isn't. Troy:
By contrast, Atlantis:
Really? You think they're a bunch of litigous bastards? I wouldn't say that... maybe just a bunch of assholes with too much clout in the legal system, and not enough in the real world.
Now now, I'm sure not all of them are assholes. It may well be that some of them are merely incompetent, stupid, or idiots. You know the saying about never ascribing to malice what can be put down to stupidity ... anyway, it would be simply false to accuse them of being malicious or immoral, let alone to suggest that they were associated with things like malpractice, frivolous lawsuits, or being disbarred. Because that would clearly be a lie.
For some reason, mixing up then/than and lose/loose seems very common though. Furthermore we never use "whom" and "neither...nor" and we always have a problem deciding whether to use "who", "that" or "which". :)
Just to mitigate the offence, the "who/which" vs. "that" rule, though strict in US English, doesn't really even have the status of a rule in UK English.
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.
I completely support the sentiment of your remarks, and agree with everything you say about Atlantis. But as for Troy: I'd be even a bit more sceptical. There are really only three specific things in the Iliad that can be independently shown to be a genuine reminiscence of the 11th century or earlier, and not of something later: (1) the boar's tusk helmet (Il. 10.261ff.); (2) Aias' body shield; (3) Nestor's two-handled cup (Il. 11.632ff.). Everything else could be a reminiscence of something more recent. All those Bronze Age sites in the Catalogue of Ships that no longer existed in 730 BCE? -- well, they didn't suddenly vanish in 1200; they were still inhabited for much of the Dark Age. Even Troy (perhaps especially Troy) -- Troy VIIb3 didn't come to an end until ca. 950 BCE.
It's very very likely that there are many more things that do genuinely go back to the Bronze Age than just the three I mentioned; it's just that those are the only ones that can be corroborated as definitely Bronze-Age-only.
But, it is common in ancient (especially greek for some reason) to run in to a lot of "10s". Everything in ancient greek stories takes "10 years" and "100 years" and it is easy to imagine, based on this pattern, that 900 could easily be embellished to 9000.
I'm not sure where you get this generalisation from. I just can't think of anything to back it up. Though if you can cite three to five examples from pre-Hellenistic sources, I'd be happy to change my mind.
Much more common are groups of 20 years (periods of a single person's life) or 30 years (common estimate of the years between two generations), or sometimes another number within a specific text (e.g. periods of 6 or 9 days in the Homeric Odyssey, or groups of 50 sons or daughters in a few myths).
But I know of no instances whatsoever of a situation where it can be shown that a historically accurate number has been multiplied by a particular factor, whether 10 or 100 or anything else.
In other words, unless you can actually demonstrate otherwise, I suspect you're just generalising from your own familiarity with Arabic numerals. I should be interested to be corrected.
B. The presence of ancient gold-and high-carbon-silicon steel making in almost all the coastal Mediterranean nations while their neighbors could only attain bronze. Many of these gold-and-steel-producing cultures were far-removed from each other, the only apparent link being their coastal Mediterranean location NB: metallurgical tech has always been connected with high culture. Think armor and armaments as well as jewelry.
(1) You indicate that Wells' story is set ten thousand years ago. Iron smelting wasn't a widespread technology around the Mediterranean until ca. 1300-1000 BCE.
(2) Finds of iron around the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea and up major rivers such as the Danube are much more easily explained by trade than by an unsubstantiated hypothesis about sea level 7000 years earlier. It is independently known that sea- and river-trade were extremely extensive in the latter half of the Bronze Age. (See e.g. several of the maps reproduced in this lecture by the former excavator of Troy, esp. figures 46-51.) Iron was traded by sea and river even for a few centuries before smelting became really widespread.
(3) It is hard to tell what neighbours you are referring to who only had bronze. If the neighbours you refer to dwelled at a distance from major sea/river trade routes, it wouldn't exactly be surprising if they didn't have access to a heavily traded technology. Lack of trade leads to lack of iron, not the other way round.
According to TFA he said that it was in the "Real Sea". Apparently that's typically interpreted as being the Atlantic, but sometimes is assumed to be the Mediterranean.
Plato Timaios 24e:
hê polis hymôn epausen pote dynamin hybrei poreuomenên hama epi pasan Eurôpên kai Asian, exôthen hormêtheisan ek tou Atlantikou pelagous.
I hope that's clear enough even if you don't know Greek! The phrase "Atlantic sea" refers specifically to the body of water beyond Gibraltar (see e.g. Herodotos 1.202-203).
The GPP's post is a little exaggerated. The Thera eruption may have been anywhere from simultaneous with, up to a century before, the end of the Minoan palatial period; while a causal connection has been hypothesised, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis (as yet, at least). Minoan culture continued to exist under Mycenaean control or hegemony up to the end of the Bronze Age (the "sub-Minoan period"), so saying it was "destroyed" is simply untrue.
(Disclaimer: in my view Atlantis-hunting is silly and has no historical foundation whatsoever. I find the "humor" and "idle" tags on this story entirely appropriate.)
Piracy may be grossly exagerated, but also is a real problem. The media companies may be stupid and behind the times but their concern is valid.
Yes, it is. So are the concerns of every other business out there. But as long as copyright law is as overwhelmingly partial as it is, I can't see many people shedding a tear -- except for the folks who're making a buck out of it (whether directly or by brib^W lobbying).
See, I completely agree with the two sides of the story you depict. There is wrong on both sides: definitely. It's just that where you take the media mega-corporations' side, most people won't, because people resent the injustices of tyrants far more than they resent the petty crimes of private individuals.
I guess that's what you get for buying tyrannical laws: even when you're in the right, everyone still hates you and wants to see you crash and burn. I do too -- even though I don't pirate anything except the occasional TV programme that I missed.
It's taken a loooooong time for the pendulum of public opinion to swing against copyright owners -- once upon a time it swung in their favour -- but it is swinging back. I for one hope it swings good and hard. If that were to happen, of course, we might be in for a century or two where the law is overwhelmingly in favour of pirates; in 2209 people might be having the same argument again, but with the sides swapped round. I don't say that that's a good thing. But it's no worse than the present situation.
If that's an attempt at Latin, it failed. In Latin, virus is in the fourth declension and its plural is virus (yep, just like the singular), and NOT viri or virii.
You, too, fail at Latin: it's second declension. Didn't your Latin teacher ever tell you to look at the genitive to determine which declension it is?
Don't be misled by the fact that it's neuter: it's one of three 2nd-decl. -us nouns that are neuter (the others are pelagus and vulgus). Nouns of this type do not have plurals in Latin (see Allen & Greenough p. 22).
If Copyright were only 1 year, do you really think that people wouldn't still be pirating films by aXXo the day of DVD release?
They would be pirating films much less. Not for the obvious reason that they could just wait a year and then get it free; but because if copyright were only one year, public sentiment would be the exact opposite of what it currently is. Currently copyright holders have an overwhelming, overbearing, and overweening array of privileges, in a disgustingly unbalanced way. Copyright holders have every right in the world; the public good counts for exactly nothing. It is absolutely right to resent the situation. It is less reasonable to hate copyright holders, but it's hardly surprising; no one likes a slave owner.
If copyright were for one year, the balance would be exactly reversed and public sentiment would be strongly in favour of copyright holders' rights. No one would be able to mistake piracy for a moral act. It would carry a social stigma: piracy would be uncool. That's how piracy was viewed before ridiculously unbalanced laws started being passed. This guy said it best. So yes, it would change piracy rates drastically.
A balance is needed; but we will not ever see that happen without underlying political change, for which I see no impetus currently. I don't think your last paragraph ("once BOTH the *IAAs and the pirates have a little bit of self-realization") really offers a solution; you can't expect public opinion to take a break from resenting the imbalance. Public opinion doesn't take breaks.
"Ex post facto" has a specific legal meaning, which is completely different than whatever you think it means. Copyright extensions do suck, but they don't have anything to do with "ex post facto".
Ex post facto refers to something that changes the legality of an action retroactively. The DMCA changes the nature of copyright retroactively. It's not that inappropriate. Close enough for government work, at least.
Myths can live a long time. We have stories in our culture whose origins date back five thousand years, and perhaps more. It is possible that the European stories of trolls and ogres came from ...
That's kind of weak grounds for the supposition if you take into account certain other relevant facts. In particular, there's the wee point that the oldest surviving myths (from ca. 3000 BCE onwards) happen to coincide with the development of a technology that is very useful for preserving those myths in the cultures from which the myths come -- namely, writing.
There is a reasonable presumption that relatively little information is likely to be preserved for more than two or three centuries without the aid of writing, and practically nothing for more than five centuries; and then only in a form that bears next to no resemblance to historical actualities on which the information is allegedly based (as in the case of the so-called Trojan War, or the Kosovo epics). There's not much in the way of independently verifiable oral traditions that challenge this presumption. And there are 25,000 years to fill in from the last Neandertal remains to the development of writing -- five times the length of time that myths have survived with the assistance of writing. Taking a plausible model of 5000 years and then multiplying the number by six goes beyond speculation; it's more like wishful thinking.
If ... you can't change national politics, why vote?
Because voting for a losing candidate (especially a third-party candidate) has a minute but positive effect on the policies advocated by candidates at the next election.
No, voting isn't the same as "New World Order" crap. Voting is how most countries elect a President/Leader/PM.
Most countries that I've lived in -- with a couple of notable exceptions -- don't elect a leader; they elect a government. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of absolute power vested permanently in one individual.