Invariably? This passes for insightful? I might have gone for funny, but it's a pretty tired knee-jerk cliche. Don't forget that even Ron Paul, the patron saint of libertarianism is a congressman. He must not think the exercise is utterly futile.

It's hard to say the Roman Empire "lasted" after the city of Rome was sacked.

Not at all. You may define Rome by the city itself, but "Rome" itself did not once Constantine had moved the capital and senate to Constantinople.

Constantinople wasn't even originally part of the Roman Empire, it was conquered later when they grew really large.

Hoo boy, is that ever off. Constantinople didn't exist before Constantine created it, and he did so with the explicit intent of moving the capital of Rome there, to the real hub of the 4th century empire.

AFAIC, you can't have something called "the Roman Empire" if it doesn't include the Italian peninsula and most especially the city of Rome.

AFAIC? OK, then you're being blatantly arbitrary. Did you intend this misconceived analogy to strengthen your argument? It does the reverse. Federalism has its merits, but I suspect from the above that your understanding of the real issues is rather thin.

Actually, Bach hated the sound of the first pianos, though later models were much better. But that isn't really the point here. The violinist in the Times article argues correctly that the power of the best music lies in communication between performer and audience on a deep emotional level. A computer performance is no more gratifying than sex with a robot. You couldn't replace a Wang Chung show with a computer, let alone a symphonic Bernstein score.

In other words, a computer doesn't replace an instrument, it replaces a musician, and does so very poorly.

This is too simplistic. You may argue whether his assessment was correct, but from all the (copious) surviving evidence Jackson believed that relocation was the only solution to a horrific problem. It was an ugly process, to be sure. R.V. Remini puts it very well: "It was harsh, arrogant, racist---and inevitable."

And your representation of Marshall's SCOTUS ruling is misleading. It was rather fuzzy on precisely what property the United States was responsible for protecting. And it lacked any injunction on the executive branch to defend that property. It also stated categorically that the Cherokee were not a sovereign nation.

As an American I am personally shamed by the whole episode. The blame cannot be glibly laid at Jackson's feet. The blame, dear C64 lover, lay not in our leaders but in ourselves.

That's below minimum wage. Someone needs to find a new employer.

Or a new calculator.

Nice, though the last line should doubtless read:

x = x - y

No?

Not true. I work in a field, Classical Philology, that has been hammering on the same material for 2 millenia. Original approaches are still plentiful because new generations approach the old material in new ways. Inscriptions and lucky finds in the libraries of old universities do occasionally appear, but even the most stable texts, like the Iliad, continue to generate fascinating scholarship.

Don't underestimate the ingenuity and creativity of intelligent people.

The best cheaters? Perhaps so, but cheaters are a self-selecting lazy bunch. Deeply obfuscated plagiarism could easily be as much work as an original paper.

> There's probably a philological method for sorting that out; I don't know it.

I do. The bronze age survivals in the Iliad and Odyssey are metrical, and generally restricted to details like place names and personal epithets, the Catalog of Ships in Iliad 2 being the canonical example. Current scholarly consensus is that the society imagined in the Iliad and Odyssey is in large scale no more than 2 generations old. For a quick and well considered overview, see Raaflaub's chapter in the recent Cambridge companion.

Thucydides knew even less about bronze age Crete than we do. A great historian, to be sure, but one best used as a source for the 8th century and later.

As for Plato, there's little cause for wonder. He's making the myths up himself to serve his literary and philosophical purposes. It isn't underhanded; it was a natural part of his rhetorical technique and would have been well understood as such by his audience. Later readers with different expectations misconstrue the text. Regardless, Plato could not be reporting a myth from Egypt accurately because the Greeks knew very little about true Egyptian culture. Their depictions of Egypt are not reliable.

Drop by the local Uni and ask your friendly neighborhood classicist or Mediterranean archaeologist. No one who understands the sources believes in Atlantis.

Tariffs? How does this stuff get started? We know nearly nothing of Minoan culture because there are no written records that we can read. Yes, they were clearly a seafaring people; yes, they felt secure enough that they didn't wall in their buildings. But trade tariffs? On *all* shipping in the Mediterannean? On what evidence can someone make this remarkable claim?

> ...it's amazing any memory of the Minoans made it to Plato.

None did. The myth of Atlantis is unrelated to the Minoans, and the legends of Theseus that persist in classical Greece were generated by later Greeks viewing Minoan ruins, not from an oral memory of their living culture.

Those who search for Atlantis based on Plato's didactic myth-making should compare the myth of Er at the end of the Republic. It's no more or less real than the two myths of Atlantis, but no one would ever claim that it's historical.

The Minoans were indeed impressive, though the multi-tiered complexes that you describe were from around 1400, not 2000. And they weren't wiped out by Santorini. They did just fine until the Mycenaean Greeks sailed down around 1250 and conquered them. If Greeks thought the Minoans magical, their reaction seems to have been, "Cool, magic! Let's kill 'em and take it!"

> I got fucked by this crappy legislation.

No, by the person who stole or lost your coupons.

Good on ya, mate. I wrote myself a python script to do the same for mp3s. But if oggs are what you're after, then oggenc in the standard xiph distribution can be compiled to produce oggs directly from flac.