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Domain: greatachievements.org
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Comments · 4
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Red flags
For safety, we should enact laws that require a robot with a red flag to walk in front of any driverless car.
There is precedence: http://www.greatachievements.o...
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Re:Sharing isn't the problem Eric makes it out to
The copies should be free because the economics work that way. Just like grass should be green. Sure, there are a few exceptions, just like you can sell some copies, but those aren't the rule. You're not an idiot for sinking a cost without expecting a direct return on that product. You're an idiot for sinking a cost with no thought about how you're going to use it to make money. Do you expect to get a return from buying a computer by reselling the parts? Or do you expect a return from the work that the computer enables? Did you go through school expecting to get paid to go to school? Or did you get a degree in order to make money? Same thing with a recording. The free distribution enables you to be popular, it enables you to do other things worth more. Feel free to try charge for copies. But expect to fail because you're spitting into the wind. Don't think the wind is wrong when it changes direction... figure out how to work with it. That's why sailboats can still make headway going into the wind... they just don't attack it directly.
I don't want to do all the parts of my job, either. That doesn't mean I don't get to pick and choose what I do. If you don't want to do the fan service, then you aren't going to be a very successful artist. That's how the real world works. Just because you don't like that a new technology has changed the landscape doesn't mean that the law should limit the technology. It means you should use it to succeed. Or do you think that buggy whip manufacturers should have been legislated into success, and cars should never have been allowed to drive without someone walking in front of them waving a red flag because that protected the way people thought transportation should be done, it protected the horse stables and breeders and street cleaners? -
Re:"copying"
Actually I think the Wright Brothers did invent the first airplane (at least the first powered one)...
And yet they didn't. They 'just' had the first successful recorded flight of a powered aeroplane.
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screwing with history, tooThis is more or less off topic, but I just happen to stumble onto it via the 14 Greatest Engineering Challenges.
Computer History 5 - Personal Computers by William H. Gates III, (C) 2008 by National Academy of Engineering.
Emphasis, mine. Interjections, mine. Brackets, mine. After the Intel 8080 microprocessor was chosen for the Altair, two young computer buffs from Seattle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, won the job of writing software that would allow it to be programmed in BASIC. The weedy buffs win again, no fair. Nowhere was interest in personal computing more intense than in the vicinity of Palo Alto, California, a place known as Silicon Valley because of the presence of many big semiconductor firms. Electronics hobbyists abounded there, and two of them--Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--turned their tinkering into a highly appealing consumer product: the Apple II, a plastic-encased computer with a keyboard, screen, and cassette tape for storage. Holy Tinker Bell, Batman. Pass the duct tape, Robin. Among them were three kinds of applications that made this desktop device a truly valuable tool for business--word processing, spreadsheets [VisiCalc], and databases. The market for personal computers exploded, especially after IBM weighed in with a crap product in 1981. Its crap offering used a crap operating system from Microsoft, MS-DOS, but due to a truly superior keyboard was quickly adopted by other manufacturers, allowing any given program to run on a wide variety of machines. Nothing clacked quite like the original IBM PC. Hardware like the [Xerox] mouse made the computer easier to control; operating systems allowed the [Xerox] screen to be divided into independently managed [Xerox] windows; applications programs steadily widened the range of what computers could do; and processors were lashed together--thousands of them in some cases-in order to solve pieces of a problem in parallel. Meanwhile, new communications standards [Xerox, AT&T, Berkeley] enabled computers to be joined in private networks or the incomprehensibly intricate global weave of the Internet. To be fair, Xerox gets its due in the timeline section. 1970 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Xerox Corporation assembles a team of researchers in information and physical sciences in Palo Alto, California, with the goal of creating "the architecture of information." Over the next 30 years innovations emerging from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) include the concept of windows (1972), the first real personal computer (Alto in 1973), laser printers (1973), the concept of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processors (1974), and EtherNet (1974). In 2002 Xerox PARC incorporates as an independent company--Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. Here he finds a fancy way to explain he still lives in his parent's basement: 1975 First home computer is marketed to hobbyists
The Altair 8800, widely considered the first home computer, is marketed to hobbyists by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems. The build-it-yourself kit doesn't have a keyboard, monitor, or its own programming language; data are input with a series of switches and lights. But it includes an Intel microprocessor and costs less than $400. Seizing an opportunity, fledgling entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Paul Allen propose writing a version of BASIC for the new computer. They start the project by forming a partnership called Microsoft. A fledgling is a young bird that has recently left its nest (it has fledged) but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding.
Speaking of which, the other history-rewriting seizure-in-residence, Darl McBride, appears to have finally come to the end of his feather.