Cell phones became practical more than just "a few years ago". I'm one of the latecomers to the cellphone party (I dislike phones in general, phones that follow you even less), and I've had one (out of necessity) since 2003.
And this map doesn't even include Alaska...which is almost half the size of the US mainland.
Your comparison of total area is correct (continental Europe and the US are of similar size), but you really need to start looking at better maps. Alaska is under 670K square miles. The contiguous 48 states (aside: Alaska is part of the mainland) are over 3100K square miles, about 4.7 times the size of Alaska. Maybe you've been looking at too many Mercator-projection maps, which exaggerate the size of northern areas? Also, the map you link to doesn't include eastern Europe, which not only includes all of those er... eastern-European countries you hear about all the time, but also a chunk of Russia.
In my travel around Europe (back when I had the freedom to do that), I found few Europeans who knew much about North American geography. That includes the semester I spent at university in Scotland. OK, they knew Canada, US, Mexico, bunch-of-little-countries, but litte more detail. New York, Florida, and California seemed to be the only states most people knew (or visited). I'm from Michigan and when that name drew blank reactions, I tried explaining that it was the one in the middle of the Great Lakes, figuring: they're visible from the moon, they form an eye-catching section on the nation's north border, etc. Still no recognition. Eventually my stock answer to polite queries of "where in the US are you from?" was a deadpan "Michigan. It's next to Canada." That seemed to satisfy most people. Once when someone asked "Is it near Detroit?" that actually made my day.
REAL AMERICANS don't need a map to tell them where their landmarks are located.
As a matter of fact, for the specific case of the Lincoln Memorial and a few other landmarks in DC, I'd say that's true. They've been shown so many times in movies and on TV, that anyone who's been paying attention should be able to find them without a map. Look for the Washington Monument, which can be seen from anywhere in central Washington. If you can't find the Lincoln Memorial from there (hint: turn your head that way, across the long "pond").... well, you're probably going there for a Glenn Beck concert.
I was around in 1975. I remember the technology that existed and understand what it was capable of. And, Senator, it was not ready for this rather brilliant idea.
In fact, the questions posed by the Kodak suits continued to plague digital photography for another quarter century. Despite my interest in both photography and computers, I didn't buy a digital camera until around 2000 because the technology just wasn't good enough yet (at least not an affordable price). In 1975 working on digital photography was a bit like Leonardo working on manned flight in 1500. It wasn't anyone's "lack of vision" that kept the pilgrims from coming to North America on an airplane instead of the Mayflower; it was the state of the technological arts.
The exposure would have been pretty much instantaneous, even with the limitations of 1975 analog-to-digital conversion technology. The 23 seconds was to write that data to a cassette, which required rather low bandwidth read/write.
A bit closer in time to the Kodak project was an exhibit/activity at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in (I think) 1978. The subject sat in front of a video camera which fed its signal to a computer, which did an analog-to-digital conversion and produced a "portrait by computer": overprinting characters on a dot-matrix printer to produce the right tonal value for each (rather large) pixel. When I sat for it, this was the result. I was really into photography (darkroom in the basement, etc), and this helped spark my interest in computers; I started saving my nickels and bought an Atari 400 a couple years later.
Just try explaining to the cyber police that you were just starting to type in a search for "child portraiture studios" when all of those naughty pictures showed up on your computer.
Software optimization just isn't economically viable any more. Throwing faster hardware at a problem is cheaper than applying programmer hours. This is why "It'll take a couple minutes for the OS to load" was said in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010, and will still be said in 2020 and 2030.
To be fair, there are still people (including young people) working on low-level software like drivers. But like the high-level drag-n-drop programmers who don't know anything about the plumbing, they have no grasp of what's going on in the floors above them... in part because you need to be that kind of in-the-basement room-lights-off best-friend-is-a-reptile-of-some-kind freak to specialize in that stuff.
And I, for one, am sick to death of specializing. Maybe I need to find a new field, one that isn't so full of black boxes I'll never have the time to look into.
One of the great things about the early micros (and probably the even-earlier minis) is that they were Knowable. With a little time, an intelligent person could become familiar with the workings of the entire architecture. I used to have a map of every memory location in the 64KB of ye olde C64 (most of it was user RAM of course) explaining what each byte was for. POKE a different value to a certain address, and the background color changes. PEEK at a certain address and it tells you the current hour. You could learn this... all of it. Obviously that's just not possible with modern computers (probably not even modern phones); no one person can grok the whole system.
I don't deny that NPR has some bias in terms of the stories they select to cover. But if you think you got unbiased, neutrally-selected information from the 700 Club, you're a naive fool.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 33 men in Chile who might raise some questions about the wisdom of adding a mile of water to the situation.
Just keep in mind that – thanks to the cube/square law and other physical principles – not all biological feats can be scaled up or down.
The patent would have expired by now. The terms are still too long, and patent law has a host of other problems, but at least patents still expire.
Cell phones became practical more than just "a few years ago". I'm one of the latecomers to the cellphone party (I dislike phones in general, phones that follow you even less), and I've had one (out of necessity) since 2003.
Your comparison of total area is correct (continental Europe and the US are of similar size), but you really need to start looking at better maps. Alaska is under 670K square miles. The contiguous 48 states (aside: Alaska is part of the mainland) are over 3100K square miles, about 4.7 times the size of Alaska. Maybe you've been looking at too many Mercator-projection maps, which exaggerate the size of northern areas? Also, the map you link to doesn't include eastern Europe, which not only includes all of those er... eastern-European countries you hear about all the time, but also a chunk of Russia.
In my travel around Europe (back when I had the freedom to do that), I found few Europeans who knew much about North American geography. That includes the semester I spent at university in Scotland. OK, they knew Canada, US, Mexico, bunch-of-little-countries, but litte more detail. New York, Florida, and California seemed to be the only states most people knew (or visited). I'm from Michigan and when that name drew blank reactions, I tried explaining that it was the one in the middle of the Great Lakes, figuring: they're visible from the moon, they form an eye-catching section on the nation's north border, etc. Still no recognition. Eventually my stock answer to polite queries of "where in the US are you from?" was a deadpan "Michigan. It's next to Canada." That seemed to satisfy most people. Once when someone asked "Is it near Detroit?" that actually made my day.
As a matter of fact, for the specific case of the Lincoln Memorial and a few other landmarks in DC, I'd say that's true. They've been shown so many times in movies and on TV, that anyone who's been paying attention should be able to find them without a map. Look for the Washington Monument, which can be seen from anywhere in central Washington. If you can't find the Lincoln Memorial from there (hint: turn your head that way, across the long "pond").... well, you're probably going there for a Glenn Beck concert.
Here's a detail of the above-linked image.
I was around in 1975. I remember the technology that existed and understand what it was capable of. And, Senator, it was not ready for this rather brilliant idea.
In fact, the questions posed by the Kodak suits continued to plague digital photography for another quarter century. Despite my interest in both photography and computers, I didn't buy a digital camera until around 2000 because the technology just wasn't good enough yet (at least not an affordable price). In 1975 working on digital photography was a bit like Leonardo working on manned flight in 1500. It wasn't anyone's "lack of vision" that kept the pilgrims from coming to North America on an airplane instead of the Mayflower; it was the state of the technological arts.
The exposure would have been pretty much instantaneous, even with the limitations of 1975 analog-to-digital conversion technology. The 23 seconds was to write that data to a cassette, which required rather low bandwidth read/write.
A bit closer in time to the Kodak project was an exhibit/activity at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in (I think) 1978. The subject sat in front of a video camera which fed its signal to a computer, which did an analog-to-digital conversion and produced a "portrait by computer": overprinting characters on a dot-matrix printer to produce the right tonal value for each (rather large) pixel. When I sat for it, this was the result. I was really into photography (darkroom in the basement, etc), and this helped spark my interest in computers; I started saving my nickels and bought an Atari 400 a couple years later.
That seems like an awful lot of effort just to make sure that your family are unable to listen to your final message to them.
"So, Bob, do you have a record player?"
"I think Grandpa Smith has a turntable on the old stereo system in his living room."
It's what I do while sitting that reduces my lifespan. Hint: I sit down for my job.
In Soviet Wikipedia, sources link to the article.
Just try explaining to the cyber police that you were just starting to type in a search for "child portraiture studios" when all of those naughty pictures showed up on your computer.
Software optimization just isn't economically viable any more. Throwing faster hardware at a problem is cheaper than applying programmer hours. This is why "It'll take a couple minutes for the OS to load" was said in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010, and will still be said in 2020 and 2030.
To be fair, there are still people (including young people) working on low-level software like drivers. But like the high-level drag-n-drop programmers who don't know anything about the plumbing, they have no grasp of what's going on in the floors above them... in part because you need to be that kind of in-the-basement room-lights-off best-friend-is-a-reptile-of-some-kind freak to specialize in that stuff.
And I, for one, am sick to death of specializing. Maybe I need to find a new field, one that isn't so full of black boxes I'll never have the time to look into.
One of the great things about the early micros (and probably the even-earlier minis) is that they were Knowable. With a little time, an intelligent person could become familiar with the workings of the entire architecture. I used to have a map of every memory location in the 64KB of ye olde C64 (most of it was user RAM of course) explaining what each byte was for. POKE a different value to a certain address, and the background color changes. PEEK at a certain address and it tells you the current hour. You could learn this... all of it. Obviously that's just not possible with modern computers (probably not even modern phones); no one person can grok the whole system.
I don't deny that NPR has some bias in terms of the stories they select to cover. But if you think you got unbiased, neutrally-selected information from the 700 Club, you're a naive fool.
Excactly. Disinformation counterbalances information.
Um... the lack of carrier wave?
It's a gag from the Woody Allen film "Love And Death".
I know: I'll bring cookies!
If it were "fire on loss of transmission", it would've been triggered by now. The signal from UVB-76 has been lost in the past.
As I understand, in Norway and Sweden, you can camp on any unfarmed, undeveloped land.
Frequent rebooting.
(You do realize that Windows has been in existence as a shipping product for nearly 25 years, right?)