Thomas Edison didn't invent the electric incandescent light bulb, he developed an electric incandescent light bulb.
The long-lived high-impedance Edison lamp could be wired in parallel --- which is essential if you want to light up a city and keep it lit and not --- however briefly --- a single Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
Edison was a system-builder.
Power generation. Distribution networks. Wiring standards. Switches. Fuses. Plugs and sockets. Training schools for a new generation of electricians.
He didn't invent the light bulb, and he didn't invent that, either.
He and his team invented a long-lived, high-impedance, incandescent lamp that could be wired in parallel --
as well as developing a complete and commercially viable system for safely electrifying your home our shop. Including the training of a new generation of electricians.
hell, all you have to do is hit twitter to see people like @aloria (infosec engineer) fully participating in programming.
This statistic shows a timeline with the amount of monthly active Twitter users worldwide. As of the third quarter of 2015, the microblogging service averaged at 307 million monthly active users.
What makes you see a rush away from things like Raspberry Pi and Arduino?
The boards appeal to the system builders, the technical hobbyists, a very small segment of the population. There are 700,000 ham radio operators in the U.S. 327 million cell phones.
Copyright infringement is NOT theft. Read the legal definition of theft.
The geek has been fighting this war of words for as long as long as I can remember. He never wins.
18 U.S. Code Chapter 113 - STOLEN PROPERTY
2319. Criminal infringement of a copyright
2319A. Unauthorized fixation of and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos of live musical performances 2319B. Unauthorized recording of Motion pictures in a Motion picture exhibition facility
In popular usage, the notion that the pirating of copyrighted works was theft was current while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.
The geek thinks he is being clever when he names his site The Pirate Bay [and settles in somewhere 10,000 distant miles distant from the U.S.,] but all he has really accomplished is to bind file sharing and theft even more strongly in the public mind.
I like to seem the try to muscle their way into Cuba...
Population of Cuba, 11 million. Spanish-speaking population of the U.S., 41 million.
Does it ever occur to the geek that the Cuban musician or filmmaker might want to cut himself a slice of that very big pie? Which would imply working with the rights agencies and not against them?
since a certain mouse is set to expire in 2023. Spoiler alert: It won't.
What expires is the copyright on "Steamboat Willie."
Eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track and a thin narrative thread.
You do not get the right to infringe on later incarnations of the mouse in any media. That would be a tad less than 90 year backlist of theatrical features and shorts, radio and television productions, Little Golden Books, comic strips, comic books, ViewMaster 3-D, stage shows and so on.
Neither do you get the right to use the Mickey Mouse trademark or any of the signature trademarked character designs for any of the signature Disney characters.
.......people would actually aspire to create something new rather than spend their lives trying to profit off the mental effort of their dead relatives.
or perhaps, just perhaps...
The world might be a more creative place if artists were encouraged to build a literary estate --- a body of work -----with a eye to the future needs of their heirs.
[In 1878,] Grant moved to New York City to go into business with his son, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., and a young investor, Ferdinand Ward.
Grant & Ward failed in May 1884, leaving Grant penniless.
That fall, the former president was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.
Facing his mortality, Grant struck a publishing deal with his friend Mark Twain and began working on his memoirs, hoping they would provide for his family after his death.
Grant suffered greatly in his final year. He was in constant pain from his illness and sometimes had the feeling he was choking. Despite his condition, he wrote at a furious pace, sometimes finishing 25 to 50 pages a day. In June 1885, as the cancer spread through his body, the family moved to Mount MacGregor, New York, to make Grant more comfortable. Propped up on chairs, and too weak to walk, Grant worked to finish the book. Friends, admirers and even a few former Confederate opponents made their way to Mount MacGregor to pay their respects. Grant finished the manuscript on July 18; he died five days later.
Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?
You have a tight budget and a bare 50 minutes to tell your story. Landing the big ship [miniature sets, props and puppetry] will take time and money you don't have. Teleportation is a dirt cheap effect trivially easy to stage that saw its first use in silent films.
The geek sees only games and ignores the success of Office 365, and a thousand other programs and services which are strongly tied to the Windows platform, and many which are clearly best-in-class, however reluctant the geek may be willing to admit it.
I wonder if the "Microsoft Tax" has something to to do with the number of users who have a desktop and/or laptop PC who actually use a Microsoft operating system.:-)
Walmart, with its enormous purchasing power, was never able to significantly undercut OEM Windows on price. It did manage to sell a few tons of crap OEM Linux hardware, sweepings off the warehouse floor, to the ever-credulous geek.
Net Applications builds its stats by looking at hits to about 40,000 sites a month which appeal to a very large and diverse audience and not the geek elite --- and that implies that Microsoft understands the needs and values of the masses better than the geek. About our Methodology
I click on the link using IE 10 with AdBlock Plus with EasyList enabled which takes me directly to Ethan Siegel's blog for Forbes. Loads instantly with all images. No adds. No problems.
... is non-biological survival, as described in Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. (1973) Rama is also a reminder that you don't need true "artificial gravity" or even a "space drive" if you can build on the grandest of scales and don't particularly care how long the journey will take or that it will almost certainly be a one-way trip.
Sci-Fi writers have been looking at these paradoxes from the beginning.
The short answer is that interstellar emigration implies that your back is against the wall. It is now or never kind of thing --- with a very good chance you will doing everything you can to conceal your true destination.
Bruce Perens.... created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond.
The original announcement of The Open Source Definition was made on February 9, 1998 on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Perens is an amateur radio operator, with call sign K6BP [who] promotes open radio communications standards.
Perens founded No-Code International in 1998 with the goal of ending the Morse Code test then required for an Amateur Radio license. His rationale was that Amateur Radio should be a tool for young people to learn advanced technology and networking, rather than something that preserved antiquity and required new hams to master outmoded technology before they were allowed on the air.
Perens worked for seven years at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab. After that, he worked at Pixar for 12 years, from 1987 to 1999. He is credited as a studio tools engineer on the Pixar films A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999).
From 2002 to 2006, Prentice Hall PTR published the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, a set of 24 books covering various open source software tools, for which Perens served as the series editor. It was the first book series to be published under an open license.
The idea was for a limited term, so the public could use that material later.
I think it would be more truthful to say that the idea was to encourage artists to produce original works and not derivatives. To plow new ground.
It is the geek's tunnel vision that I find particularly discouraging. I saw my first fan reconstruction of the Enterprise bridge set at Torcon II in 1973. In the 38 years since that is all I have ever seen him build.
And thanks to those same companies lobbying efforts they're still able to enforce copyright on something, which by all rights, should have entered the Public Domain 21 years ago.
Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works were protected for 28 years, with the option to renew for 28 years. Duration of Copyright There is no way that Star Trek: TOS enters the public domain before 2027 even under the rules in force over 100 years ago.
This ignores, of course, all licensed and copyrighted derivatives based on the original series in all media.
Been wondering if we couldn't use corporate law against them in this case, by pushing for ever longer terms they're missing out on profits - corporations are mandated to maximize profits. Paramount, by lobbying to extend the term lengths, is missing out on that sweet sweet Star Wars money (which should also be in the public domain) and thereby depriving their shareholders of a potential revenue steam.
The key to reviving a long-dormant genre, character or series, is distance and a healthy disrespect for your sources.
Twitter is free to ban whatever it chooses. It is their forum --- their platform -- not yours.
That said, free speech cannot survive in an environment that lacks civility and is open to unrelenting personal attacks and threats of violence. Hate speech is the oldest and most subtle eternal enemy of free speech.
Twitter ban 'dissenting political opinions'.
You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or disease.
There's a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore....
Platform lock-in is a geek obsession. Everyone else just makes their choice and settles in comfortably.
Installing the Win 10 update and an internal SD card freed 32 GB on my HP Stream-8 for apps and data.
Storage simply isn't a problem any more, even at entry level --- and automated updates of both system software and apps are becoming the norm.
I can't say that I am happy to see the decline of the general purpose web browser, but a one-size-fits-all solution has drawbacks of it own.
This is 2015. Why are books still being printed on paper?
Illustration.
I have collected hundreds of large format books on art. history, architecture, nature, travel and geography that would be profoundly disappointing to read when reduced to the size and resolution of a Kindle. Many of these make superb use of tipped-in prints and photographs, rare inks, textured papers.
On one hand you have the Copyright Cartel, I mean, the Entertainment Industry buying laws to give them more rights, so they can abuse more ways to make money off content that will NEVER go into the public domain.
The geek spends a hell a lot of time yapping about the "public domain."
Not so much producing original content of his own or adapting stories that have been in the public domain for decades if not millennia. But, if by chance. he finds the time and energy to build a stage set the odds are still quite good that it will be a replica of the Starship Enterprise bridge, ca. 1966.
Shows the nonsense of basing an economy on signals on a wire. It's time for a revolution.
The geek is wholly a creation of an economy based on intangible property and near instantaneous communication and computation. Signals on a wire. Come the revolution who does he think will be first against the wall?
Slashdot Mirror
swapping some of the decision logic to create something that looks original enough to pass a smell test when I cut/paste.
I'd have second thoughts about employing a programmer who passes off other people's work as his own.
Thomas Edison didn't invent the electric incandescent light bulb, he developed an electric incandescent light bulb.
The long-lived high-impedance Edison lamp could be wired in parallel --- which is essential if you want to light up a city and keep it lit and not --- however briefly --- a single Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
Edison was a system-builder.
Power generation. Distribution networks. Wiring standards. Switches. Fuses. Plugs and sockets. Training schools for a new generation of electricians.
He didn't invent the light bulb, and he didn't invent that, either.
He and his team invented a long-lived, high-impedance, incandescent lamp that could be wired in parallel --
as well as developing a complete and commercially viable system for safely electrifying your home our shop. Including the training of a new generation of electricians.
hell, all you have to do is hit twitter to see people like @aloria (infosec engineer) fully participating in programming.
This statistic shows a timeline with the amount of monthly active Twitter users worldwide. As of the third quarter of 2015, the microblogging service averaged at 307 million monthly active users.
Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2015 (in millions)
What makes you see a rush away from things like Raspberry Pi and Arduino?
The boards appeal to the system builders, the technical hobbyists, a very small segment of the population. There are 700,000 ham radio operators in the U.S. 327 million cell phones.
I'm not sure how UX issues are part of their remit any more than child labour or bees dying are.
The user experience is make or break.
The geek ought at least to have learned by now that "free as in beer or free as in freedom" is not a driving force for most users.
Copyright infringement is NOT theft. Read the legal definition of theft.
The geek has been fighting this war of words for as long as long as I can remember. He never wins.
18 U.S. Code Chapter 113 - STOLEN PROPERTY
2319. Criminal infringement of a copyright
2319A. Unauthorized fixation of and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos of live musical performances
2319B. Unauthorized recording of Motion pictures in a Motion picture exhibition facility
U.S. Code > Title 18 > Part I > Chapter 113 - STOLEN PROPERTY
In popular usage, the notion that the pirating of copyrighted works was theft was current while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.
The geek thinks he is being clever when he names his site The Pirate Bay [and settles in somewhere 10,000 distant miles distant from the U.S.,] but all he has really accomplished is to bind file sharing and theft even more strongly in the public mind.
I like to seem the try to muscle their way into Cuba...
Population of Cuba, 11 million.
Spanish-speaking population of the U.S., 41 million.
Does it ever occur to the geek that the Cuban musician or filmmaker might want to cut himself a slice of that very big pie? Which would imply working with the rights agencies and not against them?
since a certain mouse is set to expire in 2023.
Spoiler alert: It won't.
What expires is the copyright on "Steamboat Willie."
Eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track and a thin narrative thread.
You do not get the right to infringe on later incarnations of the mouse in any media. That would be a tad less than 90 year backlist of theatrical features and shorts, radio and television productions, Little Golden Books, comic strips, comic books, ViewMaster 3-D, stage shows and so on.
Neither do you get the right to use the Mickey Mouse trademark or any of the signature trademarked character designs for any of the signature Disney characters.
.......people would actually aspire to create something new rather than spend their lives trying to profit off the mental effort of their dead relatives.
or perhaps, just perhaps...
The world might be a more creative place if artists were encouraged to build a literary estate --- a body of work -----with a eye to the future needs of their heirs.
[In 1878,] Grant moved to New York City to go into business with his son, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., and a young investor, Ferdinand Ward.
Grant & Ward failed in May 1884, leaving Grant penniless.
That fall, the former president was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Facing his mortality, Grant struck a publishing deal with his friend Mark Twain and began working on his memoirs, hoping they would provide for his family after his death.
Grant suffered greatly in his final year. He was in constant pain from his illness and sometimes had the feeling he was choking. Despite his condition, he wrote at a furious pace, sometimes finishing 25 to 50 pages a day. In June 1885, as the cancer spread through his body, the family moved to Mount MacGregor, New York, to make Grant more comfortable. Propped up on chairs, and too weak to walk, Grant worked to finish the book. Friends, admirers and even a few former Confederate opponents made their way to Mount MacGregor to pay their respects. Grant finished the manuscript on July 18; he died five days later.
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?
You have a tight budget and a bare 50 minutes to tell your story. Landing the big ship [miniature sets, props and puppetry] will take time and money you don't have. Teleportation is a dirt cheap effect trivially easy to stage that saw its first use in silent films.
It would be the year of another desktop.
The geek sees only games and ignores the success of Office 365, and a thousand other programs and services which are strongly tied to the Windows platform, and many which are clearly best-in-class, however reluctant the geek may be willing to admit it.
I wonder if the "Microsoft Tax" has something to to do with the number of users who have a desktop and/or laptop PC who actually use a Microsoft operating system. :-)
Walmart, with its enormous purchasing power, was never able to significantly undercut OEM Windows on price. It did manage to sell a few tons of crap OEM Linux hardware, sweepings off the warehouse floor, to the ever-credulous geek.
Win 10's share of the desktop is approaching 10x that of Linux, all flavors. Desktop Operating System Market Share - Operating System Versions.
Net Applications builds its stats by looking at hits to about 40,000 sites a month which appeal to a very large and diverse audience and not the geek elite --- and that implies that Microsoft understands the needs and values of the masses better than the geek. About our Methodology
I click on the link using IE 10 with AdBlock Plus with EasyList enabled which takes me directly to Ethan Siegel's blog for Forbes. Loads instantly with all images. No adds. No problems.
... is non-biological survival, as described in Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. (1973) Rama is also a reminder that you don't need true "artificial gravity" or even a "space drive" if you can build on the grandest of scales and don't particularly care how long the journey will take or that it will almost certainly be a one-way trip.
This poses some interesting possibilities...
Sci-Fi writers have been looking at these paradoxes from the beginning.
The short answer is that interstellar emigration implies that your back is against the wall. It is now or never kind of thing --- with a very good chance you will doing everything you can to conceal your true destination.
Methuselah's Children (1941, 1958)
Rescue Party (1946)
Battlestar Galactica (2004)
Who is Bruce Perens?
Bruce Perens.... created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond.
The original announcement of The Open Source Definition was made on February 9, 1998 on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Perens is an amateur radio operator, with call sign K6BP [who] promotes open radio communications standards.
Perens founded No-Code International in 1998 with the goal of ending the Morse Code test then required for an Amateur Radio license. His rationale was that Amateur Radio should be a tool for young people to learn advanced technology and networking, rather than something that preserved antiquity and required new hams to master outmoded technology before they were allowed on the air.
Perens worked for seven years at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab. After that, he worked at Pixar for 12 years, from 1987 to 1999. He is credited as a studio tools engineer on the Pixar films A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999).
From 2002 to 2006, Prentice Hall PTR published the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, a set of 24 books covering various open source software tools, for which Perens served as the series editor. It was the first book series to be published under an open license.
Bruce Perens
The idea was for a limited term, so the public could use that material later.
I think it would be more truthful to say that the idea was to encourage artists to produce original works and not derivatives. To plow new ground.
It is the geek's tunnel vision that I find particularly discouraging. I saw my first fan reconstruction of the Enterprise bridge set at Torcon II in 1973. In the 38 years since that is all I have ever seen him build.
And thanks to those same companies lobbying efforts they're still able to enforce copyright on something, which by all rights, should have entered the Public Domain 21 years ago.
Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works were protected for 28 years, with the option to renew for 28 years. Duration of Copyright There is no way that Star Trek: TOS enters the public domain before 2027 even under the rules in force over 100 years ago.
This ignores, of course, all licensed and copyrighted derivatives based on the original series in all media.
Been wondering if we couldn't use corporate law against them in this case, by pushing for ever longer terms they're missing out on profits - corporations are mandated to maximize profits. Paramount, by lobbying to extend the term lengths, is missing out on that sweet sweet Star Wars money (which should also be in the public domain) and thereby depriving their shareholders of a potential revenue steam.
The key to reviving a long-dormant genre, character or series, is distance and a healthy disrespect for your sources.
Twitter ban 'dissenting political opinions'.
Twitter is free to ban whatever it chooses. It is their forum --- their platform -- not yours.
That said, free speech cannot survive in an environment that lacks civility and is open to unrelenting personal attacks and threats of violence. Hate speech is the oldest and most subtle eternal enemy of free speech.
Twitter ban 'dissenting political opinions'.
You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or disease.
There's a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore....
Platform lock-in is a geek obsession. Everyone else just makes their choice and settles in comfortably.
Installing the Win 10 update and an internal SD card freed 32 GB on my HP Stream-8 for apps and data.
Storage simply isn't a problem any more, even at entry level --- and automated updates of both system software and apps are becoming the norm.
I can't say that I am happy to see the decline of the general purpose web browser, but a one-size-fits-all solution has drawbacks of it own.
This is 2015. Why are books still being printed on paper?
Illustration.
I have collected hundreds of large format books on art. history, architecture, nature, travel and geography that would be profoundly disappointing to read when reduced to the size and resolution of a Kindle. Many of these make superb use of tipped-in prints and photographs, rare inks, textured papers.
On one hand you have the Copyright Cartel, I mean, the Entertainment Industry buying laws to give them more rights, so they can abuse more ways to make money off content that will NEVER go into the public domain.
The geek spends a hell a lot of time yapping about the "public domain."
Not so much producing original content of his own or adapting stories that have been in the public domain for decades if not millennia. But, if by chance. he finds the time and energy to build a stage set the odds are still quite good that it will be a replica of the Starship Enterprise bridge, ca. 1966.
Shows the nonsense of basing an economy on signals on a wire. It's time for a revolution.
The geek is wholly a creation of an economy based on intangible property and near instantaneous communication and computation. Signals on a wire. Come the revolution who does he think will be first against the wall?