The television was invented by Logi Baird, something every British schoolboy knows.
and it had a resolution of about 60-100 lines.
recording and displaying motion video using a spinning disk was a dead end. Baird got his system to air about the same time that all electronic television was making it obsolete.
...that a crazy Brazilian invented the airplane, before the Wright Brothers.
The Wrights' work is fully documented. You can visit their workshop in Ford's Greenfield Village. You can read their notes, correspondence, etc. You can physically examine and reconstruct their experimental gliders and early aircraft.
Another important difference is that the Wright brother's flight was witnessed only by themselves and their crew whereas Dummont's flight was a very public event.
There were witnesses. The Wrights' first flight is one of the iconic photographs of the twentieth century. The Wrights believed from the beginning that the fundamental problem of flight was control in three dimensions.
It wasn't Microsoft who brought computing to every home. It was IBM and the companies building IBM PC clones.
The IBM PC clone needed to run IBM PC software. MS-DOS retail list cost $200 less than C/PM 86.
There was never any serious doubt that Microsoft would be a major player in the evolution of the IBM PC market - no matter who got the contract for the OS.
It was a scientific device, meant to study sound waves.
Edison modified it for playback, and made his fortune. [time passed] Then he electrocuted an elephant to FUD alternating current technology.
He was the Bill Gates of the 19th/20th century. Same morals, same amount of inventing.
The story makes no connection between Scott and Edison. The graph was unreadable for 150 years - only a tiny fragment is intelligible now.
Edison had a career in invention which spanned close to ninety years.
It has been said that Edison's greatest invention was the corporate research lab. He was in the business of invention. The products which emerged from his lab provide many of the iconic images of the twentieth century.
The slash at Bill Gates is a cheap shot.
Gates was there in the beginning with the Altair.
The TRS 100 is the laptop computer pretty much as we know it now,
It wasn't CP/M, the Commodore 64, the Apple II or the Mac that brought the PC into every home and office. It was the IBM PC clone running MSDOS and Windows.
The Geek will never forgive Gates for that --- even as he builds his dirt-cheap Linux PC from the commodity parts designed and produced for the Windows market.
In that sense he is no different from his mechanically inclined ancestor who despised Henry Ford for shifting the focus of the auto industry from the handcrafted Locomobiles and Stanley Steamers of an earlier day to the mundanely mass-produced Chevy and Ford V-8.
Wish someone would describe the reasons it took so long.
Think of how some aboriginal cultures react to a photographic portrait.
The mind has to be open to the idea of the mechanically recorded image or sound.
You have to trust in the machine's ability to replicate the original without harming the original - otherwise, the copy carries with it the taint of black magic, the theft of the soul.
If you think only primitives think this way, consider the ambiguous existence of the animated - and apparently sentient - portraits in Harry Potter.
The unease many people feel when watching or interacting with the almost-but-not-quite lifelike visuals in a CGI game or video.
What edison achived was a sound recording system that was usefull.
The cylindrical - or, later, the flexible belt - recording had a rather long life in the office. Easily indexed. Relatively simple and compact machines, ideal for dictation.
It should also be noted that the intention of, "this Frenchman" was not to play back his recordings, but to develop an automatic method of transcribing speech.
I believe Bell was also interested in "transcribing speech" - interested in developing tools that would help him in understanding the mechanisms of speech and teaching speech to the deaf.
The successful inventor is both imaginative and opportunistic. Bell senses the path which leads to the telephone. Edison sees the markers that point towards the phonograph.
Julius Braunsdorf had invented an electric light long before Edison, but he is mostly forgotten, and people are taught that the electric light was thought impossible before Edison invented it.
What came out of Edison's lab was a commercially viable system to bring electricity safely into the home - and use it for something more significant than ringing a doorbell.
The domestication of the electric light is a very different problem from installing an on-site generator to power the searingly intense carbon arc lamps used to illuminate a prison yard
What's a weapon? You can splatter someone's brains everywhere in seconds with almost anything.
The assault weapon can wound or kill an entire class in little more than a single burst.
It's strange that a geek can't make distinctions that are perfectly obvious to anyone else.
Parent hides gun in the house and tells 6 year old child nothing about it. 6 year old shoots somebody. Parent is not charged.
Real-world examples, please:
Charges Filed Against Family Friend In Child Shooting
Jerome Black charged with criminally negligent homicide
(MEMPHIS, TN 3/17/2008)
Police have filed charges against a man in the case of a six-year-old child killed while playing with a gun.
Charlris Fleming was pronounced dead at Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center Monday morning.
Police say Jerome Black admitted bringing a gun into the Greenbriar apartment in Frayser. He reportedly said he hid the loaded handgun under a couch cushion.
A judge set bond for Black at $100,000.
In an unrelated case, Black is also facing a robbery charge as well as a charge for carrying a weapon on school property.
Charlris and a seven-year-old were playing with the gun in a bedroom. The revolver went off and Charlris was shot in the face. Neighbors say the victim's mother, Black and a third adult were in a separate room.
Paramedics rushed the boy to Le Bonheur Childrens' Medical Center. He died while in the hospital.
"It's devastating," said Susan Helms of Le Bonheur. "This was a preventable tragedy, this did not have to happen."
According to Helms, last year the hospital treated 50 kids for gunshot wounds. That's nearly one child every week.
"We would suggest families with young children not have [guns] at all," she said. "But if they have to have them, they need to purchase a gun safe, keep guns unloaded and locked away."
She says young children often don't know the difference between the real thing and a toy and even if they do, they don't understand the consequences.
"Kids are curious, they are going to find it, it's not a matter of if they'll find it..they will find it," she said.
Although some states have laws requiring adults to keep guns safely locked up when children are around, the District Attorney's office says Tennessee is not one of them.
Black will be formally charged in court Tuesday morning.
From the very moment his child is able to not go around swallowing small objects, he should sit down with him and start presenting him the gun Unmount it, clean it, teach the child to do both things, teach him to shot cans, show him what happens to a chicken when it's shot a good opportunity to teach the children what is that "death" thing she had heard about
I can't imagine anything worse.
Three to Six Years
Child's Perception: Child thinks death is reversible; temporary, like going to sleep or when a parent goes to work; believes that people who die will come back
1. "Magical thinking"; believes their thoughts, actions, word caused the death; or can bring deceased back; death is punishment for bad behavior
2. Still greatly impacted by parent's emotional state
3. Has difficulty handling abstract concepts such as heaven
4. Regressive behaviors; bed wetting, security blanket, thumb sucking, etc.
5. Difficulty verbalizing therefore acts out feelings
6. Increased aggression - more irritable, aggressive play
7. Will ask the same questions repeatedly in efforts to begin making sense of loss
8. Only capable of showing sadness for short periods of time
9. Escapes into play
10. Somatic symptoms
11. Hungers for affection and physical contact, even from strangers
12. Connects events that don't belong connected
13. May exhibit little anxiety due to belief that deceased is coming back
seriously, have you never seen a nerf gun? No one would EVER mistake one of those oversized cartoon-color toys for any sort of real weapon.
... when looking at a static color photo in good light.
You have caught a glimpse of a player in motion after sunset.
You are not a participant in the live-action combat RPG, you are not aware that a game is in progress.
Shape, scale, distance and movement are becoming much more difficult to judge. That is, after all, the fundamental challenge if you are to survive a stealth shooter. In real life, it is the sniper's cloak of invisibility.
The nerf's day-glow colors have faded to an indistinct gun-metal gray....
You make the call.
Remember that it is not only the weapon but how it is being carried that defines a threat.
Is it really so impossible to imagine the toy being mistaken for the real thing?
I came up with this kooky business model to make a lot of money, and for a while it made a lot of money. I thereby conclude it should be made law, since it is profitable to me, and it should be illegal for anybody to change the world around my business model in a way that might invalidate it.
This "kooky business model" draws about 10,000,00 subscribers world-wide into PC gaming.
Explain to me your god-given right to disrupt a legitimate business, enable and profit from the cheaters, and spoil the fun for everyone else.
Explain to me why your argument won't drive developers to program exclusively for the tightly enclosed console game platforms. Explain to me why it won't drive developers to employ ever-more-rigorous-DRM.
If you contribute back to a F/OSS project, such project grows and attracts new contributors, who will in turn give you stuff for free.
Win/win.
Some FOSS projects live and some FOSS projects die. There is no guarantee that you will ever see a return on your investment.
It is easy to suggest collaboration on a project of little consequence to your business. But if - for example - you have an inventory management system in place that shaves 3%-5% off the costs of your competitors, that is going to stay in-house.
The city bus costs $1.50. Gas $3.59 a gallon. Milk $2.50.
Families are dependent on the food bank, minimum wage jobs, welfare and SSI benefits . The Medicaid co-pay on a prescription drug is $3.00. Who among them can afford a computer?
Gates became fabulosly wealthy because he saw that the Microsoft PC had a future beyond the Geek. The Microsoft PC in every office. The Microsoft PC in every home.
Everything that impedes that vision gets progresively stripped away. The DirectX API for the gamer. The Ribbon for the secretary.
Slashdot Mirror
and it had a resolution of about 60-100 lines.
recording and displaying motion video using a spinning disk was a dead end. Baird got his system to air about the same time that all electronic television was making it obsolete.
The Wrights' work is fully documented. You can visit their workshop in Ford's Greenfield Village. You can read their notes, correspondence, etc. You can physically examine and reconstruct their experimental gliders and early aircraft.
There were witnesses. The Wrights' first flight is one of the iconic photographs of the twentieth century. The Wrights believed from the beginning that the fundamental problem of flight was control in three dimensions.
The IBM PC clone needed to run IBM PC software. MS-DOS retail list cost $200 less than C/PM 86.
There was never any serious doubt that Microsoft would be a major player in the evolution of the IBM PC market - no matter who got the contract for the OS.
The American kid with a Windows PC or a cell phone doesn't seem to having much trouble networking with anyone.
Edison modified it for playback, and made his fortune. [time passed] Then he electrocuted an elephant to FUD alternating current technology. He was the Bill Gates of the 19th/20th century. Same morals, same amount of inventing.
The story makes no connection between Scott and Edison. The graph was unreadable for 150 years - only a tiny fragment is intelligible now.
Edison had a career in invention which spanned close to ninety years.
It has been said that Edison's greatest invention was the corporate research lab. He was in the business of invention. The products which emerged from his lab provide many of the iconic images of the twentieth century.
The slash at Bill Gates is a cheap shot.
Gates was there in the beginning with the Altair.
The TRS 100 is the laptop computer pretty much as we know it now,
It wasn't CP/M, the Commodore 64, the Apple II or the Mac that brought the PC into every home and office. It was the IBM PC clone running MSDOS and Windows.
The Geek will never forgive Gates for that --- even as he builds his dirt-cheap Linux PC from the commodity parts designed and produced for the Windows market.
In that sense he is no different from his mechanically inclined ancestor who despised Henry Ford for shifting the focus of the auto industry from the handcrafted Locomobiles and Stanley Steamers of an earlier day to the mundanely mass-produced Chevy and Ford V-8.
But he wasn't trying to playback the sound. He was trying to read the graph as he would read a printed text or a stenographer's notes.
Think of how some aboriginal cultures react to a photographic portrait.
The mind has to be open to the idea of the mechanically recorded image or sound.
You have to trust in the machine's ability to replicate the original without harming the original - otherwise, the copy carries with it the taint of black magic, the theft of the soul.
If you think only primitives think this way, consider the ambiguous existence of the animated - and apparently sentient - portraits in Harry Potter.
The unease many people feel when watching or interacting with the almost-but-not-quite lifelike visuals in a CGI game or video.
The cylindrical - or, later, the flexible belt - recording had a rather long life in the office. Easily indexed. Relatively simple and compact machines, ideal for dictation.
I believe Bell was also interested in "transcribing speech" - interested in developing tools that would help him in understanding the mechanisms of speech and teaching speech to the deaf.
The successful inventor is both imaginative and opportunistic. Bell senses the path which leads to the telephone. Edison sees the markers that point towards the phonograph.
What came out of Edison's lab was a commercially viable system to bring electricity safely into the home - and use it for something more significant than ringing a doorbell.
The domestication of the electric light is a very different problem from installing an on-site generator to power the searingly intense carbon arc lamps used to illuminate a prison yard
To repeat: That is only true if you have a clear view of the play in daylight.
It works only when Gandhian non-violence works - which is to say it works only when your opponent gives a damn about the body count.
There are "Killing Fields" throughout history.
When the Romans decided they wanted to be done with Carthage they made quite a through job of it.
You hear this argument repeated endlessly in the states.
Never in countries where firearms are tightly regulated and gun deaths almost unknown.
The assault weapon can wound or kill an entire class in little more than a single burst. It's strange that a geek can't make distinctions that are perfectly obvious to anyone else.
Real-world examples, please:
Charges Filed Against Family Friend In Child Shooting
Jerome Black charged with criminally negligent homicide
(MEMPHIS, TN 3/17/2008)
Police have filed charges against a man in the case of a six-year-old child killed while playing with a gun.
Charlris Fleming was pronounced dead at Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center Monday morning.
Police say Jerome Black admitted bringing a gun into the Greenbriar apartment in Frayser. He reportedly said he hid the loaded handgun under a couch cushion.
A judge set bond for Black at $100,000.
In an unrelated case, Black is also facing a robbery charge as well as a charge for carrying a weapon on school property.
Charlris and a seven-year-old were playing with the gun in a bedroom. The revolver went off and Charlris was shot in the face. Neighbors say the victim's mother, Black and a third adult were in a separate room.
Paramedics rushed the boy to Le Bonheur Childrens' Medical Center. He died while in the hospital.
"It's devastating," said Susan Helms of Le Bonheur. "This was a preventable tragedy, this did not have to happen."
According to Helms, last year the hospital treated 50 kids for gunshot wounds. That's nearly one child every week.
"We would suggest families with young children not have [guns] at all," she said. "But if they have to have them, they need to purchase a gun safe, keep guns unloaded and locked away."
She says young children often don't know the difference between the real thing and a toy and even if they do, they don't understand the consequences.
"Kids are curious, they are going to find it, it's not a matter of if they'll find it..they will find it," she said.
Although some states have laws requiring adults to keep guns safely locked up when children are around, the District Attorney's office says Tennessee is not one of them.
Black will be formally charged in court Tuesday morning.
Charges Filed Against Family Friend In Child Shooting
Unmount it, clean it, teach the child to do both things, teach him to shot cans, show him what happens to a chicken when it's shot
a good opportunity to teach the children what is that "death" thing she had heard about
I can't imagine anything worse.
Three to Six Years
Child's Perception: Child thinks death is reversible; temporary, like going to sleep or when a parent goes to work; believes that people who die will come back
1. "Magical thinking"; believes their thoughts, actions, word caused the death; or can bring deceased back; death is punishment for bad behavior
2. Still greatly impacted by parent's emotional state
3. Has difficulty handling abstract concepts such as heaven
4. Regressive behaviors; bed wetting, security blanket, thumb sucking, etc.
5. Difficulty verbalizing therefore acts out feelings
6. Increased aggression - more irritable, aggressive play
7. Will ask the same questions repeatedly in efforts to begin making sense of loss
8. Only capable of showing sadness for short periods of time
9. Escapes into play
10. Somatic symptoms
11. Hungers for affection and physical contact, even from strangers
12. Connects events that don't belong connected
13. May exhibit little anxiety due to belief that deceased is coming back
Children's Understanding of Death
You have caught a glimpse of a player in motion after sunset.
You are not a participant in the live-action combat RPG, you are not aware that a game is in progress.
Shape, scale, distance and movement are becoming much more difficult to judge. That is, after all, the fundamental challenge if you are to survive a stealth shooter. In real life, it is the sniper's cloak of invisibility.
The nerf's day-glow colors have faded to an indistinct gun-metal gray....
You make the call.
Remember that it is not only the weapon but how it is being carried that defines a threat.
Is it really so impossible to imagine the toy being mistaken for the real thing?
Define "huge."
This "kooky business model" draws about 10,000,00 subscribers world-wide into PC gaming.
Explain to me your god-given right to disrupt a legitimate business, enable and profit from the cheaters, and spoil the fun for everyone else.
Explain to me why your argument won't drive developers to program exclusively for the tightly enclosed console game platforms. Explain to me why it won't drive developers to employ ever-more-rigorous-DRM.
Some FOSS projects live and some FOSS projects die. There is no guarantee that you will ever see a return on your investment.
It is easy to suggest collaboration on a project of little consequence to your business. But if - for example - you have an inventory management system in place that shaves 3%-5% off the costs of your competitors, that is going to stay in-house.
"Prior art" implies that a blueprint exists for a practical implementation of the idea.
There are 10,000 radio stations in the U.S. Clear Channel owns about 1200.
Families are dependent on the food bank, minimum wage jobs, welfare and SSI benefits . The Medicaid co-pay on a prescription drug is $3.00. Who among them can afford a computer?
Gates became fabulosly wealthy because he saw that the Microsoft PC had a future beyond the Geek. The Microsoft PC in every office. The Microsoft PC in every home.
Everything that impedes that vision gets progresively stripped away. The DirectX API for the gamer. The Ribbon for the secretary.