Now it appears, that we must change. We must adapt our requirements toward people who are easily swayed out of this carreer path. We must, in the name of equal representation, educate and employ people who are highly susceptable to social approval by others.
The problem with memory is that we often see the past not as it was, but as we want it to be.
If you listen to the NPR segment, they have a couple of women who were former compsci majors give accounts of how the men in their classes denigrated them and mocked them for missing some knowledge. I'm not certain it's motivated by a "no girls allowed" attitude. I don't think y there's a broader culture of elitism in compsci that motivates people to try to bolster their own egos by jumping on perceived weaknesses in others.
I think any woman who entered the elite architectural and engineering schools in the eighties could have told you that "No girls allowed!" was the message broadcast loud and clear from Day 1.
I can't figure out (the) strange emotional attachments they feel towards Visual Studio (even though it costs over $10000 for the full version).
Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 with MSDN ($13,000) seems quite clearly designed for teams of developers oriented towards enterprise-grade applications and deployments, not the lone-wolf programmer.
If I could delete 3 things from all existence they would be: blah, blah, blah.
Let me introduce you to the words "gainful employment." There are very few ways of earning a living that do not require advertising your product or service.
For some reason, people haven't cottoned on to the fact that HD content can be received over the air with an old pair of rabbit ears or a more modern $20 antenna.
In this border town, there were about five or six high-powered VHF stations that could be reliably received with a good roof mounted antenna. For digital, which is all or nothing, $100-$120 for the antenna would be a good starting point, plus labor, if you are not comfortable with high ladder work or pounding in a grounding stake.
Please do tell us about how the "official" prosthetic costing $40,000 are totally not a ripoff even though they can be replaced by $45 printed prostetics because each one is hand carved by highly skilled gnomes from their own bones and tied together with unicorn hair and anything else will kill the wearer in the first 5 minutes
I can't.
Because I don't have the money or resources to clinically evaluate a $45 prosthetic hand.
This I do know:
The poor have been milked for generations by frauds and fools marketing medical miracles at dime store prices. When the geek sees a buzz word like "3-D Printing" in a headline, his capacity for critical thinking goes south.
To test his computer models of neural control, Valero-Cuevas is using a very faithful physical system: cadaver hands. Hand surgeons help him connect the hands' tendons to strings driven by electric motors.
The activity of the motors is controlled by the neuron software, as if the motors were muscles themselves. This way the simulated neurons are confronted with the same problem the nervous system faces: controlling the hand as a marionette driven by complex muscles and tendons.
The goal is for the software and hardware to work in concert to control the cadaver hand the same way a healthy person can move his or her hand --- complete with stretch reflexes, muscle tone and compliance.
''We are studying the very fundamental mechanisms of how muscles have tone and how you modify that to get function, and how their disruptions lead to the pathological characteristics of hypertonia, spasticity and dystonia, which are very common in cerebral palsy, stroke and spinal cord injury,'' Valero Cuevas said. ''But we don't really know where they come from, and we're trying to understand that.''
The complexity in just one little finger
Each finger tendon is controlled by between six and 10 muscles, and in turn, each simulated muscle is controlled by a population of 256 independent neurons.
''The irony is not lost on us that we're combining one of the oldest scientific disciplines, hand anatomy, with some of the newest elements of ultra-fast parallel computing,'' Valero-Cuevas said. ''We're using this to answer central questions about evolution, health and disease, and how all these systems work.''
One application of this work is the design of better prosthetic hands, where there is still a major engineering challenge to make artificial hands that can be effective manipulators of objects. The most advanced current prosthetics are effective grippers, but the ultimate goal is truly dexterous manipulators.
''We see it as an impasse,'' Valero-Cuevas said. ''Over a century of trying to develop something that's better than the split hook prosthesis. We now have modern robotic hands and prosthetic hands that are amazing grippers, but they're not dexterous manipulators. They're great at holding things, but is it the Luke Skywalker hand that would be able to pick something up, reorient and operate it? Think of all the operations that are needed to use your smartphone with one hand.''
I have a feeling that there are some people who would take a polite "You're wrong and I disagree with you for the following reasons . .." as trolling.
This isn't about trolling.
This is about abusive, manipulative, disruptive and often threatening behavior that would not be tolerated off-line in the name of free speech --- because it is the enemy of free speech.
Free speech cannot survive in an atmosphere of fear.
Free speech cannot survive when speakers are shouted down, bullied and hounded off stage.
All of these "Feats" of human ingenuity were once thought to be impossible by the physics standards of the day.
These "feats" you describe were engineering problems, not physics problems.
The "Boy Mechanic" of 1880 could build a rubber-band powered model plane. Samuel Pierpont Langley built elegant steam powered miniatures, no less appealing and no more practical.
Power was never a problem in aviation. The problem was the need for dynamic control of an aircraft moving in three dimensions. The Wrights taught themselves to fly by building and refining man-sized gliders. In parallel with their work on lift and propulsion.
Frozen - original (and ok, by now its probably clear I have kids)
I don't think you have to apologize for liking Wreak-It Ralph or Frozen. WIR's comic demolition of the state-of-the-art first-person shooter was alone worth the price of entry.
To Ralph, playing straight man: "One more, one more. Why did the hero flush the toilet..."
At the end of the day, he created and manages the largest open source project ever. More than 20 years on, it is still going strong.
But Linus won't be around forever ---
and immature and abusive behavior that persists well beyond the adolescence of a man or a project, a system or a method, toubles me. I do not want to see such behavior institutionalized in FOSS and carried on into the next generation.
I read sci-fi(Niven, Asimov, Bradbury, etc) and fantasy(Tolkien, Lovecraft, Howard, etc).
I don't get this thing with comics.
Hitchcock began storyboarding his films around 1935.
The adventure comic strip, which was coming into its own about the same time, became increasingly cinematic in its story-telling.
The film and the comic are both essentially visual media. There isn't much time or space for dialog and none for long-winded exposition. That doesn't make dialog unimportant in a film or comic --- it just means that every word has to count.
The comics weren't always about superheroes --- and the superhero comic wasn't always a soap opera. Disney hit all the right notes with "Guardians of the Galaxy," it should be interesting to see what it makes of "Big Hero Six."
With both the recent openssl and bash bugs, in addition to fixing the bug, careful investigation was done by the respective communities and additional problems were/are being addressed.
Excuse me for saying that I find all these platitudes less than reassuring.
The name itself is an acronym, a pun, and a description. As an acronym, it stands for Bourne-again shell, referring to its objective as a free replacement for the Bourne shell. As a pun, it expressed that objective in a phrase that sounds similar to born again, a term for spiritual rebirth. The name is also descriptive of what it did, bashing together the features of sh, csh, and ksh.
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) considered a free shell that could run existing sh scripts so strategic to a completely free system built from BSD and GNU code that this was one of the few projects they funded themselves, with Fox undertaking the work as an employee of FSF. Fox released Bash as a beta, version.99, on June 7, 1989 and remained the primary maintainer until sometime between mid-1992 and mid-1994, when he was laid off from FSF.
A security hole in Bash dubbed Shellshock, dating from version 1.03, was discovered in early September 2014.
The US changed the language after breaking off from Britain changing 's' to 'z' in many spellings for example
Noah Webster published his speller in 1783. His grammar in 1784, and his dictionary in 1826.
His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions". This meant that the people-at-large must control the language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by popular usage in language.
Very close to what you would have heard on the street.
''American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,'' Meier said. ''The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.''
Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that ''haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.''
''The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as 'dialect fossils.' And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.''
Alerting the user to change the damaged battery makes sense. Now we need to convince the manufacturers to design devices which would make this possible.
--- and then persuade users to buy them.
Despite any penalty in style, weight, bulk, battery life, waterproofing and so on.
Will the customer need to buy an unfamiliar industrial screwdriver or some other special tool? You will meet resistance if the battery is any harder to replace than the AAA cells that power his LED flashlight.
Because Edison was a Jobs-like narcissist who used people to elevate his status and promote himself. Tesla was too busy working in the lab to revel in fame and build a populist legacy.
The short list:
1877. The phonograph.
Edison and Bell both began in at a time even almost no one believed that reproducing the human voice across vast distances of time and space would ever be possible.
No more need to shout into the phone. First Long Distance calls. New York to Chicago, 1892.
Then an inventor named Michael I. Pupin invented (and patented) the loading coil, a device made of electromagnets that could strengthen an electronic signal; with enough loading coils wired into a circuit, and wired properly, the signal could reach 1,500 miles---from New York to Denver---before degrading so far as to be unfathomable.
The Edison lamp could be wired in parallel, making it easy to service and drawing down relatively little power. It was reasonanly long lived. affordable, bright, without being blinding ---- of the twenty or so previous examples the geek has likely read about, all would fail on one or more counts.
Edison was both a system builder and an entrepreneur.
Residential lighting demanded a whole new way of thinking about electricity. On-site generation wasn't likely to be practical. You needed switches safe enough for a child to use. Wiring standards.
Things like fuses. cords, plugs and sockets ---
all designed for users who had never in their lives seen a fire ignited by a man-made electrical spark or over-heated wire, never experienced anything more dangerous than a mild static shock.
That makes you both the advocate and the educator. You use every resource the 19th Century has to offer to demonstrate what you have to offer and how to use it safely. You banish the candle and put up Christmas tree lights. You illuminate theaters, department stores, fairs and expositions.
Not enough electricians around to wire every home?
Can you imagine if we put the war on drugs budget against fusion power instead?
The climax of GE and Disney's "Carousel of Progress" at the 1964 New York's World's Fair was the first public demonstration of a fusion reaction. General Electric
The device was a Î-pinch from General Electric. This was similar to the Scylla machine developed earlier at Los Alamos. (1958)
In the mid-1970s, Project PACER, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) explored the possibility of a fusion power system that would involve exploding small hydrogen bombs (fusion bombs) inside an underground cavity. As an energy source, the system is the only fusion power system that could be demonstrated to work using existing technology.
However it would also require a large, continuous supply of nuclear bombs, making the economics of such a system rather questionable.
While fusion power is still in early stages of development, substantial sums have been and continue to be invested in research. In the EU almost 10 billion euro was spent on fusion research up to the end of the 1990s, and the new ITER reactor alone is budgeted at 10 billion euro.
It is estimated that up to the point of possible implementation of electricity generation by nuclear fusion, R&D will need further promotion totaling around 60--80 billion euro over a period of 50 years or so (of which 20--30 billion euro within the EU) based on a report from 2002. Nuclear fusion research receives 750 million euro (excluding ITER funding) from the European Union, compared with 810 million euro for sustainable energy research, putting research into fusion power well ahead of that of any single rivaling technology. Indeed, the size of the investments and time frame of the expected results mean that fusion research is almost exclusively publicly funded, while research in other forms of energy can be done by the private sector.
Hopefully at some point in time the FBI will realize that their mission shouldn't be to protect corporate rights, but to protect rights for the individual citizens.
by which the geek means the citizen who can afford a computer, broadband Internet.
pirating music, games, videos and other digital services and software is and always has been a middle class entitlement.
individual rights mean damn little when you are "constitutionally" unable to work together to achieve your goals and protect your interests.
You don't need to make 100k/year to afford a Tesla. The stock P85 is around ~1300/month which is only about 1/3rd of what is the median income in the US.
Good money management does not mean figuring out a way squeak by while squandering your family income on something you don't actually need.
The median household income in the U.S. is $53,000 a year.
Ford and GM built their markets from the bottom up and not the top down. The market for the sports car or luxury sedan tends to crash and burn when the economy heads south --- taking the small independent manufacturer with them. You can have style and tech and still lose in this game.
The only reason they exist is so that game companies can manage licenses. They're not meant to be for your benefit. They're consumption machines, designed to tie you into a corporate "ecosystem". If I was 13, I would love one.
If you are a parent you will love them even more.
Consoles have always been about social and family-oriented gaming in the home.
That is why you find them installed with the 60" HDTV in your family room or as one component of a far more ambitious home theater system.
It is also why they have evolved into media centers supporting DVD and Blu-ray play, streaming media services like Netflix and Pandora, download video and music sales. the Jetsons futuristic Skype big screen video phone and so on.
I found two other articles that suggest that the 900p resolution and 30fps targets came from other factors...gamespot... says that 30fps is "more cinematic" and 60fps "looked really wierd."
I've been watching live sports and other events televised at 60 fps for about a decade now, and it all feels perfectly natural. I don't understand this obsession with preserving the "cinematic" experience of 1920 in a video game designed for release in 2015.
We didn't see a lot of devices using cell and because of that, a lot of cell super-computer clusters were even made using actual PS3s
Sony sold and priced Cell based systems for commercial use.
The PS3 could be purchased in wholesale lots --- taken out of consumer distribution channels where the true cost of the hardware would be recouped by future video game sales --- at a substantial net loss to Sony.
We're 20x the size of them, have a completely different political setup and most people won't think to compare one arbitrary country to another?
Sweden is a unitary state, population 9.7 million, divided into twenty-one counties. Each county further divides into a number of municipalities or kommuner, with a total of 290 municipalities in 2004.
The U.S. is a federal union of fifty states, population 316 million, with roughly 3,100 counties, parishes or the equivalent, 39,000 local governments and 50,000 or so special districts, for schools, water, sewage disposal, and so on. [based on census reports from scattered sources]
Local governing bodies in the U.S, are wholly the creation of state governments --- and can only can only do what their state permits them to do --- only a bare handful, for example, are permitted to tax income. City Income Taxes - U.S. Cities That Levy Income Taxes
"Municipal Internet" can look a lot like an upper middle class entitlement.
Which means that your proposal may not be economically or politically viable unless it is inclusive --- bringing affordable broadband Internet deep into the inner city and far out into the suburbs and perhaps beyond.
I crowdsourced some questions about contextual advertising and contextual content on Google+. It was an unscientific survey, of course. But several strong consensuses formed that perfectly matched my own observations.
How un-surprising.
The geek preens himself for his rigorous logic and mathematical literacy ---
but will swallow an utterly worthless blog spam post like this without a second thought,
Slashdot Mirror
Now it appears, that we must change. We must adapt our requirements toward people who are easily swayed out of this carreer path. We must, in the name of equal representation, educate and employ people who are highly susceptable to social approval by others.
The problem with memory is that we often see the past not as it was, but as we want it to be.
If you listen to the NPR segment, they have a couple of women who were former compsci majors give accounts of how the men in their classes denigrated them and mocked them for missing some knowledge. I'm not certain it's motivated by a "no girls allowed" attitude. I don't think y there's a broader culture of elitism in compsci that motivates people to try to bolster their own egos by jumping on perceived weaknesses in others.
I think any woman who entered the elite architectural and engineering schools in the eighties could have told you that "No girls allowed!" was the message broadcast loud and clear from Day 1.
Compsci was not the only offender.
I can't figure out (the) strange emotional attachments they feel towards Visual Studio (even though it costs over $10000 for the full version).
Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 with MSDN ($13,000) seems quite clearly designed for teams of developers oriented towards enterprise-grade applications and deployments, not the lone-wolf programmer.
If I could delete 3 things from all existence they would be: blah, blah, blah.
Let me introduce you to the words "gainful employment." There are very few ways of earning a living that do not require advertising your product or service.
For some reason, people haven't cottoned on to the fact that HD content can be received over the air with an old pair of rabbit ears or a more modern $20 antenna.
In this border town, there were about five or six high-powered VHF stations that could be reliably received with a good roof mounted antenna. For digital, which is all or nothing, $100-$120 for the antenna would be a good starting point, plus labor, if you are not comfortable with high ladder work or pounding in a grounding stake.
Please do tell us about how the "official" prosthetic costing $40,000 are totally not a ripoff even though they can be replaced by $45 printed prostetics because each one is hand carved by highly skilled gnomes from their own bones and tied together with unicorn hair and anything else will kill the wearer in the first 5 minutes
I can't.
Because I don't have the money or resources to clinically evaluate a $45 prosthetic hand.
This I do know:
The poor have been milked for generations by frauds and fools marketing medical miracles at dime store prices. When the geek sees a buzz word like "3-D Printing" in a headline, his capacity for critical thinking goes south.
To test his computer models of neural control, Valero-Cuevas is using a very faithful physical system: cadaver hands. Hand surgeons help him connect the hands' tendons to strings driven by electric motors.
The activity of the motors is controlled by the neuron software, as if the motors were muscles themselves. This way the simulated neurons are confronted with the same problem the nervous system faces: controlling the hand as a marionette driven by complex muscles and tendons.
The goal is for the software and hardware to work in concert to control the cadaver hand the same way a healthy person can move his or her hand --- complete with stretch reflexes, muscle tone and compliance.
''We are studying the very fundamental mechanisms of how muscles have tone and how you modify that to get function, and how their disruptions lead to the pathological characteristics of hypertonia, spasticity and dystonia, which are very common in cerebral palsy, stroke and spinal cord injury,'' Valero Cuevas said. ''But we don't really know where they come from, and we're trying to understand that.''
The complexity in just one little finger
Each finger tendon is controlled by between six and 10 muscles, and in turn, each simulated muscle is controlled by a population of 256 independent neurons.
''The irony is not lost on us that we're combining one of the oldest scientific disciplines, hand anatomy, with some of the newest elements of ultra-fast parallel computing,'' Valero-Cuevas said. ''We're using this to answer central questions about evolution, health and disease, and how all these systems work.''
One application of this work is the design of better prosthetic hands, where there is still a major engineering challenge to make artificial hands that can be effective manipulators of objects. The most advanced current prosthetics are effective grippers, but the ultimate goal is truly dexterous manipulators.
''We see it as an impasse,'' Valero-Cuevas said. ''Over a century of trying to develop something that's better than the split hook prosthesis. We now have modern robotic hands and prosthetic hands that are amazing grippers, but they're not dexterous manipulators. They're great at holding things, but is it the Luke Skywalker hand that would be able to pick something up, reorient and operate it? Think of all the operations that are needed to use your smartphone with one hand.''
Perfecting a fully functioning prosthetic hand
Of course. It is just like in 1984: Language gets controlled to that people may not voice their thoughts anymore.
The geek doesn't think. He rants.
When he does think, he is perfectly capable of twisting words and ideas into whatever new and unimagined form suits him best.
The geek who claims to speak for Orwell should try reading him sometime.
I have a feeling that there are some people who would take a polite "You're wrong and I disagree with you for the following reasons . . ." as trolling.
This isn't about trolling.
This is about abusive, manipulative, disruptive and often threatening behavior that would not be tolerated off-line in the name of free speech --- because it is the enemy of free speech.
Free speech cannot survive in an atmosphere of fear.
Free speech cannot survive when speakers are shouted down, bullied and hounded off stage.
Free speech cannot survive the mob.
All of these "Feats" of human ingenuity were once thought to be impossible by the physics standards of the day.
These "feats" you describe were engineering problems, not physics problems.
The "Boy Mechanic" of 1880 could build a rubber-band powered model plane. Samuel Pierpont Langley built elegant steam powered miniatures, no less appealing and no more practical.
Power was never a problem in aviation. The problem was the need for dynamic control of an aircraft moving in three dimensions. The Wrights taught themselves to fly by building and refining man-sized gliders. In parallel with their work on lift and propulsion.
Frozen - original (and ok, by now its probably clear I have kids)
I don't think you have to apologize for liking Wreak-It Ralph or Frozen. WIR's comic demolition of the state-of-the-art first-person shooter was alone worth the price of entry.
To Ralph, playing straight man: "One more, one more. Why did the hero flush the toilet..."
At the end of the day, he created and manages the largest open source project ever. More than 20 years on, it is still going strong.
But Linus won't be around forever ---
and immature and abusive behavior that persists well beyond the adolescence of a man or a project, a system or a method, toubles me. I do not want to see such behavior institutionalized in FOSS and carried on into the next generation.
I read sci-fi(Niven, Asimov, Bradbury, etc) and fantasy(Tolkien, Lovecraft, Howard, etc). I don't get this thing with comics.
Hitchcock began storyboarding his films around 1935.
The adventure comic strip, which was coming into its own about the same time, became increasingly cinematic in its story-telling.
The film and the comic are both essentially visual media. There isn't much time or space for dialog and none for long-winded exposition. That doesn't make dialog unimportant in a film or comic --- it just means that every word has to count.
The comics weren't always about superheroes --- and the superhero comic wasn't always a soap opera. Disney hit all the right notes with "Guardians of the Galaxy," it should be interesting to see what it makes of "Big Hero Six."
With both the recent openssl and bash bugs, in addition to fixing the bug, careful investigation was done by the respective communities and additional problems were/are being addressed.
Excuse me for saying that I find all these platitudes less than reassuring.
The name itself is an acronym, a pun, and a description. As an acronym, it stands for Bourne-again shell, referring to its objective as a free replacement for the Bourne shell. As a pun, it expressed that objective in a phrase that sounds similar to born again, a term for spiritual rebirth. The name is also descriptive of what it did, bashing together the features of sh, csh, and ksh.
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) considered a free shell that could run existing sh scripts so strategic to a completely free system built from BSD and GNU code that this was one of the few projects they funded themselves, with Fox undertaking the work as an employee of FSF. Fox released Bash as a beta, version .99, on June 7, 1989 and remained the primary maintainer until sometime between mid-1992 and mid-1994, when he was laid off from FSF.
A security hole in Bash dubbed Shellshock, dating from version 1.03, was discovered in early September 2014.
Bash (Unix Shell)
Analysis of the source code history of Bash shows the vulnerabilities had existed since version 1.03 of Bash released in September 1989.
Shellshock (software bug)
A 25 year old bug with the potential to do enormous damage.
In the UNIX shell in almost universal use by *NIX professionals, and a spate-no-expense project conceived and funded by the FSF.
The US changed the language after breaking off from Britain changing 's' to 'z' in many spellings for example
Noah Webster published his speller in 1783. His grammar in 1784, and his dictionary in 1826.
His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions". This meant that the people-at-large must control the language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by popular usage in language.
Noah Webster
This is an essentially modern approach to language and usage.
You see it in H.L. Mencken, you see it in The American Heritage Dictionary.
One of the most provocative essays in Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now: (Library of America #251) offers a much needed reminder that Shakespeare first attracted readers and audiences in the states because the language was familiar and accessible.
Very close to what you would have heard on the street.
''American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,'' Meier said. ''The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.''
Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that ''haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.''
''The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as 'dialect fossils.' And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.''
First US performance of Shakespeare in the original pronunciation
Alerting the user to change the damaged battery makes sense. Now we need to convince the manufacturers to design devices which would make this possible.
--- and then persuade users to buy them.
Despite any penalty in style, weight, bulk, battery life, waterproofing and so on.
Will the customer need to buy an unfamiliar industrial screwdriver or some other special tool? You will meet resistance if the battery is any harder to replace than the AAA cells that power his LED flashlight.
Because Edison was a Jobs-like narcissist who used people to elevate his status and promote himself. Tesla was too busy working in the lab to revel in fame and build a populist legacy.
The short list:
1877. The phonograph.
Edison and Bell both began in at a time even almost no one believed that reproducing the human voice across vast distances of time and space would ever be possible.
Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines [1909]
The Carbon Microphone. [1877-78]
No more need to shout into the phone. First Long Distance calls. New York to Chicago, 1892.
Then an inventor named Michael I. Pupin invented (and patented) the loading coil, a device made of electromagnets that could strengthen an electronic signal; with enough loading coils wired into a circuit, and wired properly, the signal could reach 1,500 miles---from New York to Denver---before degrading so far as to be unfathomable.
Calling a country far, far away
The Incandescent Light Bulb (1879)
The Edison lamp could be wired in parallel, making it easy to service and drawing down relatively little power. It was reasonanly long lived. affordable, bright, without being blinding ---- of the twenty or so previous examples the geek has likely read about, all would fail on one or more counts.
Edison was both a system builder and an entrepreneur.
Residential lighting demanded a whole new way of thinking about electricity. On-site generation wasn't likely to be practical. You needed switches safe enough for a child to use. Wiring standards.
Things like fuses. cords, plugs and sockets ---
all designed for users who had never in their lives seen a fire ignited by a man-made electrical spark or over-heated wire, never experienced anything more dangerous than a mild static shock.
That makes you both the advocate and the educator. You use every resource the 19th Century has to offer to demonstrate what you have to offer and how to use it safely. You banish the candle and put up Christmas tree lights. You illuminate theaters, department stores, fairs and expositions.
Not enough electricians around to wire every home?
You recruit and train them yourself.
Can you imagine if we put the war on drugs budget against fusion power instead?
The climax of GE and Disney's "Carousel of Progress" at the 1964 New York's World's Fair was the first public demonstration of a fusion reaction. General Electric
The device was a Î-pinch from General Electric. This was similar to the Scylla machine developed earlier at Los Alamos. (1958)
In the mid-1970s, Project PACER, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) explored the possibility of a fusion power system that would involve exploding small hydrogen bombs (fusion bombs) inside an underground cavity. As an energy source, the system is the only fusion power system that could be demonstrated to work using existing technology.
However it would also require a large, continuous supply of nuclear bombs, making the economics of such a system rather questionable.
While fusion power is still in early stages of development, substantial sums have been and continue to be invested in research. In the EU almost 10 billion euro was spent on fusion research up to the end of the 1990s, and the new ITER reactor alone is budgeted at 10 billion euro.
It is estimated that up to the point of possible implementation of electricity generation by nuclear fusion, R&D will need further promotion totaling around 60--80 billion euro over a period of 50 years or so (of which 20--30 billion euro within the EU) based on a report from 2002. Nuclear fusion research receives 750 million euro (excluding ITER funding) from the European Union, compared with 810 million euro for sustainable energy research, putting research into fusion power well ahead of that of any single rivaling technology. Indeed, the size of the investments and time frame of the expected results mean that fusion research is almost exclusively publicly funded, while research in other forms of energy can be done by the private sector.
Fusion power
Hopefully at some point in time the FBI will realize that their mission shouldn't be to protect corporate rights, but to protect rights for the individual citizens.
by which the geek means the citizen who can afford a computer, broadband Internet.
pirating music, games, videos and other digital services and software is and always has been a middle class entitlement.
individual rights mean damn little when you are "constitutionally" unable to work together to achieve your goals and protect your interests.
You don't need to make 100k/year to afford a Tesla. The stock P85 is around ~1300/month which is only about 1/3rd of what is the median income in the US.
Good money management does not mean figuring out a way squeak by while squandering your family income on something you don't actually need.
The median household income in the U.S. is $53,000 a year.
The per capita income in the U.S., $28,500 a year. State & County QuickFacts
Ford and GM built their markets from the bottom up and not the top down. The market for the sports car or luxury sedan tends to crash and burn when the economy heads south --- taking the small independent manufacturer with them. You can have style and tech and still lose in this game.
The only reason they exist is so that game companies can manage licenses. They're not meant to be for your benefit. They're consumption machines, designed to tie you into a corporate "ecosystem". If I was 13, I would love one.
If you are a parent you will love them even more.
Consoles have always been about social and family-oriented gaming in the home.
That is why you find them installed with the 60" HDTV in your family room or as one component of a far more ambitious home theater system.
It is also why they have evolved into media centers supporting DVD and Blu-ray play, streaming media services like Netflix and Pandora, download video and music sales. the Jetsons futuristic Skype big screen video phone and so on.
I found two other articles that suggest that the 900p resolution and 30fps targets came from other factors...gamespot... says that 30fps is "more cinematic" and 60fps "looked really wierd."
I've been watching live sports and other events televised at 60 fps for about a decade now, and it all feels perfectly natural. I don't understand this obsession with preserving the "cinematic" experience of 1920 in a video game designed for release in 2015.
We didn't see a lot of devices using cell and because of that, a lot of cell super-computer clusters were even made using actual PS3s
Sony sold and priced Cell based systems for commercial use.
The PS3 could be purchased in wholesale lots --- taken out of consumer distribution channels where the true cost of the hardware would be recouped by future video game sales --- at a substantial net loss to Sony.
Exit the "Other OS."
There was a Batman TV show in the 90's?
"Batman: The Animated Series" introduced the now iconic character, Harley Quinn.
Kevin Conroy has had the longest run of any actor to play Batman, 1992 to the present. In 85 episodes of Batman: TAS alone.
We're 20x the size of them, have a completely different political setup and most people won't think to compare one arbitrary country to another?
Sweden is a unitary state, population 9.7 million, divided into twenty-one counties. Each county further divides into a number of municipalities or kommuner, with a total of 290 municipalities in 2004.
Sweden
The U.S. is a federal union of fifty states, population 316 million, with roughly 3,100 counties, parishes or the equivalent, 39,000 local governments and 50,000 or so special districts, for schools, water, sewage disposal, and so on. [based on census reports from scattered sources]
Local governing bodies in the U.S, are wholly the creation of state governments --- and can only can only do what their state permits them to do --- only a bare handful, for example, are permitted to tax income. City Income Taxes - U.S. Cities That Levy Income Taxes
"Municipal Internet" can look a lot like an upper middle class entitlement.
Which means that your proposal may not be economically or politically viable unless it is inclusive --- bringing affordable broadband Internet deep into the inner city and far out into the suburbs and perhaps beyond.
I crowdsourced some questions about contextual advertising and contextual content on Google+. It was an unscientific survey, of course. But several strong consensuses formed that perfectly matched my own observations.
How un-surprising.
The geek preens himself for his rigorous logic and mathematical literacy ---
but will swallow an utterly worthless blog spam post like this without a second thought,