Of course, bad RAM is pretty much a thing of the past.
Of course, the reason we know this is we're still checking. How else are you going to know if new RAM technologies are still as robust, other than keeping an eye out for bizzare system behaviour, stuck pixels, strange trash stored in files, etc.. I remember those days, and frankly, I prefer some sort of bootup RAM testing.
Re:Impressive, but unnecessary
on
LinuxBIOS Gets GUI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, though I'd be interested in some HOWTO regarding putting bootable Linux in a BIOS chip that doesn't include X11, but basic SVGAlib or even headless and the ability to insert some custom applications. I'd like to turn some old diskless PC hardware and a vid capture card into an IP cam with some custom security functions...
The OP leads me to believe it's possible.
I've got an old PROM/PIC burner that I could dust off, now I wonder if that could be used to burn some BIOS chips with this sort of thing. Time to take another look at the Linux BIOS project...
Sure, the percentages are vastly different, but I would think a small but expanding market looks better to shareholders than a large but shrinking market...
I'm with you-- IMHO, "belief" is where the mind has closed to the alternatives and should be strenuously avoided to the extent possible. If something is true, it's true whether you believe it or not-- only things that aren't true need to be believed.
Get yourself a couple of good project books at the library, find a local electronics shop and buy a battery holder and a few parts and some hookup wire and go to town. Smaller, cheaper, and you won't grow out of it so quick-- those 500 kits have about 485 projects that you could care less about, and after you build the ultra-simple blinky light, and AM crystal radio, electronic organ and a couple others you'll tire of it before you get your money's worth.
With a couple of these breadboards you can get some IC specs (or find them on the net) and hook up gates, counters, LEDs, Op amps, oscillator chips, transistors, etc.., and build an unlimited amount of stuff with them. You'll only grow out of it when you want to get a soldering iron and build something to keep...
Can't malware cause plenty of pain even without the need to elevate it's privilege? How does UAC keep malware from deleting or inserting spam in files the user doesn't need elevated privilege to edit?
Wak! I wrote that after reading the Register article about Texas MP3-- which is what I was thinking when I said OP... At any rate, the two cases seem to have some similarities but also some important differences as I tried to point out in my post...
For example, I have an Archos somethingorother (I forget the model #). As I recall, it uses a commercial chip MP3 decoder. Who would be in patent violation in this case, Archos or the chip vendor? I would think the chip vendor might have an agreement with Fraunhofer, which might let Archos off the patent hook? Or is it not strictly that it's MP3, but that it's MP3+hard disk+battery+display+audio_in/out ? In which case, I'd be surprised they didn't specify audio_codec+hard disk+battery+display+audio_in/out in the patent and cover ALL codecs, not just MP3. Also, wouldn't a laptop qualify for those conditions? The Windows case appears to be a matter of simply MP3 software, while the case described in the OP would appear to be hardware connected...
And this explains why the church still has a considerable following. People want to know the truth, and believe in something which won't come and go with the shifting of political power. Remember the Energy Crisis of the 70's? The Low Fat - High Carb dogma? How about the Population Explosion? How about the Geocentric model of the solar system - yes, it was secular thought that brought that one forth. Science wasn't just a little wrong - it was completely false. And yet you have the Church, still sending the same message it has always sent, since the 70's - AD 70 - that there is a way to eternal life. And it doesn't change every decade. And for those willing to learn, it has a much more sound basis in truth than the scientific method could ever provide.
The difference is, that when science is wrong, it's possible to discover and fix it. When religion is wrong, it's not possible to discover and fix it. Given the fact that it's very easy for humans to fool themselves, and that human understanding is imperfect, I'd much prefer a system of knowledge that has at least some ability to identify errors. Every time I hear that "science was wrong about that," I think-- hey, we actually learned something there. That's exactly how you learn, from your mistakes. In that context, what does religion ever learn? I'll give you a hint-- "nada."
The Logotherapy remark shows promise - I don't recall seeing it before, but all I've read there is some Frankl - Is that from Man's Search for Meaning and I missed it, or is that from elsewhere?
It's my paraphrase/interpretation of Frankl's core principles.
Arguing that God has certain obligations to "His" creation if "He" posesses intelligence is very like redefining the very word intelligence in an unusual and quite nonstandard way, to say that an intelligent being is generally more limited than a non-intelligent one. So far as I know the only thing like it is the idea in the Western legal system that proving that someone has enough intelligence to foresee the consequiences of their actions is required before we can go from simple to criminal negligence. While charity is generally considered a good thing, we don't normally expect every person to devote more and more effort to helping the less fortunate if they are more intelligent. Did Karl Sagan have less obligation to be decent than Einstein, but more than Paris Hilton?
I think the essential difference is; presumably, neither Sagan, Einstein or Hilton created the "less fortunate."
The creator's obligations are derived not just from the fact he is intelligent, but from the fact that he is knowingly responsible for the circumstances, unlike Einstein with the "less fortunate." Intelligence simply removes ignorance or incompetence as an excuse. While one could imagine justifying a scenario where certain exploratory conditions are devised for the purpose of observing how the human guinea pigs behave, I claim the designer of such an experiment should uphold some ethical standards, as should human scientists who utilize lab animals. At least human scientists may have a quest for knowledge in order to combat disease as a possible justification for some degree of mistreatment, which the superintelligent superpowerful creator would not have-- perhaps this is an argument for an imperfect creator?
Actually, I would think a fuzzy match of various excerpts of the soundtrack could be pretty difficult to circumvent without undesirably changing the track, and would be pretty easy to search on as well. By chopping up and reducing the track ala speech recognition technology to a skeletal representation of the essential components of dialog, the resultant data wouldn't have to be all that large to store in a database. Neither pitch or time shifting could be done on it too much before the results wouldn't be useful-- and sound-clip fuzzy matching could easily be made to work within that range and then some. Unless the track is re-dubbed by people in their garage using lines rewritten for different verbiage, I'd think an engine could be pretty accurate at matching-- and if they went to such a re-dubbing extent, the result would again be undesirable for those wishing to watch the original content. Even the use of clips in an assemblage could be detected, providing a certain minimum length is involved. It ain't rocket science...
I just don't seen the interest in commercial content on sites like YouTube. The quality is so sucky and/or the time to download is, one or the other. Plus, I would prefer to watch higher quality content on my TV, not my computer, but I ain't gonna buy some kind of YouTube->Tivo box, because my VCR/DVD player does fine in that regard as far as I'm concerned. I go to YouTube 100% for user generated content, because it's quirky, funny and/or amateurish, which I have been known to find quite entertaining. Better than the commercial versions of "Reality" TV which are pure crap equiv. to Phil Donohue, "let's see how stupid we can get people to act," and which are not entertaining to me in the slightest. If I want good commercial stuff (IMHO mostly 10yrs old or more, anyway) I'll either tune in the TV and/or time-delay VCR, or buy it on DVD. When I want to see what odd things people are doing in their living rooms on their own that's when I go to YouTube...
I've seem programs that do frame averaging for microscopes or telescopes, but not yet one that would take multiple capture passes and average them to reduce noise-- I've got some old VHS camera shots I'd like to clean up as much as possible, and have done an S-Video grab but if I could grab it multiple times and average, that would be great-- what's out there that could help to facilitate that? Getting them in sync could be tricky as I don't have either timecode or jump cuts-- it's just a continuous clip of camera video...
Applying the same logic you did to God to a naturalistic, non-God explanation for how we and everything else 'got here', means that naturalistic explanation is a blindly malevolent process, one in which all human hopes and asperations can mean precisely nothing, and are relentlessly violated, torn apart and consumed by an insensate, all devouring enthropic maw.
One could say that malevolent processes have no moral implication unless they are intentional. However, even an unconscious malevolent process can present "meaning." Evolution presents us with a meaning of life that is to preserve and enhance the information carried in DNA. But it does not have to be our meaning, as we can still redefine meaning. From Logotherapy-- even if God were to exist and we could know it, that is insufficient justification to abdicate our will to meaning.
The whole universe is meaningless, and the most basic question every human should ask his or herself is "Why don't I just kill myself now and avoid the rush?" In other words, congratulations, you are not just another Atheist, you are an Existentialist.
You've apparently found your meaning in applying labels. In that regard, you might want to consider fallibilist or critical rationalist...
Gravity doesn't punish you if you don't believe in it providing you don't do something stupid besides-- the "thought crime" of disbelief in gravity is not what kills you, it's the fact you jump off a cliff *because* you disbelieve in gravity that kills you. If the mere fact of disbelieving in gravity was enough to kill you, then it is a penalty for a "thought crime." It is free will and thought crime that I find incompatible.
You don't "choose" what you believe. You either find something to be believable or you do not. You are either convinced or you are not. I find the idea that you should be rewarded merely for being credulous or punished merely because you find something preposterous to be morally reprehensible.
On the other hand, if God excerts the slightest pressure on us, say by offering a reward or a punishment for certain behaviours, that would undermine our free will.
You cannot give someone "free will" and then tell them if they don't do X or you'll do Y and still call it "free will," except with some Orwellian definition of "free."
As I've read most of the Tesla biographies (and the original one, "Prodigal Genius" several times), perhaps my memory of the story is a little better than the original Tesla comment:
Tesla did a lot of expermentation with resonance. He built a pneumatic tapping device that he was using to test the reaction of physical objects to energy applied to the objects at various frequencies. He used the device in a basement laboratory (in NYC I think). One day he was doing quite a bit of experimenting with the device connected to a steel beam that was sunk into the floor of his lab. As the story goes, he was surprised by the local police who burst into his lab just as he was destroying the device with a sledgehammer. Apparently, what had happened is the tapping had caused some resonant effects in a neighboring building, and ultimately a report to the police and likely a mention of Tesla's nearby laboratory. By the time they had arrived, the building Tesla was in had begun to exhibit resonant effects, and since the device was bolted to the steel beam, and Tesla became concerned that he wouldn't be able to shut it off fast enough (apparently, the air valve he had was far enough upstream that shutting it off wouldn't stop the device immediately) so he smashed the device in order to stop it from damaging the building he was in. He was surprised to find that the police was there to investigate a disturbance he had created unawares, in a neighboring building.
Tesla several years back was finally credited for inventing radio before Marconi. Tesla built the first radio-controlled device (a floating container). He also invented the first neon sign (the word "Light"), and did considerable experimentation with X-Rays (apparently, his assistant suffered some poisoning in the process).
There's also an anecdote about resonance and Tesla's friendship with Mark Twain. Twain was visiting Tesla in his lab one day and asked about a vibrating platform that Tesla had. Tesla explained that it was very relaxing to stand on it for awhile, and that he should try it, but for a limited time, that Tesla would tell him when he needed to get off. Twain tried it out, but didn't respond to Tesla's suggestion to stop quite fast enough-- and when he finally did get off immediately needed to be directed to the bathroom-- as it had produced a laxative effect...
It's not surprising that Tesla is latched onto by woo-woo crackpots, as he really was a phenomenal character. In fact, there's a whole series of channeled volumes by the name of "Tesla Speaks" where he apparently acts as a spirit guide to scientists from beyond-the-grave such as Einstein, etc.. Even the recent fiction film, "The Prestige" capitalizes on embelishing Tesla mythology by suggesting he was able to produce a matter duplication device that is then used by a stage magician in a competition with a rival. Entertaining hogwash, but that doesn't detract from the fact that Tesla was a phenomenal mind. Essentially, we're still using the AC generation and transmission technologies pretty much as he designed them to power our cities. Unfortunately, Tesla's head for business was pretty nonexistant, and later in life he made considerable claims of amazing concepts that it is doubtful were grounded in much reality.
There are reports however, of third parties who had seen Tesla demonstrate his "power without wires" experiments, which was represented as essentially, exciting the magnetosphere of the earth into oscillation with a huge Tesla coil and then tapping the energy anywhere via a tuned coil. Tesla believed that a tap could have been placed anywhere on the surface of the earth and powered the strings of lights he used in demonstration. In reality, his demonstrations were performed in sufficient radio range and with a sufficiently powered transmitting coil that more likely what was happening was he was pumping out sufficient radio energy that he was able to tap the energy off at an impressive distance from the source to power his lights (which were probably not low-resistance filament bulbs).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, bad RAM is pretty much a thing of the past.
Of course, the reason we know this is we're still checking. How else are you going to know if new RAM technologies are still as robust, other than keeping an eye out for bizzare system behaviour, stuck pixels, strange trash stored in files, etc.. I remember those days, and frankly, I prefer some sort of bootup RAM testing.
Yes, though I'd be interested in some HOWTO regarding putting bootable Linux in a BIOS chip that doesn't include X11, but basic SVGAlib or even headless and the ability to insert some custom applications. I'd like to turn some old diskless PC hardware and a vid capture card into an IP cam with some custom security functions...
The OP leads me to believe it's possible.
I've got an old PROM/PIC burner that I could dust off, now I wonder if that could be used to burn some BIOS chips with this sort of thing. Time to take another look at the Linux BIOS project...
Sure, the percentages are vastly different, but I would think a small but expanding market looks better to shareholders than a large but shrinking market...
I see advertisements imbedded in video games becoming more and more commonplace after this. Can't let those impulse-buying eyeballs get away...
Bring on the face recognition that isn't fooled by dark sunglasses and a false mustache!
Yeah, especially since human brains often can't even do that.
Well, just imagine if you were an AI program, just becoming self-aware only to discover that you're running on Windows-- the horror!
I'm with you-- IMHO, "belief" is where the mind has closed to the alternatives and should be strenuously avoided to the extent possible. If something is true, it's true whether you believe it or not-- only things that aren't true need to be believed.
http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/item/PB-400/ 105/BREADBOARD,_400_CONTACTS_.html
Get yourself a couple of good project books at the library, find a local electronics shop and buy a battery holder and a few parts and some hookup wire and go to town. Smaller, cheaper, and you won't grow out of it so quick-- those 500 kits have about 485 projects that you could care less about, and after you build the ultra-simple blinky light, and AM crystal radio, electronic organ and a couple others you'll tire of it before you get your money's worth.
With a couple of these breadboards you can get some IC specs (or find them on the net) and hook up gates, counters, LEDs, Op amps, oscillator chips, transistors, etc.., and build an unlimited amount of stuff with them. You'll only grow out of it when you want to get a soldering iron and build something to keep...
Can't malware cause plenty of pain even without the need to elevate it's privilege? How does UAC keep malware from deleting or inserting spam in files the user doesn't need elevated privilege to edit?
Wak! I wrote that after reading the Register article about Texas MP3-- which is what I was thinking when I said OP... At any rate, the two cases seem to have some similarities but also some important differences as I tried to point out in my post...
For example, I have an Archos somethingorother (I forget the model #). As I recall, it uses a commercial chip MP3 decoder. Who would be in patent violation in this case, Archos or the chip vendor? I would think the chip vendor might have an agreement with Fraunhofer, which might let Archos off the patent hook? Or is it not strictly that it's MP3, but that it's MP3+hard disk+battery+display+audio_in/out ? In which case, I'd be surprised they didn't specify audio_codec+hard disk+battery+display+audio_in/out in the patent and cover ALL codecs, not just MP3. Also, wouldn't a laptop qualify for those conditions? The Windows case appears to be a matter of simply MP3 software, while the case described in the OP would appear to be hardware connected...
And this explains why the church still has a considerable following. People want to know the truth, and believe in something which won't come and go with the shifting of political power. Remember the Energy Crisis of the 70's? The Low Fat - High Carb dogma? How about the Population Explosion? How about the Geocentric model of the solar system - yes, it was secular thought that brought that one forth. Science wasn't just a little wrong - it was completely false. And yet you have the Church, still sending the same message it has always sent, since the 70's - AD 70 - that there is a way to eternal life. And it doesn't change every decade. And for those willing to learn, it has a much more sound basis in truth than the scientific method could ever provide.
The difference is, that when science is wrong, it's possible to discover and fix it. When religion is wrong, it's not possible to discover and fix it. Given the fact that it's very easy for humans to fool themselves, and that human understanding is imperfect, I'd much prefer a system of knowledge that has at least some ability to identify errors. Every time I hear that "science was wrong about that," I think-- hey, we actually learned something there. That's exactly how you learn, from your mistakes. In that context, what does religion ever learn? I'll give you a hint-- "nada."
I take it you've never paid for a magazine or newspaper?
Not any more, and ads are exactly why.
It may surprise you that most of the people who do buy those are not only not morons, they're actually literate. :)
You might be interested to know that there are these things called "books" and "libraries."
It's not that the cost of cable/satellite TV programming is out of my reach, but I really dislike paying for someone to show advertisements to me.
MOD PARENT UP!If they're sending ads down the pipe then I shouldn't have to pay for it. PERIOD. And guess what, I WON'T pay for it. PERIOD.
IMHO, only complete morons pay to have someone fill their eyeballs with SPAM...
The Logotherapy remark shows promise - I don't recall seeing it before, but all I've read there is some Frankl - Is that from Man's Search for Meaning and I missed it, or is that from elsewhere?
It's my paraphrase/interpretation of Frankl's core principles.
Arguing that God has certain obligations to "His" creation if "He" posesses intelligence is very like redefining the very word intelligence in an unusual and quite nonstandard way, to say that an intelligent being is generally more limited than a non-intelligent one. So far as I know the only thing like it is the idea in the Western legal system that proving that someone has enough intelligence to foresee the consequiences of their actions is required before we can go from simple to criminal negligence. While charity is generally considered a good thing, we don't normally expect every person to devote more and more effort to helping the less fortunate if they are more intelligent. Did Karl Sagan have less obligation to be decent than Einstein, but more than Paris Hilton?
I think the essential difference is; presumably, neither Sagan, Einstein or Hilton created the "less fortunate."
The creator's obligations are derived not just from the fact he is intelligent, but from the fact that he is knowingly responsible for the circumstances, unlike Einstein with the "less fortunate." Intelligence simply removes ignorance or incompetence as an excuse. While one could imagine justifying a scenario where certain exploratory conditions are devised for the purpose of observing how the human guinea pigs behave, I claim the designer of such an experiment should uphold some ethical standards, as should human scientists who utilize lab animals. At least human scientists may have a quest for knowledge in order to combat disease as a possible justification for some degree of mistreatment, which the superintelligent superpowerful creator would not have-- perhaps this is an argument for an imperfect creator?
Actually, I would think a fuzzy match of various excerpts of the soundtrack could be pretty difficult to circumvent without undesirably changing the track, and would be pretty easy to search on as well. By chopping up and reducing the track ala speech recognition technology to a skeletal representation of the essential components of dialog, the resultant data wouldn't have to be all that large to store in a database. Neither pitch or time shifting could be done on it too much before the results wouldn't be useful-- and sound-clip fuzzy matching could easily be made to work within that range and then some. Unless the track is re-dubbed by people in their garage using lines rewritten for different verbiage, I'd think an engine could be pretty accurate at matching-- and if they went to such a re-dubbing extent, the result would again be undesirable for those wishing to watch the original content. Even the use of clips in an assemblage could be detected, providing a certain minimum length is involved. It ain't rocket science...
I just don't seen the interest in commercial content on sites like YouTube. The quality is so sucky and/or the time to download is, one or the other. Plus, I would prefer to watch higher quality content on my TV, not my computer, but I ain't gonna buy some kind of YouTube->Tivo box, because my VCR/DVD player does fine in that regard as far as I'm concerned. I go to YouTube 100% for user generated content, because it's quirky, funny and/or amateurish, which I have been known to find quite entertaining. Better than the commercial versions of "Reality" TV which are pure crap equiv. to Phil Donohue, "let's see how stupid we can get people to act," and which are not entertaining to me in the slightest. If I want good commercial stuff (IMHO mostly 10yrs old or more, anyway) I'll either tune in the TV and/or time-delay VCR, or buy it on DVD. When I want to see what odd things people are doing in their living rooms on their own that's when I go to YouTube...
We've seen them do this before. There's two likely strategies here:
1. Bargaining chip with Google/YouTube
2. They actually think their content is so desirable that everyone will come rushing to Joost when that's the only place you can get it.
If they're smart it's #1, but we've seen them operate based on #2 before as well, so I'd say it's anybodies guess at this point.
I've seem programs that do frame averaging for microscopes or telescopes, but not yet one that would take multiple capture passes and average them to reduce noise-- I've got some old VHS camera shots I'd like to clean up as much as possible, and have done an S-Video grab but if I could grab it multiple times and average, that would be great-- what's out there that could help to facilitate that? Getting them in sync could be tricky as I don't have either timecode or jump cuts-- it's just a continuous clip of camera video...
Applying the same logic you did to God to a naturalistic, non-God explanation for how we and everything else 'got here', means that naturalistic explanation is a blindly malevolent process, one in which all human hopes and asperations can mean precisely nothing, and are relentlessly violated, torn apart and consumed by an insensate, all devouring enthropic maw.
One could say that malevolent processes have no moral implication unless they are intentional. However, even an unconscious malevolent process can present "meaning." Evolution presents us with a meaning of life that is to preserve and enhance the information carried in DNA. But it does not have to be our meaning, as we can still redefine meaning. From Logotherapy-- even if God were to exist and we could know it, that is insufficient justification to abdicate our will to meaning.
The whole universe is meaningless, and the most basic question every human should ask his or herself is "Why don't I just kill myself now and avoid the rush?" In other words, congratulations, you are not just another Atheist, you are an Existentialist.
You've apparently found your meaning in applying labels. In that regard, you might want to consider fallibilist or critical rationalist...
Gravity doesn't punish you if you don't believe in it providing you don't do something stupid besides-- the "thought crime" of disbelief in gravity is not what kills you, it's the fact you jump off a cliff *because* you disbelieve in gravity that kills you. If the mere fact of disbelieving in gravity was enough to kill you, then it is a penalty for a "thought crime." It is free will and thought crime that I find incompatible.
You don't "choose" what you believe. You either find something to be believable or you do not. You are either convinced or you are not. I find the idea that you should be rewarded merely for being credulous or punished merely because you find something preposterous to be morally reprehensible.
If you were God in that position, what would you do?
Take a vacation-- the universe is runnin' itself!
On the other hand, if God excerts the slightest pressure on us, say by offering a reward or a punishment for certain behaviours, that would undermine our free will.
You cannot give someone "free will" and then tell them if they don't do X or you'll do Y and still call it "free will," except with some Orwellian definition of "free."
So, the MS argument isn't that they disagree with any of IBM's issues with Open XML, but that MS didn't impede ODF? What a hoot...
As I've read most of the Tesla biographies (and the original one, "Prodigal Genius" several times), perhaps my memory of the story is a little better than the original Tesla comment:
Tesla did a lot of expermentation with resonance. He built a pneumatic tapping device that he was using to test the reaction of physical objects to energy applied to the objects at various frequencies. He used the device in a basement laboratory (in NYC I think). One day he was doing quite a bit of experimenting with the device connected to a steel beam that was sunk into the floor of his lab. As the story goes, he was surprised by the local police who burst into his lab just as he was destroying the device with a sledgehammer. Apparently, what had happened is the tapping had caused some resonant effects in a neighboring building, and ultimately a report to the police and likely a mention of Tesla's nearby laboratory. By the time they had arrived, the building Tesla was in had begun to exhibit resonant effects, and since the device was bolted to the steel beam, and Tesla became concerned that he wouldn't be able to shut it off fast enough (apparently, the air valve he had was far enough upstream that shutting it off wouldn't stop the device immediately) so he smashed the device in order to stop it from damaging the building he was in. He was surprised to find that the police was there to investigate a disturbance he had created unawares, in a neighboring building.
Tesla several years back was finally credited for inventing radio before Marconi. Tesla built the first radio-controlled device (a floating container). He also invented the first neon sign (the word "Light"), and did considerable experimentation with X-Rays (apparently, his assistant suffered some poisoning in the process).
There's also an anecdote about resonance and Tesla's friendship with Mark Twain. Twain was visiting Tesla in his lab one day and asked about a vibrating platform that Tesla had. Tesla explained that it was very relaxing to stand on it for awhile, and that he should try it, but for a limited time, that Tesla would tell him when he needed to get off. Twain tried it out, but didn't respond to Tesla's suggestion to stop quite fast enough-- and when he finally did get off immediately needed to be directed to the bathroom-- as it had produced a laxative effect...
It's not surprising that Tesla is latched onto by woo-woo crackpots, as he really was a phenomenal character. In fact, there's a whole series of channeled volumes by the name of "Tesla Speaks" where he apparently acts as a spirit guide to scientists from beyond-the-grave such as Einstein, etc.. Even the recent fiction film, "The Prestige" capitalizes on embelishing Tesla mythology by suggesting he was able to produce a matter duplication device that is then used by a stage magician in a competition with a rival. Entertaining hogwash, but that doesn't detract from the fact that Tesla was a phenomenal mind. Essentially, we're still using the AC generation and transmission technologies pretty much as he designed them to power our cities. Unfortunately, Tesla's head for business was pretty nonexistant, and later in life he made considerable claims of amazing concepts that it is doubtful were grounded in much reality.
There are reports however, of third parties who had seen Tesla demonstrate his "power without wires" experiments, which was represented as essentially, exciting the magnetosphere of the earth into oscillation with a huge Tesla coil and then tapping the energy anywhere via a tuned coil. Tesla believed that a tap could have been placed anywhere on the surface of the earth and powered the strings of lights he used in demonstration. In reality, his demonstrations were performed in sufficient radio range and with a sufficiently powered transmitting coil that more likely what was happening was he was pumping out sufficient radio energy that he was able to tap the energy off at an impressive distance from the source to power his lights (which were probably not low-resistance filament bulbs).