The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
But as the summary implies and history records the patent application in this case was a race to the patent office. Several people had developed working telephones at that point.
So while it is good that Bell benefited from this invention it is bad that other inventors did not.
...because the North Koreans are militaristic nut cases
And would you claim that the Americans less militaristic nut cases than the North Koreans?
Background: I am not an American. The GP drew a comparison between NK and Denmark.
The USA is a seriously militaristic country but their leadership consists of reasonably balanced people. The NK leadership consists largely of one person who is almost certainly terminally ill and quite likely unbalanced.
I occasionally work in S Korea. With this missile test coming up (presumably whenever the NK rocket techs get the thing to fire) I plan to stay safely in Australia. There is something spookily serious about the South Koreans. I think it extends to the north as well. I think there will eventually be another Korean war, though it may be a short one.
..is 14000 kilograms force. So the total mass of your spacecraft at launch will be 7000kg (or less) if you want to accelerate at 1g initially. In practice you would want more that that so 3-4 tonnes is probably the limit for the whole spacecraft.
I have come up with a fairly plausible theory that Lotus Notes is a conspiracy
of complexity to keep huge numbers of IBM engineers and testers, as well as external
Notes administrators in business.
IBM specialise in this. Have a look at the entire Rational product line, particularly ClearCase.
Yet it has never really taken off except in nitch markets.
The company I work for sells an air traffic control simulator. Voice recognition is used by the component which simulates aircraft so you can give them voice commands.
A conventional flight sim could work in a similar way to send voice messages to ATC.
My wife uses a gnome desktop for her business. Because she uses so many different functions her UI is quite cluttered. I had a look in synaptic and found gnome-voice-control so I will give it a go.
obesity, which is in turn a a major risk factor in a huge number of potentially deadly conditions and preconditions.
Its not a risk for me. Its a certainty. When I was seven years old my grandfather died at the age of 58 from a heart attack. My dad told me at the time what did it and how he planned to avoid it. When I dad was 63 he had a heart attack, and survived because his partner was on the ball and got him to hospital. So knowing what was on the way gained him five years. So here I am, aged 43. I'm not going to let this happen. Am I? Realistically I might be able to delay it another five years.
The only problem is that the level of activity needed to improve health is actually very high. Walking for an hour or three won't help at all. Riding a bike at 25km/h won't help. Swinging a wiimote definitely won't help.
To improve your health long term you need to get out and exercise hard for at least an hour a day. That means going for a run, or cycling above 30km/h.
Its not really games. Pretty much everything we do for leisure or to save manual effort reduces our life span.
My daughter is so used to on demand / dvds that she will ask to pause normal cable channels.
The pause function is so prevalent now that it seems to be finding its way into children's games. Sometimes when I watch my six year old son playing with other children one participant will say "Pause" and everybody stops the game.
I put up with TV ad breaks for years until a couple of years ago they started superimposing ads for their crap upcoming programs on top of the actual program.
After that I wouldn't trust a TV network with my time and mindshare.
30 years from now, people will think how stupid it was that you had to wait for your favorite TV show to come on at a specific time, rather than watching it whenever you wanted.
Also very strange, people considered it normal for their show to be interrupted periodically by attempts to sell you crap.
It funny. We got our first TV in the early 1970s. Within a week of watching it my dad had improvised a remote control to mute the ads. I think we started the decline of TV advertising revenue but standard wireless remote controls certainly played their part.
On a sort of related note, I'm confused as to why TVs haven't completely merged with computer monitors. They're similar enough now that they should be one and the same - they do pretty much the same thing - that's for sure.
The TV use case is sitting down with the family to watch a much loved DVD (my wife wants to sit at the kitchen table and play tetris on her laptop while browsing for cheap flights to malaysia).
The computer use case is when my wife watches chinese language movies in bed and wants me to watch with her but the colors look funny at a wide angle and I have to lean over which kills my back. And I am more likely to be on/. or reading a PDF ebook in bed anyway.
Remember that new type of film we were all going to put in our cameras? It had digital data on it for some reason. I think it was called APS or something. It didn't kill film. CCDs and flash RAM killed film.
And yeah TV is toast. Nice bit of bandwidth you have there...
I often connect my eeepc to my LCD TV. But the PC is so cheap there is no reason why it can't be part of the TV.
Re:mythtv killed TV
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A bigger impact is the people (like me and my friends) that don't buy or consume any TV at all, and hasn't for years.
Its hard to analyse because we are all changing, getting older and losing our spare time. TV may well be undergoing a race to the bottom as their best customers go to other media, they lose advertisers, pay less for content and lose more customers.
Some of it (kids TV) seems exactly the same now, but my son gets that on youtube as well. The repetition may be getting to us. Most of the content is rehashed year after year. Maybe TV has been done.
Re:Facebook?!
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Applications like facebook may be the bridge between easy to use TV and hard to use online video.
Laptops and wifi killed TV
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
My wife wanted a TV antenna point in the bedroom. Once she found youtube she stopped asking.
Back when I was very young some people I knew had a TV room (a home theatre, how about that!). The TV room had specials rules about not talking and keeping the lights out. With a laptop you can watch your stuff in the bathroom or the garage.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
But as the summary implies and history records the patent application in this case was a race to the patent office. Several people had developed working telephones at that point.
So while it is good that Bell benefited from this invention it is bad that other inventors did not.
Have a shared killfile, then turn it inside out.
I'll ask 4chan to help. Looks like a big job.
Maybe the feds should apply a flat rate to all sales, and then divide those monies up to all states based on population.
We have exactly that in Australia. Its called the Goods and Services Tax.
I used to work in a job where we got daily weather reports from equipment in Antarctica. One winter day a station reported -75C.
Offtopic, I just couldn't help but wonder:
...because the North Koreans are militaristic nut cases
And would you claim that the Americans less militaristic nut cases than the North Koreans?
Background: I am not an American. The GP drew a comparison between NK and Denmark.
The USA is a seriously militaristic country but their leadership consists of reasonably balanced people. The NK leadership consists largely of one person who is almost certainly terminally ill and quite likely unbalanced.
I occasionally work in S Korea. With this missile test coming up (presumably whenever the NK rocket techs get the thing to fire) I plan to stay safely in Australia. There is something spookily serious about the South Koreans. I think it extends to the north as well. I think there will eventually be another Korean war, though it may be a short one.
Why is this cute and interesting when done by a group of European amateurs and a global threat when done in North Korea?
Inexplicably, the European amateurs don't have a nuclear warhead development programme.
The Danes of course know that firing nukes at their neighbours would amount to shitting in their own back yard. The North Koreans on the other hand...
Am I seeing apartment buildings in the background? Maybe they should do future tests in Greenland.
...because the North Koreans are militaristic nut cases and the Danes are not?
No. It takes close to 456,521 kilograms force to lift a weight of 7,000 Kg (Stage 1 Rocket).
Are you talking about mass to orbit? I mean mass just off the ground at launch.
..is 14000 kilograms force. So the total mass of your spacecraft at launch will be 7000kg (or less) if you want to accelerate at 1g initially. In practice you would want more that that so 3-4 tonnes is probably the limit for the whole spacecraft.
I have come up with a fairly plausible theory that Lotus Notes is a conspiracy of complexity to keep huge numbers of IBM engineers and testers, as well as external Notes administrators in business.
IBM specialise in this. Have a look at the entire Rational product line, particularly ClearCase.
Yet it has never really taken off except in nitch markets.
The company I work for sells an air traffic control simulator. Voice recognition is used by the component which simulates aircraft so you can give them voice commands.
A conventional flight sim could work in a similar way to send voice messages to ATC.
My wife uses a gnome desktop for her business. Because she uses so many different functions her UI is quite cluttered. I had a look in synaptic and found gnome-voice-control so I will give it a go.
obesity, which is in turn a a major risk factor in a huge number of potentially deadly conditions and preconditions.
Its not a risk for me. Its a certainty. When I was seven years old my grandfather died at the age of 58 from a heart attack. My dad told me at the time what did it and how he planned to avoid it. When I dad was 63 he had a heart attack, and survived because his partner was on the ball and got him to hospital. So knowing what was on the way gained him five years. So here I am, aged 43. I'm not going to let this happen. Am I? Realistically I might be able to delay it another five years.
The only problem is that the level of activity needed to improve health is actually very high. Walking for an hour or three won't help at all. Riding a bike at 25km/h won't help. Swinging a wiimote definitely won't help.
To improve your health long term you need to get out and exercise hard for at least an hour a day. That means going for a run, or cycling above 30km/h.
Its not really games. Pretty much everything we do for leisure or to save manual effort reduces our life span.
Thanks for the clarification. I still don't know why this person needs solar power.
My daughter is so used to on demand / dvds that she will ask to pause normal cable channels.
The pause function is so prevalent now that it seems to be finding its way into children's games. Sometimes when I watch my six year old son playing with other children one participant will say "Pause" and everybody stops the game.
I put up with TV ad breaks for years until a couple of years ago they started superimposing ads for their crap upcoming programs on top of the actual program.
After that I wouldn't trust a TV network with my time and mindshare.
30 years from now, people will think how stupid it was that you had to wait for your favorite TV show to come on at a specific time, rather than watching it whenever you wanted.
Also very strange, people considered it normal for their show to be interrupted periodically by attempts to sell you crap.
It funny. We got our first TV in the early 1970s. Within a week of watching it my dad had improvised a remote control to mute the ads. I think we started the decline of TV advertising revenue but standard wireless remote controls certainly played their part.
On a sort of related note, I'm confused as to why TVs haven't completely merged with computer monitors. They're similar enough now that they should be one and the same - they do pretty much the same thing - that's for sure.
The TV use case is sitting down with the family to watch a much loved DVD (my wife wants to sit at the kitchen table and play tetris on her laptop while browsing for cheap flights to malaysia).
/. or reading a PDF ebook in bed anyway.
The computer use case is when my wife watches chinese language movies in bed and wants me to watch with her but the colors look funny at a wide angle and I have to lean over which kills my back. And I am more likely to be on
Remember that new type of film we were all going to put in our cameras? It had digital data on it for some reason. I think it was called APS or something. It didn't kill film. CCDs and flash RAM killed film.
And yeah TV is toast. Nice bit of bandwidth you have there...
I often connect my eeepc to my LCD TV. But the PC is so cheap there is no reason why it can't be part of the TV.
A bigger impact is the people (like me and my friends) that don't buy or consume any TV at all, and hasn't for years.
Its hard to analyse because we are all changing, getting older and losing our spare time. TV may well be undergoing a race to the bottom as their best customers go to other media, they lose advertisers, pay less for content and lose more customers.
Some of it (kids TV) seems exactly the same now, but my son gets that on youtube as well. The repetition may be getting to us. Most of the content is rehashed year after year. Maybe TV has been done.
Applications like facebook may be the bridge between easy to use TV and hard to use online video.
My wife wanted a TV antenna point in the bedroom. Once she found youtube she stopped asking.
Back when I was very young some people I knew had a TV room (a home theatre, how about that!). The TV room had specials rules about not talking and keeping the lights out. With a laptop you can watch your stuff in the bathroom or the garage.