BlackBerry Predicted a Century Ago By Nikola Tesla 253
andylim writes "According to the Telegraph, the BlackBerry was first predicted more than a century ago, by Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineer. Seth Porges, Popular Mechanics' current technology editor, disclosed Tesla's prediction at a presentation, titled '108 Years of Futurism,' to industry figures recently in New York. Recombu.com has published the original Popular Mechanics article in which Tesla predicts a mobile phone revolution."
Yet another example of why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tesla was a freakin genius.
Our entire modern world wouldnt exist without him. And he never got any credit while he was alive.
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed [wikipedia.org]. Basically if it runs on electricity, Tesla has a hand in it.
Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yet another example of why... (Score:5, Funny)
Just follow these simple commands:
Thou shalt not presente your body as a path for ye electrone to reach ground, lest ye be smitten down.
Thou shall only manipulate HV circuits with one hand, keeping the other behind your back, lest thou presenteth a path for ye electrone through thine hearte and be smitten down.
Thou shalt not touch a big-arsed capacitor without discharching it before, lest ye be smitten down.
Thou shall always remember that woode is only an isolator below a certain voltage, lest it presenteth a path for the electrone and filleth yer room with holy flame and smoke.
Thou shall always use a decent head-sink for yer MOSFETs, lest ye olde magick smoke escapeth.
Keep that in mind and rise from the lowly status of novice!
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And
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Edison was one of the great inventors of all time. Not the greatest. Not the most prolific either. But nobody I know would argue against him having a place in the top 20 inventors of all time.
Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
That stuff is either genius or failed experiments. How would you know the difference?
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
So he was wrong about how long it would take, and he threw out at least one other idea in that article that we haven't seen happen, and have no evidence can happen.
I like Tesla as much as anyone else, but I'm not sure how to call this one. Fuzzy, at best. I think Orwell had it closer.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Informative)
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
Tesla was, for the greater part of his life, badly hampered by a severe lack of money to carry out his more expansive projects. Some of this was due to his overgenerous nature, as when he gave up entirely the royalties Westinghouse owed him on the power-generation devices Tesla had designed, some was due to his lifelong habit of chasing ideas off in odd directions without consideration for their economic utility, and some was due to his inability to obtain funding from others -- Westinghouse, for example, refused to fund Tesla's development of a broadcast-power system after Tesla admitted that there would be no way to determine how much power any given end-user consumed, so there would be no way to bill them for it.
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I'm also severely limited by lack of money in my attempt to create a cold-fusion machine which uses kittens as a fuel source. If every slashdot user sends me $500, I'm sure I'll have it worked out in no time!
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Not only did J.P. Morgan suppress Tesla's most revolutionary work (by halting the flow of money)...
That's like saying the lead investor suppressed Pets.com by halting the flow of money to it.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Informative)
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He predicted a small communication device that could communicate in voice via transmissions that allowed you to talk to other people thousands of miles away and would also interface with normal phone lines. At least that is what I got out of the article.
Sounds a lot like a cell phone to me, then again it also sounds a lot like HAM radio.
In his head what he was predicting probably in no way shape or form come close to what we think he was predicting.
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sounds like a car phone to me, those pre-cell phones that had a limited number of channels covering a whole city.
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If Tesla had been a science fiction writer (similar to, say,
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:4, Funny)
"The device that Tesla predicted would look completely different from a technical standpoint than the devices we have today."
Really?
Tesla mentioned one device being the size of a watch that you wore on your wrist to communicate with people all over the world.
I HAVE ONE, it's called the M810 Tri-band wrist phone.
Do you even pay attention to the things we have today or do you just sit in the cave, on the computer?
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Any persons predictions will come to fruition if given enough time.
I predict the world will end in a fiery death. And I am right, simply wait around a few billion years to witness the sun eating our planet.
Predictions of flying cars will come to life the second that they can perfect the auto flying system. Because everyones worse nightmare is the current crop of idiots on our highways, piloting a "flying car" in 3 dimensions.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:5, Informative)
But he did. Telsa was the inventor of the AND logic gate. [tfcbooks.com] When computers started to catch on and research was done and people went to patent their inventions, some of them found out that Telsa already had the patents some more than 50 years earlier because he was already developing the same techniques while trying to control devices wirelessly. So, he did do that, it just wasn't mentioned in the article probably because it wasn't seen as important at the time and because it was quite simply beyond everybody else.
When Tesla developed weapons for the military and displayed them at a World's Fair, he demonstrated remote controlled submarines and torpedoes and tried to explain how both the submarines and torpedoes could be controlled and guided wirelessly by operators far away. In a time where a simply wireless system that allowed ships to talk to each other reliably, submarines, or torpedoes would have been a major military breakthrough, the army and navy just couldn't even comprehend what he was talking about let alone figure out how to use remote drones effectivly.
Re:Count the misses, not just the hits. (Score:4, Insightful)
It would not be utterly misguided to view the history of electrical engineering in the last 100 years as the attempt to document and render reproducible that which Tesla intuitively grasped and understood.
I didn't bother mentioning to the man that if it wasn't for that raving lunatic who had contributed nothing that he would a) be working in a room powered by candlelight or b) that we would have DC power generators on every city block providing electricity .....At the rate we are going we will still need another 100 years to catch up to where Tesla was 100 years ago....He managed to pull these things off *without* a body of knowledge composed by millions of people working together, around the world, for the last 100 years-without modern theories, without modern equipment, without decent funding, etc.
And our geniuses of today nitpick and dismiss what Tesla did, because we are oh so much smarter nowadays, give me a friggin break...
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Satphones are not huge. An Iridium is the size of a cordless handset at home, without the handset's base station.
And they're getting smaller every single year.
And GPS is *NOT* receive only. How the hell is it supposed to sync with multiple satellites if it can't send a signal out for triangulation?
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Tesla: Nostradamus for geeks.
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Secretary? Typewriter? I have an army of monks with the finest parchment & goose feathers money can buy.
Re:Loser (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Loser (Score:4, Informative)
This would be the same Edison that resisted our modern electrical transmission standard tooth and nail until he finally hijacked it from Tesla.
That's all fine and good (Score:2)
But could he predict people associating "Blackberry" with "Phone that has a qwerty keyboard", the same way people associate "iPod" with "any MP3 player"?
Surely you understand the difference (Score:2)
Blackberry is one word, whereas SMS is three, and therefor far more complex and difficult to use.
For example 'i just got a message on my blacberry ' vs 'i just received a short message service message'. You see just how complex it is?
Clearly RIM were the ones who opened up mobile messaging to the world and deserve full credit.
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Uhm, what?!? SMS had already been in popular use in Europe for years when the BlackBerry came. Or do you mean reading/sending email on the phone? Then say so.
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Most normal people simply say, "just a sec, I got a message on my phone."
What wierdos call it a blackberry? is it the same ones that say, "I dont know, let me check my IPHONE. SEE IPHONE! LOOKIE!!!!! I'm trendy..... stop mocking me...."
disclaimer: I have an iphone. I like it because it's the best tool for a business person at the moment.
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Most normal people simply say, "just a sec, I got a message on my phone." What wierdos call it a blackberry?
The same weirdos who ask for a Kleenex instead of a facial tissue? Or who ask "Would you like a coke?" when they're asking if you'd like a carbonated beverage? Or who ask for an Aspirin instead of a tablet of acetylsalicylic acid?
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Kay proposed his Dynabook in 1972... but before that Gene Roddenberry and company proposed the PADD in Star Trek circa 1966. The iPad looks (and sounds) a lot more like PADD than the Dynabook.
Hey, credit where credit is due!
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Tesla was talking about the Nokia N900, but the submitter never heard about that one.
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:5, Funny)
Just wait until you read his letter on why the iPad sucks.
Nokia V apple (Score:4, Interesting)
SO does this invalidate the claims in Nokia V. Apple lawsuit. If wireless connectiviry was anticipated in 1909, are practical methods for carrying that out truly surprising 100 years later?
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that's the funny thing. Blackberry is a late comer "mee too" copycat.
Motorola had the first QWERTY data phone.. the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.
Nokia was next with their Mobira Senator.
Then IBM had the personal communicator.
I had the first real smartphone the QCP6035 from kyerocera. It predated the first blackberry by 2 years.
Blackberry did not invent anything. They simply copied others ideas and patented them as their own.
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it makes a change from people round here talking about "Iphone-like device" to refer to "phone", and I'm surprised for once that the media have chosen Blackberry rather than Apple yet again.
Really though, looking at the article:
such a hand-held device would be simple to use and that, one day, everyone in the world would communicate to friends using it
There's nothing here that even implies a QWERTY keyboard, or even being so-called "smart" (which is ill-defined anyway, and simply means the high end at any given time). This description refers to mobile phones in general (whether it's communicating by speech, text, or Internet - almost all phones do all these things).
If anyone one company deserves the mention, it should be Nokia, who've shipped billions of these "hand-held devices" and have 40+% of the market. Other companies worthy of mention would be LG, Samsung, Motorola - in fact, RIM and Apple come rather low on the list.
(And I have to say, is predicting a device really that special? Communication devices already existed, and this just said, one day they'll be smaller and mobile. I'm going to predict that in the future we'll have faster computers, and they'll be smaller too.)
Re:That's all fine and good (Score:4, Insightful)
You're forgetting that he said it in a day and age where most people simply didn't have a telephone line at all, and if they did have one, they usually had a party line that they shared with their neighbours. Not only did he predict that communications devices would be smaller and mobile, he also said that everybody would have one, and that they'd be networked globally. That's a fairly big leap, and while you can argue in hindsight that the writing was on the wall, it's akin to predicting netbooks in 1943.
And there's a few things that Tesla got wrong in his prediction... he said that it would be possible and easy for a single tower to control millions of devices from thousands of miles away. In reality there's millions of cell towers in the world, and each may have a few thousand phones on it at a maximum. There's a few orders of magnitude difference there.
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But cell towers are a terrible way to design a system. Sure, they are the best method we have for overcoming signal quality and bandwidth requirements now, but a central station like Tesla envisions would be much better.
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Actually, he's kind of right. A single tower could control millions of some sort of devices from thousands of miles away, he perhaps just didn't consider signal quality and bandwidth requirements.
More likely, as with his work for Westinghouse, he didn't consider the control aspects of his ideas. It may well be possible to carry radio-style waves over the ocean, but you'd have to tromp all over the FCC regs, etc, to pull it off.
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And there's a few things that Tesla got wrong in his prediction... he said that it would be possible and easy for a single tower to control millions of devices from thousands of miles away. In reality there's millions of cell towers in the world, and each may have a few thousand phones on it at a maximum. There's a few orders of magnitude difference there.
Can you really say he got it wrong though? Also note that he was talking about devices "no bigger than a wristwatch". My Palm Pre is significantly larger than a wristwatch, as are ALL mobile phones, smart or otherwise.
Perhaps it is more correct to say that his vision hasn't been fully fulfilled yet, but that we are, for the first time, able to fully comprehend what he was talking about.
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Free advertising going too far (Score:4, Insightful)
So the guy predicted text messaging. Impressive. But why does everything have to be a product placement nowadays?
This case is especially stupid, since what really enables worldwide access to messaging are $20 phones.
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what really enables worldwide access to messaging are $20 phones.
And a messaging plan of how much per month?
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Mine is £free per month (or $free per month, if you only work in dollars). I don't get X free messages/minutes per month, but given the length of time that credit lasts then why get a contract? Computers do all I need, or I'm already at home with my family. Communication in those situations is already catered for.
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given the length of time that credit lasts then why get a contract?
When I bought my handset, the pay-as-you-go carriers didn't have smartphones, and U.S. residents can't buy a CDMA handset and plan separately because U.S. CDMA carriers don't use removable CSIM cards.
Computers do all I need
With exorbitant tethering charges.
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Tethering charge explained (Score:2)
What's a tethering charge, and how is it different from any other data transfer?
In mobile phone service plans offered to residents of the United States, a tethering charge is a surcharge for the privilege to use a handset associated with a plan as a modem for an external device, as opposed to using the handset as a terminal in itself. The rationale is that an external device with a 1680x1050 pixel display will be used to initiate the transfer of a larger quantity of data than a smartphone with a 320x480 pixel display.
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SMS is free...
Only if you have the unlimited plan. Otherwise, after you run out of the number of texts specified in your plan, the carrier charges the end user 0.20 USD to send each message and 0.20 USD to receive each message.
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Only if you have the unlimited plan. Otherwise, after you run out of the number of texts specified in your plan, the carrier charges the end user 0.20 USD to send each message and 0.20 USD to receive each message.
I have a Tracfone, it only costs me $.03 per test message. Also, don't forget this: http://www.ehow.com/how_4448927_send-email-cell-phone.html [ehow.com]. My wife & I use this trick fairly often to make it even more affordable.
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Even if you don't have an unlimited plan, receiving is free. Reading the message will cost you. Until you do, you merely get to see who it was from.
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In the US, SMS/messaging has always been an extra luxury charge. On most contracts, it's cheaper to just call (given that the daytime voice minutes are already paid for, and nighttime and weekend voice minutes are free. But SMS messages cost upwards (!) of 5cents each for send or receive, and an extra $10 per month for unlimited (which is separate from a "real" data plan (!!)).
All this for 160 char messages that have just about negligible impact on the phone network and are easily delayed if there is netw
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Though to be fair, if SMS /was/ really free, we would have developed some kind of really really slow HTTP-over-SMS gateway by now to get free news and traffic updates for free over the network to avoid paying for the WAP plan :-P
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I actually did try using data over SMS. Yes, it's horribly slow. It's *perfect* for sending status updates from things like automatic remote machinery, and passing commands back.
These days, unlimited data solves a lot of those problems...
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Videoconferencing was predicted way back in 1869 by cartoonist George du Maurier. [neverpedia.com]
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So the guy predicted text messaging. Impressive.
Western Union launched its transcontinental telegraph service in 1861. Keyboard entry and alphanumeric printing for the telegraph appears along about 1902. Frederick G. Creed [wikipedia.org]
The only missing piece of the puzzles are direct telephone-like dialing and affordable "Telex" machines for home and office use.
Blackberry? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Anyway; product placement aside, it really isn't that surprising he predicted wireless communication. I mean, look at his areas of scientific interest and research.
What I'm still waiting for is generation of energy from thin air, preferably cheaply available to anyone.
Re:Blackberry? (Score:4, Funny)
You mean the windmill, invented by Heron of Alexandria in approx 50AD?
Not Surprised (Score:5, Funny)
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That whole article was such bunk. Especially that last line? Darth_Brooks needs to take ten steps back away from desk befo%^$#^%$#^% NO CARRIER
Blackberry Advert (Score:4, Insightful)
Tom
Re:Blackberry Advert (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hmm... Well spotted
Tom...
Re:Blackberry Advert (Score:5, Informative)
TECHNICALLY, a satphone only transmits up to the closest satellite. Single sideband (PSK31 if you want data) on the HF bands can transmit all over the world.
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*shrugs* it is possible for a normal cellular phone to transmit data world-wide. In 1998 I had an Ericcson PCS phone that was able to send and receive e-mail, which could go world wide by that point. The problem was that I could only do it in an area where I had cellular reception, and the cell tower was what relayed the message through the wire/fibre network world-wide.
So yeah, in a *literal* sense, only a sat phone can actually transmit world-wide, though even that's going through a sattelite or three as
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Funny, I heard that one differently. (Score:5, Insightful)
Way back in the day when I was in high school I heard Tesla predicted the Internet, using exactly that quote. There's no arguing that Tesla did a lot of amazing things but he's no technological Nostradamus, no matter how much people try to shoehorn him into the role.
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Well, considering the fact that when you read Popular Science articles from that era and that claim things like "in the future no-one will drink water unless it has been infused with the life-giving properties of radium", it's still a pretty good prediction, even if it is fairly general.
Jules Verne? (Score:2)
And so forth. As I recall, Verne also prediction global electronic communications in another novel...
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Jules Verne read the equivalent of /. back in the day. Almost everything he "predicted" in his books was in theory at that time.
Not that that is a bad thing.
Please stop the needless sensationalism (Score:3, Interesting)
Tesla anticipating the advent of portable communication devices does not in any way equate to him having predicted the BlackBerry.
I've found that I'm making small scornful noises increasingly often while reading Slashdot and BetaNews headlines. I have yet to determine the threshold at which I will cease reading technology news altogether, but I feel it is rapidly approaching. I don't want to stop, so please, please, for the love of Christ please stop posting this frothy nonsense.
Sadly he was preoccupied with ... (Score:3, Informative)
At the turn of the century, Marconi, Tesla and Jagdish Chandra Bose demonstrated wirelessly turning on a switch over a distance. Marconi could never get the resonance circuit working right (what he called coherer). Got the idea from Bose in a conference, (or stole Bose's notebook depending on where you hear it from). Bose was an idealist and never thought of commericializing his inventions, and was stuck in Calcutta, India anyway. Marconi went into wireless signal propagation and Tesla went into wireless power transmission.
Despite his visionary predictions about wireless communications, Tesla's dream of wireless transmission of power has not yet been realized.
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If it is possible to beam power, we should be able to lift cell phone repeaters using balloons and power the transponders using a beamed from earth. Or launch solar power stations in low earth orbit and get the power to the ground via microwave power. We still can't do it.
No even if his investors had continued to fund him, he would not
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He may have been preoccupied with wireless power transmission, but he was funded for wireless data transmission. After Marconi transmitted across the atlantic, his funding dried up before he could achieve either to an appreciable degree.
Prior Art! (Score:5, Funny)
It appears that Tesla thought of everything. So let's just toss out all those silly mobile patents and let the real innovation -- and competition -- begin.
What did he have to say about audio and video encoding?
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What did he have to say about audio and video encoding?
Yeah, he pretty much said to use Ogg formats. Further, to quote: "Verily, Real Audio is gash."
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Tesla in 1909? Try Francis Bacon in 1623 (Score:5, Interesting)
From Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" of 1623:
We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines.
We find also diverse means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light, originally from diverse bodies.We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where were present all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies.
We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
Re:Tesla in 1909? Try Francis Bacon in 1623 (Score:4, Funny)
Tesla didn't predict this at all (Score:4, Informative)
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Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't Sat Phones exactly this? Also Walkie Talkies meet much of what he was talking about. Additionally, he predicted the transmission of pictures, music, speeches, etc. wirelessly from a central station. Isn't this what Television and Radio does, and don't we have wrist watch TVs and radios? Radio (AM) can reach the entire world with the proper frequency and proper weather conditions. While he may not have directly predicted the cell phone, and certainly didn't predict t
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He thought that you could easily transmit stuff directly to other devices even if they are hundreds of miles away and even if there are millions of them being used at the same time. This isn't true [..]
Actually, it is very true. There are ways to have several radio-devices communicating to each other directly using various multiplexing methods such as time division, frequency or just have packets collide and then detect the collision, like in Ethernet. And yes, the devices can and often are, hundreds of miles apart.
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Do you not even feel ashamed for the amount of straw-man fallacies you use in there?
As I did already said somewhere up there: /. story, is a mobile phone. QED.
He specifically talks about handheld devices “not bigger than a [wrist]watch” (last paragraph of the first column), used for communication. Which is exactly what mobile phones are. The BlackBerry that was stated in the title of the
Everything else in your comment is a made-up hallucination of your mind and fallacy over fallacy, too many to
Tesla would've invented it too... (Score:2)
Tesla would've invented it too, had he not been disrupted by ladies' emotions (and underwear) [harkavagrant.com]. It's just as well though, somebody would have just stolen it anyway. [harkavagrant.com]
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The Tractor (Score:2)
Nope.
It was - people who were famous for being famous..?
No it wasn't that.
Dang! It was microwave food. MMM!
Hedamannnn!
Freedom of Information request (Score:2)
IMHO we should all be pushing for a FOI request for all of Tesla's papers that were taken from his hotel room after he died. I'll bet the coolest stuff is kept secret.
Classic bias error (Score:3, Informative)
He did some amazing stuff, and figures out AC. No real argument there.
But he also predicted a ton of stuff, was a little mad, and everyone ignores the crap that didn't seem to pan out.
At this point he is becoming Nostradamus of technology.
Did some really advance stuff, but people only talks about his wild ass guess that may or may not have claimed with the person reading them says that claim.
Stupid Humans (Score:3, Insightful)