Inventors // Current TV

Nikola Tesla Died This Day in 1943

Audio, video of Tesla's funeral. Also obituaries and links. He was an amazing... more

DrDissent
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2 months ago
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Now Corporations & Congress ATTACK Inventor's Rights !!!

Just when you think there's nothing left for Congress & Corporations to steal, Here They Come Again, In For The Kill ! As usual, after Republicans reject the Senate's proposal for patent reform; ( which has served and facilitated the greatest industrial expansion in history and on earth ), the Senate says: "o.k., tell us what you want for Big Corporate and we'll give it to them. Don't worry about the public, they don't understand the issue anyway. They won't be looking. Just make sure you pay me on the way out."

"The Senate will take up the House's version of a bipartisan patent reform bill immediately after its summer recess".

"The bill has drawn opposition from small inventors, and some provisions are controversial, such as one that would make it easier to challenge business method patents. But the legislation has wide-ranging support from industry, both parties, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the White House."

When industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Republicans are sponsoring, championing, and promoting an issue, can there be any doubt that they're about to steal someone's lunch money? After this farcical debt crisis / ceiling debacle, can we really be surprised that the President and Congress are supporting it too? There must be a lot of blood money floating in the waters. What this proposed bill does is to help Big Corporate steal from independent inventors and innovators with impunity. Since it is individuals which create most innovations and new products, this will ultimately stifle job creation instead of growing it. Patent experts have objected and protested what they see as stifling technology development, decreasing job growth, suppressing economic recovery, and saddling us with a international "handicap" which we previously did not have. If our patent system helped grow us into the most powerful nation on the earth, how can it be so bad; except to would be robber barons. It behooves all who is interested in stopping Big Corporate's DEATH MARCH on the PEOPLE of the United States to read the numerous articles linked on Mr. Laudner's page:

"There are many things wrong with our patent system, and many ways in which it might be improved, but this bill does not materially improve it, and would make it much harder for start-ups to obtain and enforce patents. Unlike the Senate bill passed in March, the bill passed by the House (HR1249) in June does not fix the problem of the patent offices's fees being diverted to help cover our federal deficit. The change to First-to-file would be a benefit to those who would like to steal others ideas, and consequently will force entrepreneurs in the USA to have to follow the same advice that exists in Europe: file for your patents BEFORE talking with investors, potential customers or even potential co-founders. This will stifle the open innovation model that has flourished in America. Other changes will make it easier to accidentally lose the ability to obtain a patent (e.g. if you offer your invention for sale or publicly use it), will more easily enable an infringer to defend themselves by showing such actions prior to the plaintiff's application, and will enable infringers to postpone the issuance of other's patents by filing expensive post-grant review procedures...which can also cost a company more than they can afford. The proponents have sold this bill based on superficial talking points that sound plausible, but are deceptions. Every well-known US inventor opposes this, as does Judge Paul Michel, the US's #1 patent judge who resigned early from his lifetime appointment in order to speak out against this."

http://www.lauderpartners.com/PatentReform/Just when you think there's nothing left for Congress & Corporations to... more

COMMONSENSEFORCOMMONGOOD_COM
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6 months ago
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How long before this guy dissapears? New Engine!

The Wave Disk Generator uses 60 percent of its fuel for propulsion; standard car... more

GoodGodGuy
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8 months ago
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1 comment

Leonardo Da Vinci Art

singhbharti
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12 months ago
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2 comments

Happy 154th birthday, Nikola Tesla!

Happy birthday, you death-ray-inventing, no-sex-having, alternate-current-pioneering,... more

pjacobs51
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1 year ago
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7 comments

Game Over for Trivial Pursuit Inventor, Dead at 59

Board game lovers, knowledge seekers and pub quiz enthusiasts mourned the death of... more

cclark_productions
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1 year ago
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Amazing map of things invented in London

Just yards from Current's London office, television transmission was first... more

richjm
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1 year ago
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1 comment

Man builds first flying hovercraft at home

If you don’t know who Rudy Heeman is, then let me introduce to you the man who... more

fashionista83
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1 year ago
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Sir Clive Sinclair: Down but never out, the eternal optimist

He wanted to be a latter-day Henry Ford. Instead, Sir Clive saw his fortune disappear... more

ironicbliss
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2 years ago
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When Man & Machine Merge

Technological visionary Ray Kurzweil discusses the future of humanity and its place in a world of super-intelligent machines and super-human intelligence.

...Over the past four decades, Ray Kurzweil has established himself as one of the world's most prolific and influential inventors. His specialty is pattern recognition — teaching machines to classify data and learn. He created the first program to enable computers to read text — the basis of modern scanning — as well as the first program to translate text into speech. Stevie Wonder, a close friend of Kurzweil, calls the inventor's print-to-speech technology a "breakthrough that changed my life." In 1983, with Wonder as an adviser, Kurzweil built the Kurzweil 250 — a synthesizer that revolutionized the music world with its uncannily realistic re-creations of acoustic orchestral instruments.
For his contributions to artificial intelligence, Kurzweil has been enshrined in the Inventors Hall of Fame and has received White House honors from three presidents — including the highest prize in his field, the National Medal of Technology. But nothing he has done in the past has shaken the scientific community as profoundly as his latest prediction. In our lifetime, Kurzweil believes, machines will not only surpass humans in intelligence — they will irrevocably alter what it means to be human. Cell-size robots will zap disease from our bloodstream. Superintelligent nanotechnology, operating on a molecular scale, will scrub pollution from our atmosphere. Our minds, our skills, our memories, our very consciousness will be backed up on computers — allowing us, in essence, to live forever, all our data saved by super-smart machines.
"Right now, people think it's irresponsible not to back up our PCs," Kurzweil says. "But increasingly, we'll be backing up the information in our brains. People will think it was remarkable that we couldn't back up our brains in 2010."
Kurzweil is very specific about when this epic shift will take place. By 2045, he predicts, machines and humans will merge, redefining life as we know it. The moment is known as the Singularity, referring to the term used in astrophysics to describe the point inside a black hole where the ordinary laws of physics cease to apply. To prepare himself and the rest of the world for the era of conscious machines, Kurzweil has turned himself into the chief prophet of the coming Techno Rapture. He crisscrosses the globe to rally top scientists, hosts an annual Singularity Summit that draws leaders from places like Google and MIT, and has even developed his own line of nutritional supplements to extend people's lives until the day when their existence can be endlessly preserved by technology. At 61, Kurzweil pops 150 of his own pills every day, determined to live long enough to see the day when, thanks to machines, he will never age.

To say that Kurzweil's prediction is controversial is to understate the scientific firestorm it has generated. No less a pragmatist than Bill Gates has hailed Kurzweil's vision, calling him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." But to other leading thinkers, Kurzweil has gone off the deep end, venturing into an almost messianic fervor with his promises of life everlasting. "The Singularity is a new religion — and a particularly kooky one at that," says Jaron Lanier, a top computer scientist who pioneered the realm of virtual reality. "The Singularity is the coming of the Messiah, heaven on Earth, the Armageddon, the end of times. And fanatics always think that the end of time comes in their own lifetime."

Kurzweil shrugs off such criticism: He has the self-confidence of a man who is used to being so far ahead of the curve that others can't see where he's headed. The only time he falters is when he's asked if he could be wrong about the Singularity. For a moment he stares blankly into space, as if receiving an otherworldly transmission.

More...Technological visionary Ray Kurzweil discusses the future of humanity and its place in... more