Re: filmscanners: Nikon 8000 ED or Polaroid Sprintscan 120 ??

[Arthur Entlich <artistic@ampsc.com>]

> Mr Wilkinson PLEASE!
> Everyone likes to talk futures, it's fun and what's more it costs nothing,
> and what's even more, anyone can do it.
> 
> Soothsaying has been with us always and always will be with us.
> Just remember...soothsayers never make money because they never guess right
> often enough, but they do spend an inordinate amount of time on the lecture
> circuit - in other words they become famous for saying a lot and producing
> very little if anything at all.

Mr. Corbett,

Thank you for diminishing my prior statements to so much hot air and 
useless commentary.  How very "british" of you.  (See how easy it is to 
summate a person with one simple comment?)

What some people refer to as "soothsayers" others call visionaries. A 
good example of such a person is Arthur C. Clarke, (who perhaps escaped 
to Sri Lanka to avoid just such ridicule??)  Besides being a genius, and 
"soothsayer" (futurist), he also holds patents to some very valuable 
property, some of which have made space flight possible.  Apparently, he 
lives quite comfortably on the revenues and royalties off these and his 
books.  Most of his patents, by the way were based upon ideas for 
processes or products that did not exist (other than in his mind) at the 
time he conceived of them.  In fact, apparently, he hold patents on a 
number of things that still haven't been made.


> Anyone know of a digital magic wand being developed anywhere (:-)

Exactly. People stuck firmly in the "reality" of the time never know 
what a magic wand looks like, and likely would step right over it, until 
someone less "grounded" picks it up and calls it something you can 
pronounce.  As someone whom I can't recall by name once said, "To know 
the limits of what is possible, you must first try to do what is 
currently impossible."

One thing I will agree with, when it comes to predicting anything much 
beyond the immediate future, we are much more often wrong than right. 
All that proves to me is that the logical chain of events is rarely 
followed linearly, and that is usually due to break-throughs rarely 
considered or conceived of at the time predictions are made.

Quite honestly, whether Apple systems or PCs became the standard in 
industry doesn't change the fact that the whole desktop computer 
development came from the ideas and concepts that Jobs and Wazniak put 
together in that basement.  Historically, rarely is the one who 
conceptualizes an idea the one who is remembered for it, nor the one who 
greatly profits from it. Free thinkers often make terrible (or aren't 
interested in being) business men (and for good reason).

I'm sure you've heard that British Telecom has been attempting to sue 
all the major internet providers because they claim to own patents on 
the "idea" of the wwweb.  It would seem the bigwigs there couldn't quite 
figure out what to do with the patent which most assuredly one of their 
employees came up with which, was described "a method a piece of 
computer software mitigates navigation by a user through pages of data" 
(US Patent #4873662) which they ended up doing nothing with. Thankfully, 
Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreeson and others "discovered" this idea some 
years later and developed what we now call the wwweb (I might add they 
apparently didn't make any money on it because they never patented any 
of it).  BT, however is still trying to claim ownership and has demanded 
licensing fees from major ISPs.

Anyway, I've gone a long way from Kansas here.  All I'm saying is that 
anyone who doesn't believe in magic wands will sooner or later be made a 
fool of.

Art

> 
> Richard Corbett - and this is the completion of my contribution on this
> topic within this thread so over and out.