Jinn of Quality and Risk

In the summer of 1921, at the age of 14, while plowing a field near Rigby Idaho, 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth was struck with an inspiration [...] As a young boy growing up on the frontier, Farnsworth marveled at the inventions of Edison and Bell. At the age of 6, he confided in his father his heart's desire, that he had been "born an inventor." By 12 he was was demonstrating a natural affinity for all things electrical. Late one night, hidden away in his attic loft with a stack of old electrical magazines the aspiring inventor encountered the fanciful notion of "pictures that could fly through the air" by radio waves — and imagine that he had stumbled upon a problem that he might be uniquelly suited to solving. [via /.]

Also of interest: John Logie Baird is remembered as the inventor of mechanical television, radar and fiber optics. Successfully tested in a laboratory in late 1925 and unveiled with much fanfare in London in early 1926, mechanical television technology was quickly usurped [sic] by electronic television, the basis of modern video technology. Nonetheless, Baird's achievements, including making the first trans-Atlantic television transmission, were singular and critical scientific accomplishments. Lonely, driven, tireless and often poor, the native Scot defined the pioneering spirit of scientific inquiry. 

We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren't engineered for security. — Microsoft executive Brian Valentine, on the painful realization that a $100 million, two-month-long codeathon still hasn't fixed the glaring holes in its software, InfoWorld, 2002-Sep-05 [Ditherati via /.] 

I am perfectly happy for Perl to continue parsing logfiles. Perl has always been, and always will be (I hope), a humble language. When I am 80 years old, even if everyone in the whole world puts me on a pedestal and thinks I'm the renaissanciest man that ever lived, I still intend to take out the trash when my wife asks me to. ... But just as people grow (and are stretched), Perl continues to grow (and be stretched).