Whither America's Technological Edge?

baldass_newbie asks: "Ben Stein wrote an editorial titled, 'How to Ruin American Enterprise'. To me, technological innovation is a big outward sign of a successful economy. Sometimes it appears like the U.S. is losing its edge in technology. Well, I was wondering what the Slashdot community at large thinks is wrong (or right) with the U.S. and technological innovation?" The article deals less with technology and more with the society on which said innovation is based, and the problems that may bring it down around our collective ears. Give the article a read, and share your thoughts on whether or not you think it's an accurate assessment on the current and future situation of America's technological advantage.

Comments

Since When Did America Have a Tech Edge?

[ras_b]

Every time some new, cool tech gadget comes out here, i talk to my friend from Tokyo and he tells me he had it a year ago.

Re:Since When Did America Have a Tech Edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having the coolest gadgets first means nothing in terms of technological prowess.

- Who invented the transistor?
- Who started the computer industry?
- Who invented nuclear power?
- Who put human beings on the moon and then brought them back safely 6 times

THAT is what is missing. Not the latest tiny-ass minidisc player.

Re:Since When Did America Have a Tech Edge?

[squiggleslash]

With respect, this is precisely the USA's problem: It's resting on laurels with a sense of misplaced smug technical superiority that'll get the better of it.

If you don't buck up, you'll end up like Britain, spending 50 years celebrating inventing half a dozen invention innovations from steam power through (via an immigrant Italian) radio, to the (mechanical) TV, before realising that Britain isn't really ahead of the rest of the world any more. There was a moment during the 80's that it became obvious, just as we were celebrating our home grown personal computer revolution, thanks to Sinclair and Acorn, and we suddenly realised nobody was taking any notice of the stuff we were putting out, because the rest of the world had raced ahead of us. Sir Clive Sinclair made some comment once that he'd invented the pocket calculator, but the Japanese had made it successful.

There are innovations going on in the US, but there's also an over heavy emphasis on ignoring technologies built outside. That attitude is guaranteed to get the better of the USA, especially if America's dominance as a world power is diminished, as the rise of a united Europe, a restructed former-Soviet Union, and a blue-in-tooth-and-claw Capitalist China, make all too possible.

Excuse me while I whore for Karma

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Well, I was wondering what the Slashdot community at large thinks is wrong (or right) with the U.S. and technological innovation?"

Well, that's easy. Big business doesn't like innovation. They like the semblance (sp?) of innovation to encourage you to buy "new" things, but completely and truly new things cost money, take away from the bottom line, and transition periods are where big companies tend to get replaced. Thus, we have to fight for innovative products, no matter how useful they are, and we only get them because some company "goes rogue" - such as portable MP3 players.

The only innovation we get is innovative ways to protect the old guard - like copy protection that arguably erodes consumer rights (I say consumer in the global sense, being a non-USian so I can't really say my rights as a US citizen :).

School

[seanadams.com]

7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school.

This IMHO is the big one. I went to school in England until about age 12, and then came back to a private school in California. Overnight, I went from doing trig, chemistry, latin, greek, french, to gluing fucking popsicle sticks together. I kid you not, our schools are WAY behind the rest of the world.

If you're an American parent, PLEASE either ship your kids over to Europe, or home school them yourself. American society is way too fucked up to allow for anyone to get a decent education. You would not believe the social pressure - I remember it well, and I had to fight it tooth and nail in order to succeed.

Re:School

[IamTheRealMike]

trig, chemistry, latin, greek, french, to gluing fucking popsicle sticks together,

Wow. You must have gone to an old-skool school :) I'm proud to state that the school I went to is in the top 5% of all comprehensives - it's mixed, non selective and state run. We never did latin or greek, that's rather highbrow. We only learnt French because, well, we're right next door to them. Trig at age 12? Man, we didn't do that until we were 15 or 16 (gcses). I dunno how Brit schooling compares to American, but you're experience seems to have been a lot better than normal.

Oh, and for any Yanks wondering - such articles are regularly published in UK media too, and all the parents stress about lack of quality schooling and how India will kick our ass etc. I think it's a western thing, rather than American.

Re:School

[Knara]

When I was having thanksgiving dinner with my extended family, the wife of one of my cousins was complaining about her kid's schooling. In the same breath she complained about how the schooling was inadequate, and how they give the kids too much homework.

How could this be, I wondered. I added that from my experience (and the experience related by my friends who did not go to a private school like I did), kids needed *more* homework, not less.

Her reply? "Just wait until you have kids, and have to spend your time helping them with their homework."

And there, my friends, is why our educational system is in the crapper.

Re:School

[Gropo]

I absolutely concur! I was raised in British and American international schools in Europe until the 4th grade, at which point we moved back to the 'States and I attended Public schools. They began to teach us French in 1st frickin' grade!

I recall my 3rd grade class play was a highly professional production with singing solos etc - I move back to the states and I'm the frickin' '3rd upper Molar on the right side' in some banal play about hygeine.

This country's public school system (shy the new 'charter' system) strikes me as Cro-Magnon survival skills in comparison...

Re:School

[silas_moeckel]

Hrm homework our salvation? Granted I finished my public education in the early 90's but more homework does not seem to be what they need. First off differnt students learn best in differnt ways some may ned the wrote repition that homework provides few should. The problem is the teachers time. Students need one on one time with teachers and good mentors TA's etc. First things first throw out wrote memorization it's trash forget it it dosent work it's msotly there because it's easy for most students and they can get that happy feel good of a good test score. If you can study for a test your not doing anything. My school had end of year surprise testing for some subjects and the reality is if they werent on a curve the vast majority of the students would fail. Now there was a section of us that did well on these and a lot of these students were not A test takers, why I can only guess because we learned it not memorized reguritated and purged the infomation.

Re:School

[Fastball]

I agree up until the sixth grade.

I passionately hate math (ducking flames now). Any time I see an equation with coefficients and variables, I want to puke. I don't care about trains A and B: they'll get there when they get there. I might have understood Calculus better had my teachers spoken Old English instead. But I was and continue to be highly fluent in algebra, because my mother drilled me until I cried buckets.

I learned my multiplication tables in the second grade thanks to my mother's patience with a very loud, uncooperative brat, me. Our class would have a competition where a kid would stand up and go up and down the rows of desks and be challenged by each student. My teacher would hold up a card with a multiplication, e.g. 4x4, and the student who answered correctly first would continue down the row. My mother sat me down the night before and went over every multiplication from zero to twelve until I had it.

I mean burned in folks. The next day when the teacher held up the cards, I didn't see the multiplication, I saw the answer. 4x4 wasn't 4x4. It was 16. I was so quick that next day, I went around the classroom five times before my teacher asked me to sit down and give others a chance. I think he let me go on so long, because he couldn't believe it. I'll never forget that day. It was one of my proudest, most fulfilling days of my life. Mathematics of all things.

I graduated college with a B.A. in English. I write poetry chapbooks. Literature rocks my world. But I'm the guy that always adds up the scorecard correctly, tallies the stats, and runs the numbers for others.

Ironically, I was a terrible reader until the fifth grade. I never could put events in sequence correctly (remember?). But my fifth grade teacher, the best I ever had, never let up on me. He worked me, gave me a ton of things to read until I improved. I love to read so much now, I'm in dire need of bookshelves.

The point is, you have to drill kids when they're young. Parents and teachers alike. IMHO, you have until the sixth grade to educate a kid on the fundamentals: reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, school is a social call. No high schooler cares more about metaphors or differentials than he does about his social standing. To this day, I don't remember what I studied let alone learned in the seventh and eighth grades, because I was too busy considering tits and cars.

We in the U.S. need two basic changes to our education system:

First, drill the absolute shit out of kids from first to sixth grades. Algebra, reading comprehension, and writing composition should be outstanding by the end of the sixth grade. If you think about adulthood, if you can add, subtract, multiply, divide, read, and write well, then you can take care of yourself. It all comes back to these fundamentals.

Second and just as important, completely reform high school and college curriculums to prepare people for jobs. I firmly believe that if you take two eighteen year old men and run one through a college curriculum and start the other in an apprenticeship or company, the kid outside of the college halls is going to be light years ahead of the collegian after his four years are gone. Colleges as institutions are more enterprising then educational, period. College curriculums are the combo value meals of understanding. I knew intimately that I could not hack it as an engineer or scientist due to my lack of interest/understanding of calculus. But I had to waste away for two semesters of calculus regardless. Same story with requirements completely irrelevant to my interests and strengths. Strip away these requirements and structure a series of classes that revolve around my interests and strengths, and I should have departed college no more than two years after starting.

I'll end with this important point. I'm afraid of the American job market and its limitations not on the sheer number of jobs but on what we Americans have to take up to earn a decent living. I am lucky enough to make some money writing in addition to my regular gig as a web programmer, but I would love to make a living in a skilled labor trade. Electrician, carpenter, etc. The way I see things--and my parents steered me this way for better or worse--you're gonna have to be a lawyer, manager, or doctor to get by in the years to come. Maybe I'm wrong. We manufacture almost nothing in the U.S. any more. Look around your apartment or house. MADE IN CHINA.

Our system of education is supposedly geared to turn out knowledgeable workers, but there's only so many of those jobs to go around, right? Not everybody can be a manager. I long for the day when the phrase reads, "The world needs CEOs too."

6a.

[RalphTWaP]

Blockquoth the poster evermore:

6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long-term thinking. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of innovation and everything else.

And now for an addendum

6a. Specifically construct laws so riddled with inaccuracy of purpose, incomprehensibility of intent, impossibility of execution, immorality of effect, and plain lack of common sense, that everyone is criminalized equally, and proven innocent $ub$antially due to their per$onal $olvency. Particularly good results may be achieved if the laws in question are ignored as technicalities by the traditionally moral masses.

inspiration for this post, and the poster believes the original article, was gained largely through understanding the logical basis of the works of Ayn Rand, all credit as it is due

Well, let's see

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Sure, they have Sony, Matsushita, NEC, Toshiba, etc.*

We've got Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.*

I think there's a lot more visible innovation going on in the United States. The average joe doesn't hear about the latest and greatest in commodity hardware, but they see commercials for the iMac or whatever every day.

I think it may just be a matter of preception.

*Obviously not all-inclusive lists, sorry if I left your favorite out.

Re:Well, let's see

[ergo98]

You think the administration and communications costs of running a division in India, for instance, are free? You are absolutely insane. I'm not talking about just the long distance (although that would add up), but the significant time spent on communications, naturally the increased data security costs, and losses due to communication gaps.

Once Indians get too pricey, the multinationals will move their operations and front groups to focus on poorer, more desperate people, all the while proclaiming to be "American" companies.

This is ridiculous. Desperate people who are computer programmers or engineers? That seems a little absurd. India is yielding gold on the fact that they have a first rate educational system and a motivated workforce: More power to them! The idea that this transplants anywhere that there are "Desperate" people is ridiculous.

Already, Russia and China are trying to edge out India in destroying American jobs.

You mean the American jobs making products that are used and consumed around the world? You see the economy as a zero sum game and that's unfortunately how a lot of people see it, and THAT will be the failing of America if it fails to see the potential.

This same sort of "they're stealing all our jobs!" BS comes out everytime that there is a economic slowdown...then there's a boom again and suddenly every employer is offering $100K, despite lots of desperate people in nowhere land.

Re:Well, let's see

[spanky555]

You think the administration and communications costs of running a division in India, for instance, are free?

Nope, YOU said that. I said that smaller companies can utilize front companies, meaning companies already existing and run by Indians, in India. I said larger companies have to incur the costs of moving, which implies a division. No, it's not free, but it's definitely cheaper any way you look at it. And all those nasty pollution and OSHA laws aren't in effect in some of these countries.

You see the economy as a zero sum game...

Well, actually, I don't. I also should have explained that I don't think Indians/Chinese/Russians are "stealing" our jobs, but multinationals utilize their efforts to destroy American jobs - no doubt.

America most definitely does not fail to "see the potential", that is if you are talking about the potential for globalism. Unfortunately, it's this very globalism that is creating so much anti-American sentiment. And yes, destroying American jobs.

As for a first-rate educational system...hmmm. What's India's illiteracy rate? 50, 60 percent? Yeah, top-notch.

That being said, yes, I commend India and the others' efforts at trying to better themselves, especially if they are creating their own competitive companies. But I *don't* see why American companies have to fall all over themselves to move jobs there, if only to boost profit margins for next few quarters or years. What can this mean for long-term innovation?

To think about the economy in only next quarter's earnings is terribly naive, in my opinion, and this obsession was not always the norm. I know it sounds so terribly old-fashioned, but a sense of gratitude to your country and the people who populate it doesn't necessarily preclude a company being profitable and maintaining growth...

The rest of the way there

[st. augustine]

We're well on our way to hell in a handbasket. What would it take to get us the rest of the way there?

1. Blame all problems with the educational system on greedy teachers' unions. Do not provide sufficient funding for building upkeep and course materials, let alone enough to attract a wider range of more highly qualified teachers. Count on philanthropic parents in rich neighborhoods to chip in to keep their kids' schools going, and let schools in poor neighborhoods go to hell.
2. Allow large corporations to buy unlimited influence in government. Have any legislation that affects a particular industry be written by the lobbyists for that industry's entrenched players. Assume that anyone currently making a profit has a God-given right to their business model, and structure the intellectual property laws appropriately. Claim marketing expenses as R&D.
3. Support a company's right to falsify evidence in favor of their products and suppress evidence against them. If the evidence that a company's products or processes do more harm than good has finally become too overwhelming for them to cover up, shoehorn loopholes into unrelated laws to protect them.
4. Treat CEOs as celebrities, even when all they've done is preside over tanking companies and collect golden parachutes. Confuse blind luck with well-deserved rewards and ruthlessness with business sense. Pretend that we live in a society with equal opportunity, and salute those whose successes have been handed to them on a silver platter as though they'd earned them.
5. Encourage companies to avoid taxes by creating shell offices in Bahamanian PO boxes. Reward them with open-ended government contracts with no cost auditing.
6. Do your best to keep 50% of your productive population out of the workplace. Continue to pretend that a single-income family is viable in today's economy. Provide no support for working parents. Discourage women from intellectual, innovative, or creative pursuits.
7. Discourage cultural and social diversity as much as possible. When immigrants absolutely can't be kept out, do whatever you can to make them, and their citizen children, feel unwelcome and unvalued. (Consider bringing back the educational and religious policies of forced assimilation that worked so well with Native Americans.) Presume in the face of all historical evidence that the children of uneducated immigrants will be unable to contribute to society. Assume that America has nothing to learn from the rest of the world, and do your best to make sure it doesn't.
8. Enact a tax system that encourages the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. Shift as much of the tax burden as possible onto the middle class. Make sure that the wealthy have plenty of ways to exclude their income from taxation, and that the less wealthy have as little access to capital as possible. Encourage them to go into debt, and allow consumer lending companies to set themselves up for a fall approaching the one the Japanese banking system's going through.
9. Take as a given that nothing that works (or doesn't work) in the rest of the world could possibly have applicability to America, unless of course it agrees with your preconceived notion of the direction America should be going. If anyone tries to suggest that something the Europeans or Japanese are doing might be a good idea, accuse them of being socialist or communist. Where possible, try to confuse France with the USSR.
10. Pretend that a health care system that leaves tens of millions of citizens uninsured is "socialized". (Use "socialized" as a dirty word to describe any system that might actually cover all Americans.) Skew what medical care there is toward prolonging the agonies of the terminally ill. Discourage preventative medicine and expect all medical problems to be solved with pharmaceutical "silver bullets".

My list need not end here but I got tired of typing. And anyway, I even agree with one or two of Mr. Stein's points. But just as Mr. Stein did I realized that my list was already the program of many of our elected officials. (Hmm.)

Re:Well, duh.

[leviramsey]

Those societal things are often why the various Asian nations tend not to make advances in science, medicine, and technology, though they may be the ones who best capitalize on it. Innovation, by definition, requires challenging the old order, the hierarchy. Confucian-type values make it very difficult to take this first step.

How many major, reasonably innovative (ie not a clone of Outlook) pieces of computer software (to take an example) are currently or were designed by an Asian (not an Asian American)? I can't think of one off the top of my head. Now how many are being coded by Asians (using design directives from non-Asians)?

This may sound horribly racist, but that is not the intent. If anything, it's pointing out a tension that exists between Confucianism and innovation. The fact that many persons "of Asian extraction" but who grew up in the West are great innovators indicates that it is not an issue of brain capacity; it is an issue of culturally-influenced psychology.

And yet 11% of US citizens 18-24...

[gatesh8r]

Can't even point out where the US is on a world map.

The educational system needs stronger standards. It also has to let students fail and repeat. I went through school (in a "smart" state, Wisconsin) unchallenged and graduated with minimal effort because it was too easy. The sad part is I graduated a 3.0 cummulative GPA, and I was a slacker!

This shit shouldn't happen. I know of some people in my class that should of never passed.

Trade Secrets, Copyright & The Erosion Of Pate

[Mittermeyer]

One of the biggest problems from my perspective is that the entire purpose of patent law has been undermined by the expansion beyond the original intent of trade secrets and copyrights.

Trade secrets has allowed companies to essentially patent the unpatentable and protect concepts and ideas far past the patent limit.

Copyrights are even worse in that they have allowed companies to publish software and legally protect it without actually publishing the source code.

Consider Microsoft's successful squashing of any 'unauthorized' books regarding API calls. To me Microsoft would be truly covered if all the API calls were actually published and therefore copyrighted, but they are not. So what is covered is not actually known to the public or described in any public way, yet Microsoft can continue to have them and be legally protected by just copyrighting the distribution of the executables.

This is an abomination of the entire point of having a patent or a copyright system- to encourage innovation by giving the user exclusive use and rights legally protected for a time in exchange for having the body of knowledge published publically.

Why bother to patent when trade secrets or copyright can protect you longer with no public release of knowledge or concepts?

We have drastically erred on the side of use and rights without the fair exchange of public knowledge. Until we fix this part our innovative tech base will continue to suffer.

Re: Tech innovation check

[Stripe7]

Should be fairly easy to see. Lets see what the US companies are patenting compared to the patents in the rest of the world. Hmmm, 1 click shopping patents, patents on how to use a swing etc..

OK, lets compare, if all the idiotic patents were not listed and then compared to the also non-idiotic patents owned by non-US interests we should be able to determine fairly easilly how far the US has dropped in technology.

Re:What do you expect from a Nixon Speechwriter?

[RealAlaskan]

1. The duh answer of them all of course is increased school funding. I relize however, if everyone got a decent education, we would have very few people willing to join the military and those who did would join one loaded with officers, and no cannon fodder, I mean elisted men.

There is a strong correlation between increasing expenditures and decreasing results, if you look at a time series for any random school district. There is no correlation between expenditures and results, if you look at panel data. As H.L. Menken (sp?) said, ``For every problem, there is an answer which is simple, attractive, and wrong.'' I think you've found it for this problem.

The answer here is for parents to demand more of their children, and more of their children's teachers. Given that most public schools are bureaucracies, they'll have to home school.

2. Not everyone needs to get a four year degree. There needs to be many more professional opportunities for people with 2 year degrees. It would increase tax revenue to have a better paid population, and reduce the burden on four year universities who can better use the money on people who need to spend the time in college.

You came so close on this one! Universities shouldn't be training construction managers (Purdue has a four-year program in that!). We need to encourage non-university, non-bachelors-degree education for crafts and trades.

The current system cheats everyone. The crafts and trades people, and the engineers, have to suffer through a lot of distribution requirements which preserve the illusion that they are getting a university education. This means that the classes must be dumbed down to be accessible to the unscholarly and uninterested (notice I didn't say stupid). The result is that the engineers don't get the in-depth techincal education they need, and the scholars don't get the education they need either.

3. Companies that spend a sigifigant portion (~75%) of thier R&D money in Univeristy based Labs would recive an huge tax break. 4. Medical Advancement: Place a 20 blackout on the production of generics and in return drug companies must reduce prices by 75%. New drug prices are high in this country because a company must recoup the billions it spent on R&D in the first 3 years to make any sort of profit, because after 5 it can be made by anyone dirt cheap. This give companies much more capital and incentive to innovate instead of copy what the other guy did and sell it cheaper. 5. Government Funded Hard Science: If we rely only on corperations to fund research, then we are going to be limmited to innovations that will make a profit, and we will be worthless as a civilization.

Are (3) and (5) contradictory? Probably not. On the other hand, given the amount of damage that corporate funding seems to be doing to academic research, your (3) might be counter productive. Finally, (4) is just a re-jiggering of the patent laws, and while it might be a good start, it isn't nearly far-reaching enough.

Furthermore, the US has been subsidising drug development and low drug prices in Canada and Europe by allowing high drug prices here to drive innovation. As long as we're chasing pie in the sky, let's force those socialist free riders to start paying their fair share!

how to ruin america

[EugeneK]

Ben Stein's got it all wrong.

• spend billions of taxpayer $'s on funding violent and repressive client states like Israel, Columbia and Saudia Arabia
• create a National Security State where civil rights and privacy are sacrified in the name of a never-ending war with a rotating cast of interchangeable villians
• continue to spend more on incarceration than education. teach children their only hope for a future is as a soldier, a prisoner or a guard.
• don't fund or subsidize technology that is useful for civilian society (which would pay for itself in new productivity improvements and economic scenarios). Instead only fund research that is used for killing people or spying on them and that otherwise sits useless in military warehouses.

USA is going down the drain frankly.

[miffo.swe]

With the emerging protectionism of some predatory companies on the expence of newstarters the innovation regarding to computers have almost grinded to a halt. Damn, our computers is still based on 1950 technoloygy when better ways exists but no one seems willing to take a chance and implement it with such entrenched companies as Intel and Microsoft at the helm. The USA needs aggressive enforcement of antitrust, oligopol and kill the DMCA in its cradle. The DMCA pretty much cements certain oligopols and monopolies by law.

All these stupid decisions gives the ball to other countries to play with. I think the USA can very well go the same way as Japan did in the 90's. With current leadership in the states that is dangerous as hell. Bad economy? Start a war and focus the citizens on another direction.

It happens right now!

The way it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting as an AC because I just moderated here.

My thoughts about the US (and it's edge)
1. Your country at the moment is run by a Cabal of less than holies. Someone tell me why so many Nixon era politicians are attempting to rule the world and cut off your freedom now.
2.Your media leaves no room for a view of the rest of the world.
3.Americans tend to see the wolrd in terms of black and white IMO.Automatically thinking of France as Communist or Germany as Nazi seems to be a standard practice. Words like "socialism" are automatically seen as dirty or evil. Whatever happened to pragmatism?
4.Someone has to pay for your enormous national debt and your massive armies. At the moment, I think that this is your average American wage worker in the form of taxes. Conquering Iraq is not going to improve life for these people. This may improve the military's tech edge but it doesn't automatically translate to an improved tech sector outside of the military.

whither sensibility ?

[dmohanty]

I am a software engineer from India, with quite a few years in the software industry with a voracious apetite for news pertaining to world economics/IT trends/physics/medicine etc. I currently work for an American MNC, a technology leader, at its India office.

Mr. Stein's article contains a lot of facts the Americans must ponder over and I think their implementation will help stem the rot of American culture greatly. But it and the subsequent remarks by fellow slashdotters do have some factual incrorectness about them. This remark refers to comments on the "technological edge" and the "immigrants".

America does have a "technology edge", if we consider the seer number of Nobel prizes the Americans have won, the sophistication of the American arsenal, the kind of animation that hollywood churns. Yes, there is a lot of hype about many of their achievements, Nobel prizes too can be manipulated, their technologial superiority gets magnified hugely by the combined efforts of their media and their armed forces. But keeping all that aside, if we try to gauge the number innovations coming out of the US, the number of new ideas that that country has produced in the last century, there is an overwhelming feeling that America has been the heart that pumps not only money, but also technology throughout the world (It has pumped more than its fair share of destruction also).

I attribute the American edge to two factors, "freedom to think" and "freedom to enjoy a decent life" even though you are an immigrant in the US. This has helped America become the beacon of bleeding edge technology that it is today. Most of the technological advances by Americans in the last century have the immigrant Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese and to some extent the Indians behind them.

The kind of labour that is handed out to the IT operations flourishing in India is yesterday's technology. Even if the Americans were to manufacture the space shuttle in India, they would have little to loose. Because the space shuttle is 25 years old. Today's technology e.g. nano-technology, inter planetary missions, JSF, LASER beams that can destroy an incoming missile in mid-flight, sustainable fusion, quantum computing etc. will take more than 25 years to come to India and the Indians are in no mood to play catch-up.

The American technological edge will continue to exist till the Americans continue to use their brains, till they continue to embrace and till they have the hunger to learn.

Our technological edge

[jgardn]

Businesses accept a certain level of risk when they invest their money in things to grow their business.

Technology is one of the most dangerous risks to take. Not only are you pouring money into something that has never been done before, but you are doing it for a product that has never been created before. Usually, the results of your investment will not be seen for several years or more.

Ben Stein is right on the money. Those things that liberals want to do -- uproot our society, change the way everyone lives over night, and throw away everything we built our country on -- means that the future is unpredictable.

Conservatives have had it right all along. We should be building on the past, not tearing it down and starting from scratch.

Laser

[varjag]

Well since that leaves you with only the atom bomb, the telephone, cotton gin and the laser..

Some inventions cannot be attributed to a single nation or person; laser is one of them.

'"Basic work in quantum electronics leads to the inventions of resonator and amplifier based on maser-laser theory", Townes, A.Prskhorov and N.Bason of Lebedev Institute in Moscow were awarded together the Nobel Prize of Physics of that year.'