perhaps we shouldn't speak of what quantum computing makes possible until quantum computing is itself feasible? people seem to make it out to be more than it is.
So that would be now then?
SAN JOSE, Calif., December 19, 2001 - Scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center have performed the world's most complicated quantum-computer calculation to date. They caused a billion-billion custom-designed molecules in a test tube to become a seven-qubit quantum computer that solved a simple version of the mathematical problem at the heart of many of today's data-security cryptographic systems.
No. IBM works within a bussiness model of selling hardware. Where the hell have you been, Rip Van Winkle? The focus on shipping hardware is what caused their record $5 billion single-year loss in 1992. The IBM of today is a profitable consultancy and services business.
Do you really believe that it is just the republicans that are pushing heavy copyright enforcement?
PUNCH: Hello, everybody! I'm a Republican, vote for me! JUDY: Oh no, boys and girls, vote for me! I'm a Democrat! PUNCH: Come an be friends with me, give us a kiss. JUDY: I'll give you a kiss. Here's one (slap) and another one (slap) PUNCH: Oh no, you don't! Take that (slap) and that slap (slap) PART OF THE AUDIENCE: Come on Mr Punch! ANOTHER PART OF THE AUDIENCE: Hurray for Judy! PUPPETEER (offstage): chuckles softly to himself
unlike talking, which must be taught at a certain stage of growth No. Everybody eventually learns to talk, unless you have a kind of aphasia (ie brain damage). Perhaps a better analogy would be swimming? Billions of people never learn to do it, but only the disabled can't speak.
This is variation within a species Yeah, well so is all evolution. It's only when populations become separated, and follow different variations over a ver-r-r-y long period that you get a new species.
Chinese growth because of its embrace of free markets is amazing
An EU report issued on June 29th concluded that China has yet to qualify as a market economy. The Chinese government is a dictatorial micromanager, loves protectism, and cedes control only slowly. Compare and contrast with countries that have genuinely tried to embrace free markets, like Russia. It adopted a far more radical free market than is seen even in the US, it wasn't adequately protected, and the economy imploded as it was asset-stripped.
Also, the US is largely responsible for China's growth in that we are the primary source of their business.
The US accounts for just 21.5% of China's export market. That's the number 1 slot, but don't go patting yourself on the back too hard, even little Hong Kong manages 18%
European technocrats... They claim that Europe can surpass the US in a decade. This simply won't happen because control from a central source takes away exactly that which is good from a free market: distributed trial & error.
You are quite right that this is unlikely to happen, but for different reasons than you suggest. It is true that the US has grown faster than the EU since 1990. However, GDP per hour worked has grown faster in Europe, and is now higher in France and Germany than the US. The reason Americans are richer is not because they are more in tune with the Free Market (tm), but simply because they prefer to work longer hours. Europeans would rather take the leisure time. Perhaps this because Europeans pay more tax? Apparently not. Ireland has lower tax rates than the US, but Irish workers, too, would rather put in less hours than take home more money.
America's superior economic performance over the past decade is much exaggerated. Productivity has grown just as fast in the euro area; GDP per person has grown a bit slower, but mainly because Europeans have chosen to take more leisure rather than more income; European employment in recent years has grown even faster than in America; and America has created some serious imbalances which could yet trip the economy up badly. From a position of surplus before 2000, the structural budget deficit is three times as big as that in the euro area. America has a big current-account deficit, compared to the Europeans small surplus; Americans save less than 2% of their disposable income, it's 12% in Europe. Total household debt in America amounts to 84% of GDP, compared with only 50% in the euro zone. So don't get complacent.
China? maybe, but 1/8 US GDP and a large number of "unperforming" loans are a problem.
Converting national GDPs into dollars at market exchange rates is misleading. Prices tend to be lower in poor economies, a dollar of spending in China is worth around 4 times as much as a dollar in America. A better method is to use purchasing-power parities (PPP), which take account of price differences.
On PPP figures, China has accounted for almost one-third of global GDP growth and America only 13%. This is why commodity prices (esp. oil) are surging, even though rich world growth has been relatively subdued since 2000. [source: The Economist]
And what is preventing me from moving from Windows to BSD?
I'm using a Debian machine to post this, and in my home directory are my personal settings and saved files for 170-odd applications including KMail, Gaim, Firefox, LinCity, OpenOffice, xmms, acrobat, gnucash, aspell, cpan, cvs, elinks, ethereal, mutella, pan, ssh and many, many others. Since my home dir is on it's own partition, all these would be preserved if switched to BSD; all my mail folders, address book, bookmarks, jabber contacts, mp3 playlists, pretty much the whole shooting match. Try that with Windows.
For maximum effectiveness smallpox vaccine needs to be readministered every 3 - 5 years. All those over 40 that were once vaccinated will derive very little benefit from it now.
More people die in the US from Car Accidents EVERY DAY than have died as a result of the entire conflict in Iraq.
According to the US Transportation Department there was an average of 118 fatalities per day, on US roads during 2003.
There have been 972 coalition deaths, 854 Americans, 60 Britons, six Bulgarians, one Dane, one Dutch, one Estonian, one Hungarian, 18 Italians, one Latvian, six Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and six Ukrainians, in the war in Iraq as of June 28, 2004
The Coalition forces do not count Iraqi deaths, but reports in the media have totalled somewhere between 9,436 and 11,317 (it can be difficult to spot dupes). It is likely that many or most Iraqi deaths are never reported.
If 10,000 people were dying on the US roads every day, they would be so piled with bodies it would be impossible to drive anywhere. Aircraft really would be the safest way to travel. At 3.65 million fatalities per year the US road network would outperform lesser killers like Hitler and Stalin, and without massive immigration the US would run of people within 80 years.
Your assumptions may seem reasonable to you, but would they seem reasonable to your aliens? Since we have absolutely zero experience of alien lifeforms, all you have done is drawn unwise conclusions based on pure speculation about what you think their likely behaviour might be.
There are all kinds of possible scenarios where the galaxy is stuffed full of lifeforms, but the heavens continue to be silent (see Greg Bear's "Forge of God" for just one example), only one of them needs to be true, and we are just too lacking in hard data to make any kind of sensible judgement on it.
The United States is powerful enough to be able to cut its own deals with the rest of the world.
Thus, we don't need the UN. We don't need the UN dictating what we can and cannot do to us.
Right. Because unlike WIPO, the US government has a good track record of standing up to powerful corporate interests, particularly on Intellectual Property.
You are focussed on the wrong enemy. This isn't about US vs UN, those two entities are both having their strings pulled by the same Intellectual Property puppet-master. This is about abuses of corporate power. This is bought and paid for by the people who brought you the DMCA.
And so will I, and so will nearly all Slashdotters. The point is, the market will expand dramtically because many, many people who will never own a PC will own one of these phones; and the phone will be the biggest percentage in this much bigger market.
Phones supplanting the PC is like the PC supplanting the mainframe. The mainframes didn't go away, there are probably more companies using more mainframes today than there ever were during The Age of The Mainframe. It's just that vast hordes of ordinary people bought PCs, so that's currently the major part of the market. The same will soon be true of phones, they will knock PCs into second place. Nothing really bad will happen to those that own PCs (or mainframes).
That would be Bic and Liquid-paper in the States. You British and your wierd terms. Calling cookies, biscuits; elevators, lifts; and car trunks, the boot.:-)
...and we mispronounce "the Innerr-ned" as "the Intah-net".
...but what happens when government policy/action/inaction stifles innovation? For an example, take a look at how the US government punished Microsoft for anticompetitive behavior
I see. So the highly-innovative Microsoft suffered when the evil Government persecuted Saint Bill? No, no.. you're saying that the innovative small companies all suffered when the Government let the evil and predatory Micro$oft corporation off with just a slap on the wrist? Hmmm. When two completely wildly, and completely condradictory interpretations can be drawn from the same statement, you probably need to use the preview button a bit more. Or is it a subtle and carefully-crafted ambiguity, that sounds radical, but really just intended to reflect the readerships' different biases back at them? It is? Cool.
The term pirate has a very specific meaning when it comes to software. It refers to someone that unlawfully copies a work then redistributes it, usually breaking some kind of copyright protection in the process. I'm sick of stupid pedantic fucks whingeing on about this. Words can have more than one meaning, if you haven't noticed.
Yes, they frequently do. However, it is a major win for the copyright cartels to associate, in the public mind, copyright infringement with the rape and pillage of a ship. Who will be worthy of the tougher crackdown? Someone that's a filthy pirate or someone who merely infringed someone else's copyright? George Orwell tried to warn us about language corrupting thought and this is a good example of it in action.
The patent system has been heading in more-or-less the direction you suggest for some time. This is actually how it works:
1. Anyone can submit a patent, in practise the patent examination is little more than a rubber stamp.
2. Anyone can contest a patent by submitting prior art (or bringing up another weakness in the patent application). The original submitter(s) have a choice: admit the prior art (which invalidates the patent) or argue the point. If they argue, the disagreement goes to court. In some jurisdictions the loser pays costs.
Why do people keep trotting this one out and getting modded up? The freedom to tinker is fundamentally what Free Software is all about, trying to enforce a single universal anything is like trying to make water not wet. Even if Bruce Almighty, as an act of divine intervention, granted you this wish, anyone who wants to can immediately fork the project or start their own (and *someone* will want to).
I like Heinlein's definition better, "serendipity" is when you dig for worms and strike gold.
The equivalent definition for "paradigm shift" would be you look closely at the worms you've been digging up and realise they were actually gold all along. It's clumsy but think it illustrates the difference between the two concepts. A paradigm is specifically about your assumptions and state of mind. A paradigm shift is when those change. The observed facts themselves can stay the same, the important point is that the interpretation changes.
I do not subscribe to the idea of "paradigm shifting". I think things just naturally evolve due to need or pure serendipity.
A paradigm is a model, a set of assumptions about the way the world works. A simple example is the Copernican model of the solar system. The Earth revolves around the sun. Previously, the common view was that the Sun went around the Earth.
Paradigms certainly do shift, and it's a very different process to natural evolution. When Copernicus said "Hang on a minute, the Sun doesn't go round the Earth, it's the other way around". That's not natural evolution, that's the exact opposite. He junked the old model and started again with a new one. Paradigm shifts occur when the natural evolution of ideas has come to an end, when they no longer quite fit the observed realities, and gradually becomes clear that it's time to start again with a clean sheet of paper.
I recall an analysis of the browsers used by slashdot readers to browse slashdot, and most of them use windows to read slashdot.
I'm not sure you should place too much confidence in those satistics. I'm definately an anti-Microsoft Linux user, there's not a sniff of Windows on any of the machines I own, I spit on the floor everytime Bill Gates' name gets mentioned, I cheer through all the anti-MS stories. But... most of my Slashdot time is done in work where they make me use Win XP. So how accurately am I represented in those stats?
You are missing the point of Pot/Kettle comment. The US imposes its views on other nations via trade agreements all the time. For just two very quick examples off the top of my head: Helms-Burton slaps sanctions on other countries for trading with Cuba; Congress requires the President to annually certify a list of 27 countries are pulling their weight with regard to The War on Drugs. This is a consistent component of US foreign policy that you can see some new variant of pretty much all the time.
Really? I can't see how that would work; are they going to suddenly make people not know what the API looks like again?
If you really want to know what this looks like, just type "windows source zip" into Gnutella. The EU ruling affects the legality of seeing the API, not the physical practicality.
Slashdot Mirror
So that would be now then?
http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/resources/new
Or perhaps by feasible you mean available on the mass market? How would we know which shops were offering the best deal if we didn't speak about it?
No. IBM works within a bussiness model of selling hardware.
Where the hell have you been, Rip Van Winkle? The focus on shipping hardware is what caused their record $5 billion single-year loss in 1992. The IBM of today is a profitable consultancy and services business.
Do you really believe that it is just the republicans that are pushing heavy copyright enforcement?
PUNCH: Hello, everybody! I'm a Republican, vote for me!
JUDY: Oh no, boys and girls, vote for me! I'm a Democrat!
PUNCH: Come an be friends with me, give us a kiss.
JUDY: I'll give you a kiss. Here's one (slap) and another one (slap)
PUNCH: Oh no, you don't! Take that (slap) and that slap (slap)
PART OF THE AUDIENCE: Come on Mr Punch!
ANOTHER PART OF THE AUDIENCE: Hurray for Judy!
PUPPETEER (offstage): chuckles softly to himself
unlike talking, which must be taught at a certain stage of growth
No. Everybody eventually learns to talk, unless you have a kind of aphasia (ie brain damage). Perhaps a better analogy would be swimming? Billions of people never learn to do it, but only the disabled can't speak.
This is variation within a species
Yeah, well so is all evolution. It's only when populations become separated, and follow different variations over a ver-r-r-y long period that you get a new species.
Chinese growth because of its embrace of free markets is amazing
... They claim that Europe can surpass the US in a decade. This simply won't happen because control from a central source takes away exactly that which is good from a free market: distributed trial & error.
An EU report issued on June 29th concluded that China has yet to qualify as a market economy. The Chinese government is a dictatorial micromanager, loves protectism, and cedes control only slowly. Compare and contrast with countries that have genuinely tried to embrace free markets, like Russia. It adopted a far more radical free market than is seen even in the US, it wasn't adequately protected, and the economy imploded as it was asset-stripped.
Also, the US is largely responsible for China's growth in that we are the primary source of their business.
The US accounts for just 21.5% of China's export market. That's the number 1 slot, but don't go patting yourself on the back too hard, even little Hong Kong manages 18%
European technocrats
You are quite right that this is unlikely to happen, but for different reasons than you suggest. It is true that the US has grown faster than the EU since 1990. However, GDP per hour worked has grown faster in Europe, and is now higher in France and Germany than the US. The reason Americans are richer is not because they are more in tune with the Free Market (tm), but simply because they prefer to work longer hours. Europeans would rather take the leisure time. Perhaps this because Europeans pay more tax? Apparently not. Ireland has lower tax rates than the US, but Irish workers, too, would rather put in less hours than take home more money.
America's superior economic performance over the past decade is much exaggerated. Productivity has grown just as fast in the euro area; GDP per person has grown a bit slower, but mainly because Europeans have chosen to take more leisure rather than more income; European employment in recent years has grown even faster than in America; and America has created some serious imbalances which could yet trip the economy up badly. From a position of surplus before 2000, the structural budget deficit is three times as big as that in the euro area. America has a big current-account deficit, compared to the Europeans small surplus; Americans save less than 2% of their disposable income, it's 12% in Europe. Total household debt in America amounts to 84% of GDP, compared with only 50% in the euro zone. So don't get complacent.
Converting national GDPs into dollars at market exchange rates is misleading. Prices tend to be lower in poor economies, a dollar of spending in China is worth around 4 times as much as a dollar in America. A better method is to use purchasing-power parities (PPP), which take account of price differences.
On PPP figures, China has accounted for almost one-third of global GDP growth and America only 13%. This is why commodity prices (esp. oil) are surging, even though rich world growth has been relatively subdued since 2000. [source: The Economist]
I'm using a Debian machine to post this, and in my home directory are my personal settings and saved files for 170-odd applications including KMail, Gaim, Firefox, LinCity, OpenOffice, xmms, acrobat, gnucash, aspell, cpan, cvs, elinks, ethereal, mutella, pan, ssh and many, many others. Since my home dir is on it's own partition, all these would be preserved if switched to BSD; all my mail folders, address book, bookmarks, jabber contacts, mp3 playlists, pretty much the whole shooting match. Try that with Windows.
For maximum effectiveness smallpox vaccine needs to be readministered every 3 - 5 years. All those over 40 that were once vaccinated will derive very little benefit from it now.
More people die in the US from Car Accidents EVERY DAY than have died as a result of the entire conflict in Iraq.
According to the US Transportation Department there was an average of 118 fatalities per day, on US roads during 2003.
There have been 972 coalition deaths, 854 Americans, 60 Britons, six Bulgarians, one Dane, one Dutch, one Estonian, one Hungarian, 18 Italians, one Latvian, six Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and six Ukrainians, in the war in Iraq as of June 28, 2004
The Coalition forces do not count Iraqi deaths, but reports in the media have totalled somewhere between 9,436 and 11,317 (it can be difficult to spot dupes). It is likely that many or most Iraqi deaths are never reported.
If 10,000 people were dying on the US roads every day, they would be so piled with bodies it would be impossible to drive anywhere. Aircraft really would be the safest way to travel. At 3.65 million fatalities per year the US road network would outperform lesser killers like Hitler and Stalin, and without massive immigration the US would run of people within 80 years.
Your assumptions may seem reasonable to you, but would they seem reasonable to your aliens? Since we have absolutely zero experience of alien lifeforms, all you have done is drawn unwise conclusions based on pure speculation about what you think their likely behaviour might be.
There are all kinds of possible scenarios where the galaxy is stuffed full of lifeforms, but the heavens continue to be silent (see Greg Bear's "Forge of God" for just one example), only one of them needs to be true, and we are just too lacking in hard data to make any kind of sensible judgement on it.
Right. Because unlike WIPO, the US government has a good track record of standing up to powerful corporate interests, particularly on Intellectual Property.
You are focussed on the wrong enemy. This isn't about US vs UN, those two entities are both having their strings pulled by the same Intellectual Property puppet-master. This is about abuses of corporate power. This is bought and paid for by the people who brought you the DMCA.
Moderation Guideline: -1 Boring
And so will I, and so will nearly all Slashdotters. The point is, the market will expand dramtically because many, many people who will never own a PC will own one of these phones; and the phone will be the biggest percentage in this much bigger market.
Phones supplanting the PC is like the PC supplanting the mainframe. The mainframes didn't go away, there are probably more companies using more mainframes today than there ever were during The Age of The Mainframe. It's just that vast hordes of ordinary people bought PCs, so that's currently the major part of the market. The same will soon be true of phones, they will knock PCs into second place. Nothing really bad will happen to those that own PCs (or mainframes).
Yeah, in the US it's other way around.
I see. So the highly-innovative Microsoft suffered when the evil Government persecuted Saint Bill? No, no
Yes, they frequently do. However, it is a major win for the copyright cartels to associate, in the public mind, copyright infringement with the rape and pillage of a ship. Who will be worthy of the tougher crackdown? Someone that's a filthy pirate or someone who merely infringed someone else's copyright? George Orwell tried to warn us about language corrupting thought and this is a good example of it in action.
The patent system has been heading in more-or-less the direction you suggest for some time. This is actually how it works:
1. Anyone can submit a patent, in practise the patent examination is little more than a rubber stamp.
2. Anyone can contest a patent by submitting prior art (or bringing up another weakness in the patent application). The original submitter(s) have a choice: admit the prior art (which invalidates the patent) or argue the point. If they argue, the disagreement goes to court. In some jurisdictions the loser pays costs.
3. Normal legal appeals apply.
Why do people keep trotting this one out and getting modded up? The freedom to tinker is fundamentally what Free Software is all about, trying to enforce a single universal anything is like trying to make water not wet. Even if Bruce Almighty, as an act of divine intervention, granted you this wish, anyone who wants to can immediately fork the project or start their own (and *someone* will want to).
I like Heinlein's definition better, "serendipity" is when you dig for worms and strike gold.
The equivalent definition for "paradigm shift" would be you look closely at the worms you've been digging up and realise they were actually gold all along. It's clumsy but think it illustrates the difference between the two concepts. A paradigm is specifically about your assumptions and state of mind. A paradigm shift is when those change. The observed facts themselves can stay the same, the important point is that the interpretation changes.
A paradigm is a model, a set of assumptions about the way the world works. A simple example is the Copernican model of the solar system. The Earth revolves around the sun. Previously, the common view was that the Sun went around the Earth.
Paradigms certainly do shift, and it's a very different process to natural evolution. When Copernicus said "Hang on a minute, the Sun doesn't go round the Earth, it's the other way around". That's not natural evolution, that's the exact opposite. He junked the old model and started again with a new one. Paradigm shifts occur when the natural evolution of ideas has come to an end, when they no longer quite fit the observed realities, and gradually becomes clear that it's time to start again with a clean sheet of paper.
I'm not sure you should place too much confidence in those satistics. I'm definately an anti-Microsoft Linux user, there's not a sniff of Windows on any of the machines I own, I spit on the floor everytime Bill Gates' name gets mentioned, I cheer through all the anti-MS stories. But
You are missing the point of Pot/Kettle comment. The US imposes its views on other nations via trade agreements all the time. For just two very quick examples off the top of my head: Helms-Burton slaps sanctions on other countries for trading with Cuba; Congress requires the President to annually certify a list of 27 countries are pulling their weight with regard to The War on Drugs. This is a consistent component of US foreign policy that you can see some new variant of pretty much all the time.
If you really want to know what this looks like, just type "windows source zip" into Gnutella. The EU ruling affects the legality of seeing the API, not the physical practicality.