I think you are deliberately interpreting my words in the least favourable way. Splitting a hair may be a remarkable feat in itself, but it does little to endear you to others.
The Michelson-Morley experiment: You don't seriously assume that I am unaware of this, do you? Seeing that I know fancy words like 'scalar field', it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that I know about the experiemnt and its consequences. It is also worth noting my use of the word "theoretical" and the single quotes around the word medium, both of which suggest that I wasn't talking about an aether in any but the metaphorical sense.
Enough of this - we are not talking stringent, mathematical proofs here, and being contrary about everything that is said will only lead to silly bickering, which I refuse to be pulled further into.
This style of "journalism" is an outstanding example of how one can twist just about anything to fit any purpose; and it stinks, to be quite honest. If you think your message to the world is important, try not to make it sound like a crude attempt at deceiving the gullible.
It is strange that this kind of intellectual fraud and manipulation can not only go on, year after year, but actually seems to be on the increase. It is as if everything has been infected by "advertitis" - all that matters is "making a sale", whether your wares are religion, politics, journalism or consumer goods. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we weren't always lied to? Like, if you go into a church, you find the priest is living in relative poverty and his congregation consists of kind, openminded and tolerant people; if politicians didn't pretend to be saints, that always turned out to be the worst of the lot; and if everything we read in the papers was rock-solid, objective truth.
This is the perfect argument against the standard 'I have nothing to hide' argumentation. Why doesn't anybody see through the "nothing to hide" rhetoric? We all have something to hide - it's just not something that is necessarily criminal. It's called "privacy" - I, for example, wouldn't like somebody to watch me while I take a dump. I wouldn't want a stranger to hear certain of the things I say to my wife. I might have a mistress ("I neither confirm nor deny..."), and I certainly wouldn't want that to become general knowledge - but it isn't illegal in most countries.
Privacy - we all have something to hide, of course we do. Our right to privacy ties in well with the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty. Why do "they" want to spy on ordinary people? In a sense, to prove that we are not guilty - so they assume we are guilty until it has been proven otherwise. You can't build a happy society on mistrust and suspicion.
And why would people do anything about a model that gives ridiculous accuracy on fundamental particle-physics experiments? It works. You need to learn to deal with it, not the other way around. Why? That's the wrong attitude; the real question is "Why not?"
Yes, for practical purposes QM is fine - but it is not enough for understanding. It's like the difference between engineering and science; engineers are good and worthy people, but their focus is practical: the construction of things, the application of knowledge to a practical purpose. The focus of the scientist is on the unknown, the unanswered questions; the practicality of things is not foremost in their mind, they speculate and grope in the dark. These are of course wild generalisations, but the principle of what I just said is sound, at least:-)
And thus I find that the proper scientific attitude to QM is not "Who cares, it works", but "Why does it work?" - there must be something better out there, a theory of which QM is just a special case, an approximation. Scientific method relies, after all, on theories being falsifiable - isn't that, more than anything, the very embodiment of "Why not"?
Are they? Ever seen evidence of one? Gravitons are a purely theoretical construction and, worse of all, one that does not work. Come to think of it, I haven't seen a photon either. I have seen experiments that are most easily explained by 'light particles', but then it might just be a sort of solitons that are interacting. The fact of the matter is that what we see is simply that light waves can occur in a localised form; of course, that may be what all particles are, at the end of the day: localised packets of waves in some sort of theorectical 'medium'. We don't know - I don't think any theory has gone in that direction; there are simply too many other things to research, that are more immediately important.
You mean a vector field since gravity has direction, rather than the Tensor field of GR. I meant a scalar field, since it is usual practise to think of the size of gravitation rather than the direction; although of course you are right. Still, it is the same difference, more or less, when the purpose was just to illustrate the different nature of the two theories.
Whatever else one may think of surveillance and wiretapping (and believe me, it is not something I love), outsourcing it to private businesses does not sound like a good idea to me. The police are, at least in principle, trained in law enforcement and they are required to know about civil right. If the police are caught abusing their power it is in itself a punishable offence - at least in principle; if private persons do the same, they are not held responsible in the same way.
Accountability is one of the most important checks and stops in a modern society.
An alternative explanation is of course that the anti-particles are distracted and therefore miss the Earth, as demonstrated in the well-known experiments performed by Arthur Dent.
It is my distinct impression that what they mostly do is start from a classical physical model, which is then "quantified" by putting it through the magical transformation, where the classical Hamiltonian is turned into a differntial equation. I have no idea why this is done, nor have I ever met anybody who could explain it convincingly; but it seems to work. It is of course by no means a intellectually satifying method, which is what makes me wonder why nobody seems to seriously do anything about it. It is also, in my opinion, one of the reasons why quantum mechanics has always been plagued by quasi-religious mumbo jumbo like the Copenhagen interpretation.
Gravitons are like photons: simply distortions in the underlying field. When two masses move relative to each other, the change in position corresponds to a change in the force between the two, but this change isn't communicated instantaneously. Instead the change travels as a distortion in the force-field - ie. a graviton (or several, as the case might be). This is what it means, intuitively at least, when they say that "the graviton mediates the force of gravitation"; and the same goes for the other mediators of force: photon, gluon and W- and Z boson. The perceived conflict is an artifact of limitations in the viewpoint of quantum mechanics.
The gravitational field as a scalar field surperposed on a flat space-time is just another way of describing gravitation - the curved geometry of general relativity is a better model, although it is more difficult to get a handle on. Perhaps it would be worth trying to tackle the other forces in the same way, as geometry in some sort of space-time. Perhaps we can even derive quantum mechanics as a special case of such a model; mathematics has certainly come a long way since the time of Einstein and Bohr, and it isn't unreasonable to hope that we are now approaching a situation where we can solve those old problems, that neither had the tools for.
Yes, that is how I read it. Mass is only known to us through its gravitational effect; if anti-matter falls away from matter, it must mean that it has negative mass. There is no conflict with energy conservation - it only means that the total energy (or mass) of a closed system doesn't change.
Somehow it irritates me when articles like this start talking baby language; surely, if a person is clever enough to be interested in science, they are able to understand or quickly learn about a notation like "10^15"?
It takes a lot of balls to suggest that the USA is being xenophobic. The USA is way beyond lavishly generous in matters of immigration, and work visas. And I've got plenty, mate.
However, I am not saying that the US is xenophobic, only that Denmark is. And I'm saying: Don't go that way. It's up to you, of course, but chances are that you will lose more than you gain if you do.
And I'm amazed that anybody takes this crap serious enough to give it the time it takes to read the headline. Of course it's a joke - it's called "propaganda" and it's a game to see just how far one can string along a bunch of gullible teenagers.
China is a huge country with a huge population, and implementing something like what Ms Klein describes would require just over 3 persons to watch every ordinary Chinese; it can't be done, not even in the US, certainly not in a country that still hasn't quite got all the resources it needs for just the basic needs.
But I can see from your comments that you obviously think this is true; have you even thought about how Ms Klein can know exactly what the Chinese government is going to do and what they intend? Is she an insider? Does she take part in planning meetings without them noticing? This has nothing to do with the real world, let alone Communism, but Ms Klein has realised that her stories sell for a better price if they are spiced with this kind of nonsensical prejudice that everybody knows can't be verified, but everyone wants to believe in.
Apart from that - seeing that you probably don't see yourself as a communist - why would you expect the state to feed the poor? Isn't your philosophy that they are poor simply because they are lazy and stupid, and that they don't deserve any better?
Take a lesson from Denmark - currently notorious for its xenophobic legislation. In Denmark we have for at least the last decade introduced laws that make ever less attractive for foreigner to come and work or study, and we are now facing a situation where, in not too many years, we will have a large number of people in the retirement age, but too few younger people to do the work necessary to produce the revenue for care. One solution would have been to get more immigrants into the country - the fact of the matter is that immigrants don't really 'come and steal our jobs', they come and produce taxable income, just to mention one, very basic thing, and that benefits everyone.
All in all it is very stupid to stop immigration, especially of young talented people like students. America rose to greatness in the world, not because of immense wealth in natural resources - just look to Saudi Arabia for an example of what that kind of wealth does on its own; and it certainly wasn't because of military power either - need I mention Iraq and Vietnam? In fact, the main, if not the only, reason for America's greatness is that there has been a steady influx of immigrants, who have brought new talent, initiative and ideas. This has gone on from the earliest pioneers until fairly recently, and until fairly recently, the US has been on top when it comes to wealth, education and influence.
And that is another matter - state funding or not, you have the educational resources you want, as a people, at the end of the day. The religious fundamentalists wouldn't have any influence on schools if it wasn't because a lot of people agree that 'too much education is bad for you'. All the funding in the world will make no difference if it is spent on teaching children that 'Evolution is just a theory' and that intelligent design is just as valid.
What is at stake here is the US' position in the world - I, being a foreigner, don't have as much invested in America's reputation and well-being as an American would, or should, but it would be very sad to see a nation that was once admired and envied crumble into the dust and become a sleepy, introverted backwater.
No, the real problem is that people think that equality is about everybody being exactly the same - which I personally think is a distortion manufactured for the purpose of disparaging all serious discussion about inequality.
Equality means 'all men (and in these modern times women too) are born equal under the law' - ie that the same law applies t oeverybody, no matter whether you are rich or poor, clever or stupid. Nobody in their right mind has ever imagined that all people are exactly equal when it comes to talent, intelligence etc.
The problem with standardised tests isn't the idea of testing students' skills, but the sad fact that once you have the tests, that is all you strive for. If there were no tests, the schools would ideally strive to simply provide the best they can, whereas when you have the tests, you strive to score as much as possible. It's like intelligence testing - if you are tested unprepared, the test may show something about how intelligent you are, but if you are allowed to study the test and prepare for it, you can suddenly demonstrate an huge intelligence, except of course that the result is now worthless.
I am all for testing and making the quality of schools comparable, so the parents have a better chance of choosing the right school for their children, but the standardised tests are simply bogus - a bad attempt at solving some problems, or even a tool for deceiving the parents and the public.
The submitter writes as if these things were solid facts written in stone, whereas the fact is that nobody really knows. Sadly, building on what "intelligence" comes out of CIA just isn't feasible, as the arguments for the war in Iraq amply demonstrate. SO, the power outages "may have been caused by hackers" or something; or they may have been caused by something else. We rely heavily on advanced technology, which is a bit like balancing on a knifes edge - it is bound to go wrong from time to time, sometimes massively so, especially when stiff competition makes funding for maintenance less abundant.
Apart from that, it isn't exactly difficult to break in to this kind of system - in the past we have seen hackers walk all over the place where they aren't supposed to have been. If script kiddies can do it, is isn't surprising if higly trained miltary personnel can do it too.
But I sincerely doubt that they would leave lots of traces and clues lying around for the more paranoid factions on slashdot to play with. Script-kiddies, yes, but if you are professional, whether criminal or some foreign government, you don't just blunder stupidly in and trigger alarms, or leave your droppings all over the place.
I can see how this kind of nonsense is politically useful. Hasn't the American public caught on to this yet?
Yes, I know that will get a number of people out their chairs, but programming in this context is simply a skill you pick if you need it. I studied maths and physics, admittedly a while ago; programming is quite simply not the way to learn good research practise, and it is not relevant for your theoretical understanding. I personally think it is in many ways very wise not to teach programming as part of most science education - you have to learn to walk before you can run.
So, we don't want to fund proper science, or proper education, but we want to build machines that can think for us, so we can concentrate on the important things, like believing that the war in Iraq is about bringing freedom and democracy to the poor people and that the world was created in 6 days (BTW, how can one even talk about days before the creation of Heaven and Earth, and crucially the sun?)
Not that this kind of research is bad in itself - we already have 'logic computers' that can construct mathematical proofs, which has made it possible to advance in some areas, where brute force seemed to be the only way forward and where the task simply was too overwhelming for a human to take on. But the danger is, of course that this kind of technology will make us intellectually lazy and incompetent, just like many people now are "psysically incompetent" because we have machines to the work for us.
- what Microsoft's priorities were. Compared to Windows 2 and 3, 95 was a revelation. It looked better, the interface was far better, there were even a couple of technical improvements. W95 is probably what made Microsoft's commercial success more than anything else; I remember a lot of people resisted moving away from it for a long time despite its all too many, all too obvious flaws.
But this comment from Gates really highlights that Microsoft's main priority has never been to produce a technically good product; to them look and feel are much more important. As I recall, they spent a lot of resources getting the user interface right - one can only assume they didn't spend nearly as much on getting it to actually work.
You're probably right. Most of modern science (Mathematics, quantum mechanics, relativity theory etc) was founded in Europe and reached its high point just around WWII, during which time many of the scientists migrated to America. Europe lost much of its religiosity at the same time as the great scienfic discoveries were made, whereas America has always held on to religion. Education has certainly played a major part in this, but I think there is a fundamental difference in how intellectual pursuits are viewed in general. In Europe much of the culture was shaped by an elite that held intellectuals in hig esteem - kings and princes had their court astronomers, alchemists, poets, musicians etc, the upper classes followed suit by supporting the same things, so being intellectual was a high status thing.
America, on the other hand, has never had kings and has always had their misgivings about that very thing; so by association intellectuals have always been seen as suspicious, not least because they also tend to be irreligious or atheists. And now that the big stars of science, Einstein, Bohr etc, have all died, people are much more willing to let their schools turn into Christian madrasas. Of course it doesn't really help that things are taking a turn for the worse in the West, especially in America, I suppose - in the 50es and 60es our lives got constantly better "because of science", so people loved it, but now people feel disappointed that "science" doesn't seem to come up with more improvements to solve the problems, never mind that actual science still is our only hope for warding off the climate and energy crisis we've landed ourselves in. So it is only natural that they turn away from science, perhaps, and try religion.
Shoddy security may be stupid but I don't know if it's illegal or not Nor do I, but in my experience Sarbanes-Oxley is used increasingly as an excuse for exaggerated security measures, so I think it may actually be illegal not to protect your data.
As everybody has already observed, the two parties are almost identical - there is certainly little difference in ideology as far as I can tell, so why vote at all? well, I suppose McCain is a bit more isolationist than Obama, perhaps - who knows, really? But the differences are only skin deep, if that. Where have the big issues gone? Isn't it because you simply can't become a serious contender in politics unless you have massive financial backing? And you only get that if you appeal to the people with lots of money: the big corporations, the big churches etc. So it matters little whether 95% (or whatever) of the American population is irreligious and socialist, because only the candidates that the rich like will ever get a chance. (Yes, yes, I know, the proportion of socialists in America is perhaps not quite 95%; it was just an example).
And that is not democracy. It may look a lot like it, but it isn't; ideally, in democracy more or less all candidates have equal access to the public's attention, so people can make up their own minds about them. And of course there would be proportional representation as well. The political process might be less efficient, but experience from the rest of the world shows that it works well enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are deliberately interpreting my words in the least favourable way. Splitting a hair may be a remarkable feat in itself, but it does little to endear you to others.
The Michelson-Morley experiment: You don't seriously assume that I am unaware of this, do you? Seeing that I know fancy words like 'scalar field', it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that I know about the experiemnt and its consequences. It is also worth noting my use of the word "theoretical" and the single quotes around the word medium, both of which suggest that I wasn't talking about an aether in any but the metaphorical sense.
Enough of this - we are not talking stringent, mathematical proofs here, and being contrary about everything that is said will only lead to silly bickering, which I refuse to be pulled further into.
This style of "journalism" is an outstanding example of how one can twist just about anything to fit any purpose; and it stinks, to be quite honest. If you think your message to the world is important, try not to make it sound like a crude attempt at deceiving the gullible.
It is strange that this kind of intellectual fraud and manipulation can not only go on, year after year, but actually seems to be on the increase. It is as if everything has been infected by "advertitis" - all that matters is "making a sale", whether your wares are religion, politics, journalism or consumer goods. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we weren't always lied to? Like, if you go into a church, you find the priest is living in relative poverty and his congregation consists of kind, openminded and tolerant people; if politicians didn't pretend to be saints, that always turned out to be the worst of the lot; and if everything we read in the papers was rock-solid, objective truth.
Hmm, did I actually eat those mushrooms?
Privacy - we all have something to hide, of course we do. Our right to privacy ties in well with the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty. Why do "they" want to spy on ordinary people? In a sense, to prove that we are not guilty - so they assume we are guilty until it has been proven otherwise. You can't build a happy society on mistrust and suspicion.
Amazingly, I find myself believing what Microsoft say.
Yes, for practical purposes QM is fine - but it is not enough for understanding. It's like the difference between engineering and science; engineers are good and worthy people, but their focus is practical: the construction of things, the application of knowledge to a practical purpose. The focus of the scientist is on the unknown, the unanswered questions; the practicality of things is not foremost in their mind, they speculate and grope in the dark. These are of course wild generalisations, but the principle of what I just said is sound, at least
And thus I find that the proper scientific attitude to QM is not "Who cares, it works", but "Why does it work?" - there must be something better out there, a theory of which QM is just a special case, an approximation. Scientific method relies, after all, on theories being falsifiable - isn't that, more than anything, the very embodiment of "Why not"?
Whatever else one may think of surveillance and wiretapping (and believe me, it is not something I love), outsourcing it to private businesses does not sound like a good idea to me. The police are, at least in principle, trained in law enforcement and they are required to know about civil right. If the police are caught abusing their power it is in itself a punishable offence - at least in principle; if private persons do the same, they are not held responsible in the same way.
Accountability is one of the most important checks and stops in a modern society.
An alternative explanation is of course that the anti-particles are distracted and therefore miss the Earth, as demonstrated in the well-known experiments performed by Arthur Dent.
It is my distinct impression that what they mostly do is start from a classical physical model, which is then "quantified" by putting it through the magical transformation, where the classical Hamiltonian is turned into a differntial equation. I have no idea why this is done, nor have I ever met anybody who could explain it convincingly; but it seems to work. It is of course by no means a intellectually satifying method, which is what makes me wonder why nobody seems to seriously do anything about it. It is also, in my opinion, one of the reasons why quantum mechanics has always been plagued by quasi-religious mumbo jumbo like the Copenhagen interpretation.
That's a good point; perhaps this is an argument against anti-matter having negative mass and thus their falling up.
Gravitons are like photons: simply distortions in the underlying field. When two masses move relative to each other, the change in position corresponds to a change in the force between the two, but this change isn't communicated instantaneously. Instead the change travels as a distortion in the force-field - ie. a graviton (or several, as the case might be). This is what it means, intuitively at least, when they say that "the graviton mediates the force of gravitation"; and the same goes for the other mediators of force: photon, gluon and W- and Z boson. The perceived conflict is an artifact of limitations in the viewpoint of quantum mechanics.
The gravitational field as a scalar field surperposed on a flat space-time is just another way of describing gravitation - the curved geometry of general relativity is a better model, although it is more difficult to get a handle on. Perhaps it would be worth trying to tackle the other forces in the same way, as geometry in some sort of space-time. Perhaps we can even derive quantum mechanics as a special case of such a model; mathematics has certainly come a long way since the time of Einstein and Bohr, and it isn't unreasonable to hope that we are now approaching a situation where we can solve those old problems, that neither had the tools for.
Yes, that is how I read it. Mass is only known to us through its gravitational effect; if anti-matter falls away from matter, it must mean that it has negative mass. There is no conflict with energy conservation - it only means that the total energy (or mass) of a closed system doesn't change.
Somehow it irritates me when articles like this start talking baby language; surely, if a person is clever enough to be interested in science, they are able to understand or quickly learn about a notation like "10^15"?
However, I am not saying that the US is xenophobic, only that Denmark is. And I'm saying: Don't go that way. It's up to you, of course, but chances are that you will lose more than you gain if you do.
How fortunate for him that he was a proctologist instead.
And I'm amazed that anybody takes this crap serious enough to give it the time it takes to read the headline. Of course it's a joke - it's called "propaganda" and it's a game to see just how far one can string along a bunch of gullible teenagers.
China is a huge country with a huge population, and implementing something like what Ms Klein describes would require just over 3 persons to watch every ordinary Chinese; it can't be done, not even in the US, certainly not in a country that still hasn't quite got all the resources it needs for just the basic needs.
But I can see from your comments that you obviously think this is true; have you even thought about how Ms Klein can know exactly what the Chinese government is going to do and what they intend? Is she an insider? Does she take part in planning meetings without them noticing? This has nothing to do with the real world, let alone Communism, but Ms Klein has realised that her stories sell for a better price if they are spiced with this kind of nonsensical prejudice that everybody knows can't be verified, but everyone wants to believe in.
Apart from that - seeing that you probably don't see yourself as a communist - why would you expect the state to feed the poor? Isn't your philosophy that they are poor simply because they are lazy and stupid, and that they don't deserve any better?
Take a lesson from Denmark - currently notorious for its xenophobic legislation. In Denmark we have for at least the last decade introduced laws that make ever less attractive for foreigner to come and work or study, and we are now facing a situation where, in not too many years, we will have a large number of people in the retirement age, but too few younger people to do the work necessary to produce the revenue for care. One solution would have been to get more immigrants into the country - the fact of the matter is that immigrants don't really 'come and steal our jobs', they come and produce taxable income, just to mention one, very basic thing, and that benefits everyone.
All in all it is very stupid to stop immigration, especially of young talented people like students. America rose to greatness in the world, not because of immense wealth in natural resources - just look to Saudi Arabia for an example of what that kind of wealth does on its own; and it certainly wasn't because of military power either - need I mention Iraq and Vietnam? In fact, the main, if not the only, reason for America's greatness is that there has been a steady influx of immigrants, who have brought new talent, initiative and ideas. This has gone on from the earliest pioneers until fairly recently, and until fairly recently, the US has been on top when it comes to wealth, education and influence.
And that is another matter - state funding or not, you have the educational resources you want, as a people, at the end of the day. The religious fundamentalists wouldn't have any influence on schools if it wasn't because a lot of people agree that 'too much education is bad for you'. All the funding in the world will make no difference if it is spent on teaching children that 'Evolution is just a theory' and that intelligent design is just as valid.
What is at stake here is the US' position in the world - I, being a foreigner, don't have as much invested in America's reputation and well-being as an American would, or should, but it would be very sad to see a nation that was once admired and envied crumble into the dust and become a sleepy, introverted backwater.
No, the real problem is that people think that equality is about everybody being exactly the same - which I personally think is a distortion manufactured for the purpose of disparaging all serious discussion about inequality.
Equality means 'all men (and in these modern times women too) are born equal under the law' - ie that the same law applies t oeverybody, no matter whether you are rich or poor, clever or stupid. Nobody in their right mind has ever imagined that all people are exactly equal when it comes to talent, intelligence etc.
The problem with standardised tests isn't the idea of testing students' skills, but the sad fact that once you have the tests, that is all you strive for. If there were no tests, the schools would ideally strive to simply provide the best they can, whereas when you have the tests, you strive to score as much as possible. It's like intelligence testing - if you are tested unprepared, the test may show something about how intelligent you are, but if you are allowed to study the test and prepare for it, you can suddenly demonstrate an huge intelligence, except of course that the result is now worthless.
I am all for testing and making the quality of schools comparable, so the parents have a better chance of choosing the right school for their children, but the standardised tests are simply bogus - a bad attempt at solving some problems, or even a tool for deceiving the parents and the public.
The submitter writes as if these things were solid facts written in stone, whereas the fact is that nobody really knows. Sadly, building on what "intelligence" comes out of CIA just isn't feasible, as the arguments for the war in Iraq amply demonstrate. SO, the power outages "may have been caused by hackers" or something; or they may have been caused by something else. We rely heavily on advanced technology, which is a bit like balancing on a knifes edge - it is bound to go wrong from time to time, sometimes massively so, especially when stiff competition makes funding for maintenance less abundant.
Apart from that, it isn't exactly difficult to break in to this kind of system - in the past we have seen hackers walk all over the place where they aren't supposed to have been. If script kiddies can do it, is isn't surprising if higly trained miltary personnel can do it too.
But I sincerely doubt that they would leave lots of traces and clues lying around for the more paranoid factions on slashdot to play with. Script-kiddies, yes, but if you are professional, whether criminal or some foreign government, you don't just blunder stupidly in and trigger alarms, or leave your droppings all over the place.
I can see how this kind of nonsense is politically useful. Hasn't the American public caught on to this yet?
Yes, I know that will get a number of people out their chairs, but programming in this context is simply a skill you pick if you need it. I studied maths and physics, admittedly a while ago; programming is quite simply not the way to learn good research practise, and it is not relevant for your theoretical understanding. I personally think it is in many ways very wise not to teach programming as part of most science education - you have to learn to walk before you can run.
This really ties in with this article: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/28/2217230
So, we don't want to fund proper science, or proper education, but we want to build machines that can think for us, so we can concentrate on the important things, like believing that the war in Iraq is about bringing freedom and democracy to the poor people and that the world was created in 6 days (BTW, how can one even talk about days before the creation of Heaven and Earth, and crucially the sun?)
Not that this kind of research is bad in itself - we already have 'logic computers' that can construct mathematical proofs, which has made it possible to advance in some areas, where brute force seemed to be the only way forward and where the task simply was too overwhelming for a human to take on. But the danger is, of course that this kind of technology will make us intellectually lazy and incompetent, just like many people now are "psysically incompetent" because we have machines to the work for us.
- what Microsoft's priorities were. Compared to Windows 2 and 3, 95 was a revelation. It looked better, the interface was far better, there were even a couple of technical improvements. W95 is probably what made Microsoft's commercial success more than anything else; I remember a lot of people resisted moving away from it for a long time despite its all too many, all too obvious flaws.
But this comment from Gates really highlights that Microsoft's main priority has never been to produce a technically good product; to them look and feel are much more important. As I recall, they spent a lot of resources getting the user interface right - one can only assume they didn't spend nearly as much on getting it to actually work.
You're probably right. Most of modern science (Mathematics, quantum mechanics, relativity theory etc) was founded in Europe and reached its high point just around WWII, during which time many of the scientists migrated to America. Europe lost much of its religiosity at the same time as the great scienfic discoveries were made, whereas America has always held on to religion. Education has certainly played a major part in this, but I think there is a fundamental difference in how intellectual pursuits are viewed in general. In Europe much of the culture was shaped by an elite that held intellectuals in hig esteem - kings and princes had their court astronomers, alchemists, poets, musicians etc, the upper classes followed suit by supporting the same things, so being intellectual was a high status thing.
America, on the other hand, has never had kings and has always had their misgivings about that very thing; so by association intellectuals have always been seen as suspicious, not least because they also tend to be irreligious or atheists. And now that the big stars of science, Einstein, Bohr etc, have all died, people are much more willing to let their schools turn into Christian madrasas. Of course it doesn't really help that things are taking a turn for the worse in the West, especially in America, I suppose - in the 50es and 60es our lives got constantly better "because of science", so people loved it, but now people feel disappointed that "science" doesn't seem to come up with more improvements to solve the problems, never mind that actual science still is our only hope for warding off the climate and energy crisis we've landed ourselves in. So it is only natural that they turn away from science, perhaps, and try religion.
As everybody has already observed, the two parties are almost identical - there is certainly little difference in ideology as far as I can tell, so why vote at all? well, I suppose McCain is a bit more isolationist than Obama, perhaps - who knows, really? But the differences are only skin deep, if that. Where have the big issues gone? Isn't it because you simply can't become a serious contender in politics unless you have massive financial backing? And you only get that if you appeal to the people with lots of money: the big corporations, the big churches etc. So it matters little whether 95% (or whatever) of the American population is irreligious and socialist, because only the candidates that the rich like will ever get a chance. (Yes, yes, I know, the proportion of socialists in America is perhaps not quite 95%; it was just an example).
And that is not democracy. It may look a lot like it, but it isn't; ideally, in democracy more or less all candidates have equal access to the public's attention, so people can make up their own minds about them. And of course there would be proportional representation as well. The political process might be less efficient, but experience from the rest of the world shows that it works well enough.