If you genuinely think that Sweden should thank the US for the internet (as if it mattered where things were invented, given that all inventions build upon previous inventions), then the US should also thank Europe for the World Wide Web, developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (which Sweden co-sponsors), without which hardly anyone except us geeks would be likely to use the internet.
While relatively-speaking Sweden may still be doing a acceptable job with its tax funded services, they have become an increasing problem for the last ten years. The major issues in the past two elections (most recently in September last year), have revolved around:
An under-funded police, with way too few officers especially in scarcely populated areas. The percentage of crimes solved has gone down, particularly for car burglaries and such crimes that may be considered less important on the whole but are important to give citizens a sense of safety.
2) A declining health care system, which while still having good technical quality (Sweden is home to a lot of medical research), and providing care to everyone, has incredibly long operation queues for various non-urgent (but still frustrating) conditions. Would you believe me if I said that for some types of operations, the queue is in the range of years rather than weeks? It's true, although it does vary a lot between counties.
As an aside, I should perhaps take the opportunity to also mention the privatization of healthcare services in Stockholm county, ruled by a liberal-conservative-christian coalition for the past several years (until they were ousted by a largely skeptic and hostile population last year and replaced with the social democrats, greens and left party who already held national majority). Many hospitals built with tax money were sold (underpriced) to private firms, although taxes still provide the actual funding with the exception for smaller fees which are present for publicly owned hospitals as well. My analysis is that the public was frustrated with declining healthcare, giving the right-wing a window of opportunity to attempt their recipe for solving it -- with privatization. Would it have worked had it continued? Your guess is as good as mine. But the right-wing coalition left the county with a huge budget deficit I'd rather live without.
A declining education system, with insufficient discipline and decreasing scores, particularly in immigrant-heavy areas and an insufficient number of teachers to help students with special needs.
An increasing sick leave problem -- a surprisingly large part of the workforce is on long-term sick leave, causing an absolutely gigantic hole in the public finances.
An aging population (having to cope with poor service at publicly financed retirement homes), resulting in fewer people having to provide finances for more and more retirees.
I should also point out that while a lot of people don't pay national tax, everyone pays local tax to the county -- between 28 and 33 % depending on what parties hold majority county in the local governments.
In summary, Sweden has major problems in some areas and emulating it in every respect is not necessarily the solution. I should perhaps say though that I support the basis of the system, and do not want to see further privatizations (which are impossible to reverse and in my opinion are more likely to go wrong than right).
The EU (which doesn't even include all European countries, at least not yet) actually exports more to the US (in financial terms), than the US exports to the EU.
This is an interesting discussion, but it's difficult to draw any conclusions without knowing what programming is shown. Some people seem to assume that what they get is typical American shows, but I doubt very much that this is the case (mostly for the language and culture barrier, and also because buying foreign shows is expensive).
Furthermore, their advertisements (which some in this discussion have speculated about), if they even have any, may also look very different from what we have in the west and may not necessarily equate happyness with owning things like typical western consumerism. Perhaps they sell their products with a somewhat different strategy, more appropriate for the local culture.
"Prohibiting violence, greed, commercialism, and consumerism is very different from prohibiting nudity and profanity. The latter concerns things that everyone can learn about naturally(nudity), or by exposure to adults(profanity... and probably exposure to grade school for this one as well). The former are some of the kinds of ideas that storytelling is supposed to teach about."
Don't people learn about violence, greed and commercialism naturally as well? Why is it that storytelling is "supposed" to teach about those things but not nudity or profanity? Where is the magic border that separates these categories? Seems to me that this is merely some sort of defence for censuring the ideas that a certain culture (the American culture?) dislikes. Trying to see this with cultural objectivity I don't think the point holds up.
How can you say the council does not have any real power? Over half of the legislation in many member countries come straight from the EU, which means the council (sometimes combined with the parliament). Explain yourself, please.
I do not believe that Europeans generally dislike the governmental structure of the United States, but rather the policy of the government which is significantly more to the right on the political scale. The way I feel is, if we have to become a big federal country in order to stand up to the US (which I sadly feel is increasingly necessary, for many reasons), then so be it. There will be drawbacks as well but we will have to accept them as the alternative is worse. Small independant countries are shark meat in today's world.
As for socialism, well, the EU institutions as such and the treaties that founded them really are fairly liberal (in the non-American sense, where liberalism is considered freedom, etc).
I think your comparison with the USSR is quite a bit off. We're talking about old and stable democracies with market economies.
Except for one Red Hat distribution (I think 8), I never found a distro that could configure X for me (although most claimed they would) -- on either of my computers or monitors. Usually I would just get error messages and would have to tweak the file manually.
I think that many of the problems people experience with Linux can be traced down to the fact that the desktop environments have a somewhat narrow focus.
KDE and GNOME have come a long way towards addressing issues such as consistancy and ease-of-use in user interfaces. They may still lag slightly behind Windows but overall they're clean, elegant and friendly.
The problem is that the desktop environments really aren't particularly aware of the lower levels of the computer. They know how to display graphics using X and how to produce sound but that's pretty much it. If the desktop environments could be extended to cover other vital aspects of the system, such as hardware installation / configuration, then I think Linux would be ready for anyone's desktop.
The problem, of course, is that this is rather hard to do as the various flavours of GNU/Linux (and other *nix and *BSD systems) do things rather differently. Still, I think it could be done using some kind of extensible system with modules to handle distribution specific things.
My point isn't that he was admitted. My point was that he selected ITT (or whatever the name was) in place of supposedly prestigous MIT as his first choice. As for the "premise of the whole program", I'm not disputing that there may be another perspective. But you have yet to provide one.
You can't imagine how sad that makes me feel for the future of American IT. Obviously, if Americans find their truth in weekly communion with 60 Minutes , we are doomed.
Why the heck did you assume I was American for some reason? I'm not. In any case, I found the story very interesting. I'm not claiming my impression from the story is founded in science, but it's silly to disregard all TV programs as many have at least a minor grain of truth them, and frequently a lot more. As for this particular student's father holding a position at Cornell, why do you feel that is relevant?
There was a 60 minutes story some time ago about a famous Indian engineering school. Only a fraction of a percentage of the applicants were admitted, but that still meant several thousand people a year. The skills these students attained were extremely broad -- convering virtually all fields of engineering, including computer science and very in-depth, too. Many of the students there had arranged fall back solutions with colleges such as MIT if they failed to get admitted. I doubted before, but this episode left me convinced that a fair amount of Indian engineers are far more well-educated than the vast majority of Europeans and Americans, at least in the technology and science fields.
What you say is valid for developers of DLLs, but not developers who make use of DLLs. People who want to use shared components are likely to have to confront this problem sooner or later.
M$ ain't going to change it's product (Windoze) to accomodate the legal problems of one Continent
Actually, they probably would if it comes to that. They make a lot of their revenue in Europe, perhaps even as much or more as in the US (the EU does have 380 million people after all, and many members are among the richest countries in the world). Microsoft is a company that wants it all, they wouldn't ever sacrifice the European market and let open source establish a bigger base there from which to eventually take on Microsoft with increased strength.
Your suggestions don't solve DLL hell, given that some shared components must be explicitly registered, and only one version of the component can be registered at once.
Developers like to make use of existing components, there's no use re-inventing the wheel over and over. Also, some development tools require functionality not delivered as standard with the OS, and require vendors to ship additional DLLs.
There's nothing wrong with using existing components. However, I do agree with you that having to register components before they can be used is silly and has caused a world of trouble. There should have been another way for Microsoft to solve this.
You raise an interesting question. I can only speak for Sweden which is where I was born, grew up and live.
The distinction between "nerds" and "normal people" definitely exists outside the US -- and is perhaps universal. Most people of basic school age don't spend a large portion of their free time in front of their computers coding. I think this intense focus on one particular area is where "nerds" were different from other people in their age groups.
However, and I think this is an important point, in many countries high school is a kind of trade school. In Sweden, compulsory school stops at age 15 or so. Nearly all students then proceed to a volunteer school, gymnasiet, selecting one out of 20 or so three-year education programs which suits their interests. Programs included, among many others:
The vehicle program: students were tought how to repair cars and other vehicles (and sometimes to drive them, with driving lessons and sometimes a license funded by the school).
The nursing program: students were taught skills needed to work jobs at retirement homes and other institutions that care for people.
The individual program: students that lacked motivation and sufficient grades were given a chance to catch up, aiming to apply for a regular program later on.
The electronics program: students were given basic skills in handing electronics, and got jobs such as being electricians or electronics repairmen.
The social sciences program: students received additional heavy education in history, geography and other social sciences, and got jobs that may include working for their local government carrying out investigations or other matters. People in this program sometimes would continue to college to develop additional additional skills.
The natural sciences program: students were given a very solid ground (complementing that which they had received in earlier years) in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, material computational skills, electronics skills and computer skills. This program was largely theoretically oriented and was not meant to lead to a job directly, but provided the foundation for students to continue to college and become engineers and scientists.
This particular specialization relatively early also explains why Sweden (and other European) college degrees are shorter in terms of years than equivalent US degreees -- the basics in the profession or study of choice were already taught in high school, so college was even more specialized.
With that said however, I should point out that this specialized programs all included a relatively broad range of subjects -- but with a certain very heavy focus. The natural sciences program for example would include five maths courses, while most other programs would only have one or two. The social sciences program on the other hand would have more history and related issues than other programs. And many programs had courses shared by no other education program.
This early specialization means that nerds separate from their schoolmates aged 15 or 16 and join other people in the natural sciences program (usually) who have the same inclination for programming, maths or science. They find "equals" and the risk of being rejected is significantly reduced, if not entirely eliminated.
I did not find that my early interest in programming (which ignited around 11 or 12 years of age) caused any significant problems. Many classmates at the time were interested in gaming or the occasional programming on the C64, C128 (and later the Amiga) and joined me in technical discussions or to seek assistance. In gymnasiet, everyone around me were interested in science and technology and frequently engaged in more or less serious discussions on the topic.
As someone already pointed out, the concept of "jocks" also is alien to European school systems. People who engaged in sports did so on their own free time, it was not something the school got involved in (other than providing the normal gym classes).
You raise some good points, I'd just like to add something:
A country has the right to issue restrictions against foreign companies working on their soil. The US actually has prevented European companies from merging (with other European companies) and issued various other restrictions to European companies as well. This is pretty routine stuff.
I don't particularly think this will affect EU-US relations in general. The trade people go their own way, and in fact EU trade commisioner Pascal Lamy and US trade representative Robert Zoelick are said to be close private friends (even though they sometimes battle in the political arena).
If convicted by the European antitrust authorities, Microsoft could appeal the case to a real court (the European Court of Justice), which actually has a recent history of reversing commisioner Monti's decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
I think having 30 times more people is a large part of the explanation for that (although not necessarily the only factor).
If you genuinely think that Sweden should thank the US for the internet (as if it mattered where things were invented, given that all inventions build upon previous inventions), then the US should also thank Europe for the World Wide Web, developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (which Sweden co-sponsors), without which hardly anyone except us geeks would be likely to use the internet.
While relatively-speaking Sweden may still be doing a acceptable job with its tax funded services, they have become an increasing problem for the last ten years. The major issues in the past two elections (most recently in September last year), have revolved around:
An under-funded police, with way too few officers especially in scarcely populated areas. The percentage of crimes solved has gone down, particularly for car burglaries and such crimes that may be considered less important on the whole but are important to give citizens a sense of safety.
2) A declining health care system, which while still having good technical quality (Sweden is home to a lot of medical research), and providing care to everyone, has incredibly long operation queues for various non-urgent (but still frustrating) conditions. Would you believe me if I said that for some types of operations, the queue is in the range of years rather than weeks? It's true, although it does vary a lot between counties.
As an aside, I should perhaps take the opportunity to also mention the privatization of healthcare services in Stockholm county, ruled by a liberal-conservative-christian coalition for the past several years (until they were ousted by a largely skeptic and hostile population last year and replaced with the social democrats, greens and left party who already held national majority). Many hospitals built with tax money were sold (underpriced) to private firms, although taxes still provide the actual funding with the exception for smaller fees which are present for publicly owned hospitals as well. My analysis is that the public was frustrated with declining healthcare, giving the right-wing a window of opportunity to attempt their recipe for solving it -- with privatization. Would it have worked had it continued? Your guess is as good as mine. But the right-wing coalition left the county with a huge budget deficit I'd rather live without.
A declining education system, with insufficient discipline and decreasing scores, particularly in immigrant-heavy areas and an insufficient number of teachers to help students with special needs.
An increasing sick leave problem -- a surprisingly large part of the workforce is on long-term sick leave, causing an absolutely gigantic hole in the public finances.
An aging population (having to cope with poor service at publicly financed retirement homes), resulting in fewer people having to provide finances for more and more retirees.
I should also point out that while a lot of people don't pay national tax, everyone pays local tax to the county -- between 28 and 33 % depending on what parties hold majority county in the local governments.
In summary, Sweden has major problems in some areas and emulating it in every respect is not necessarily the solution. I should perhaps say though that I support the basis of the system, and do not want to see further privatizations (which are impossible to reverse and in my opinion are more likely to go wrong than right).
"LeftOfCentre"
Stockholm, Sweden, EU
The EU (which doesn't even include all European countries, at least not yet) actually exports more to the US (in financial terms), than the US exports to the EU.
Yes, Denmark is in the EU. There are some EU wide initiatives to combat spam as well, although I don't know what the current status is.
I hate to write a "me too" post, but I have to say it's a very interesting idea and I think you're right.
This is an interesting discussion, but it's difficult to draw any conclusions without knowing what programming is shown. Some people seem to assume that what they get is typical American shows, but I doubt very much that this is the case (mostly for the language and culture barrier, and also because buying foreign shows is expensive).
Furthermore, their advertisements (which some in this discussion have speculated about), if they even have any, may also look very different from what we have in the west and may not necessarily equate happyness with owning things like typical western consumerism. Perhaps they sell their products with a somewhat different strategy, more appropriate for the local culture.
"Prohibiting violence, greed, commercialism, and consumerism is very different from prohibiting nudity and profanity. The latter concerns things that everyone can learn about naturally(nudity), or by exposure to adults(profanity... and probably exposure to grade school for this one as well). The former are some of the kinds of ideas that storytelling is supposed to teach about."
Don't people learn about violence, greed and commercialism naturally as well? Why is it that storytelling is "supposed" to teach about those things but not nudity or profanity? Where is the magic border that separates these categories? Seems to me that this is merely some sort of defence for censuring the ideas that a certain culture (the American culture?) dislikes. Trying to see this with cultural objectivity I don't think the point holds up.
Perhaps software patents are formally not allowed, but in practice they do exist...
How can you say the council does not have any real power? Over half of the legislation in many member countries come straight from the EU, which means the council (sometimes combined with the parliament). Explain yourself, please.
I do not believe that Europeans generally dislike the governmental structure of the United States, but rather the policy of the government which is significantly more to the right on the political scale. The way I feel is, if we have to become a big federal country in order to stand up to the US (which I sadly feel is increasingly necessary, for many reasons), then so be it. There will be drawbacks as well but we will have to accept them as the alternative is worse. Small independant countries are shark meat in today's world.
As for socialism, well, the EU institutions as such and the treaties that founded them really are fairly liberal (in the non-American sense, where liberalism is considered freedom, etc).
I think your comparison with the USSR is quite a bit off. We're talking about old and stable democracies with market economies.
Except for one Red Hat distribution (I think 8), I never found a distro that could configure X for me (although most claimed they would) -- on either of my computers or monitors. Usually I would just get error messages and would have to tweak the file manually.
I think that many of the problems people experience with Linux can be traced down to the fact that the desktop environments have a somewhat narrow focus.
KDE and GNOME have come a long way towards addressing issues such as consistancy and ease-of-use in user interfaces. They may still lag slightly behind Windows but overall they're clean, elegant and friendly.
The problem is that the desktop environments really aren't particularly aware of the lower levels of the computer. They know how to display graphics using X and how to produce sound but that's pretty much it. If the desktop environments could be extended to cover other vital aspects of the system, such as hardware installation / configuration, then I think Linux would be ready for anyone's desktop.
The problem, of course, is that this is rather hard to do as the various flavours of GNU/Linux (and other *nix and *BSD systems) do things rather differently. Still, I think it could be done using some kind of extensible system with modules to handle distribution specific things.
Thanks for the info, interesting.
My point isn't that he was admitted. My point was that he selected ITT (or whatever the name was) in place of supposedly prestigous MIT as his first choice. As for the "premise of the whole program", I'm not disputing that there may be another perspective. But you have yet to provide one.
You can't imagine how sad that makes me feel for the future of American IT. Obviously, if Americans find their truth in weekly communion with 60 Minutes , we are doomed.
Why the heck did you assume I was American for some reason? I'm not. In any case, I found the story very interesting. I'm not claiming my impression from the story is founded in science, but it's silly to disregard all TV programs as many have at least a minor grain of truth them, and frequently a lot more. As for this particular student's father holding a position at Cornell, why do you feel that is relevant?
There was a 60 minutes story some time ago about a famous Indian engineering school. Only a fraction of a percentage of the applicants were admitted, but that still meant several thousand people a year. The skills these students attained were extremely broad -- convering virtually all fields of engineering, including computer science and very in-depth, too. Many of the students there had arranged fall back solutions with colleges such as MIT if they failed to get admitted. I doubted before, but this episode left me convinced that a fair amount of Indian engineers are far more well-educated than the vast majority of Europeans and Americans, at least in the technology and science fields.
"US spending on R&D is roughly equal to spending by the rest of the OECD combined"
Please provide a source for this claim, it sounds incredible.
What you say is valid for developers of DLLs, but not developers who make use of DLLs. People who want to use shared components are likely to have to confront this problem sooner or later.
M$ ain't going to change it's product (Windoze) to accomodate the legal problems of one Continent
Actually, they probably would if it comes to that. They make a lot of their revenue in Europe, perhaps even as much or more as in the US (the EU does have 380 million people after all, and many members are among the richest countries in the world). Microsoft is a company that wants it all, they wouldn't ever sacrifice the European market and let open source establish a bigger base there from which to eventually take on Microsoft with increased strength.
Your suggestions don't solve DLL hell, given that some shared components must be explicitly registered, and only one version of the component can be registered at once.
Developers like to make use of existing components, there's no use re-inventing the wheel over and over. Also, some development tools require functionality not delivered as standard with the OS, and require vendors to ship additional DLLs. There's nothing wrong with using existing components. However, I do agree with you that having to register components before they can be used is silly and has caused a world of trouble. There should have been another way for Microsoft to solve this.
You raise an interesting question. I can only speak for Sweden which is where I was born, grew up and live.
The distinction between "nerds" and "normal people" definitely exists outside the US -- and is perhaps universal. Most people of basic school age don't spend a large portion of their free time in front of their computers coding. I think this intense focus on one particular area is where "nerds" were different from other people in their age groups.
However, and I think this is an important point, in many countries high school is a kind of trade school. In Sweden, compulsory school stops at age 15 or so. Nearly all students then proceed to a volunteer school, gymnasiet, selecting one out of 20 or so three-year education programs which suits their interests. Programs included, among many others:
The vehicle program: students were tought how to repair cars and other vehicles (and sometimes to drive them, with driving lessons and sometimes a license funded by the school).
The nursing program: students were taught skills needed to work jobs at retirement homes and other institutions that care for people.
The individual program: students that lacked motivation and sufficient grades were given a chance to catch up, aiming to apply for a regular program later on.
The electronics program: students were given basic skills in handing electronics, and got jobs such as being electricians or electronics repairmen.
The social sciences program: students received additional heavy education in history, geography and other social sciences, and got jobs that may include working for their local government carrying out investigations or other matters. People in this program sometimes would continue to college to develop additional additional skills.
The natural sciences program: students were given a very solid ground (complementing that which they had received in earlier years) in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, material computational skills, electronics skills and computer skills. This program was largely theoretically oriented and was not meant to lead to a job directly, but provided the foundation for students to continue to college and become engineers and scientists.
This particular specialization relatively early also explains why Sweden (and other European) college degrees are shorter in terms of years than equivalent US degreees -- the basics in the profession or study of choice were already taught in high school, so college was even more specialized.
With that said however, I should point out that this specialized programs all included a relatively broad range of subjects -- but with a certain very heavy focus. The natural sciences program for example would include five maths courses, while most other programs would only have one or two. The social sciences program on the other hand would have more history and related issues than other programs. And many programs had courses shared by no other education program.
This early specialization means that nerds separate from their schoolmates aged 15 or 16 and join other people in the natural sciences program (usually) who have the same inclination for programming, maths or science. They find "equals" and the risk of being rejected is significantly reduced, if not entirely eliminated.
I did not find that my early interest in programming (which ignited around 11 or 12 years of age) caused any significant problems. Many classmates at the time were interested in gaming or the occasional programming on the C64, C128 (and later the Amiga) and joined me in technical discussions or to seek assistance. In gymnasiet, everyone around me were interested in science and technology and frequently engaged in more or less serious discussions on the topic.
As someone already pointed out, the concept of "jocks" also is alien to European school systems. People who engaged in sports did so on their own free time, it was not something the school got involved in (other than providing the normal gym classes).
You raise some good points, I'd just like to add something: A country has the right to issue restrictions against foreign companies working on their soil. The US actually has prevented European companies from merging (with other European companies) and issued various other restrictions to European companies as well. This is pretty routine stuff. I don't particularly think this will affect EU-US relations in general. The trade people go their own way, and in fact EU trade commisioner Pascal Lamy and US trade representative Robert Zoelick are said to be close private friends (even though they sometimes battle in the political arena).
If convicted by the European antitrust authorities, Microsoft could appeal the case to a real court (the European Court of Justice), which actually has a recent history of reversing commisioner Monti's decisions.