Come now. Jocks designing ASDIC? Two tin cans on the ends of a piece of string, possibly.
But then, as our English teacher remarked on seeing the football coach wearing an academic gown, "You don't often see a chimpanzee in a black nightshirt"
Try writing on the thing when it's pressed against your ear. Difficult, no? If you have trouble with handsfree cables (no, I don't like them much either)I rather assume the W will work with a Bluetooth headset, a much neater option.
As politicians have good cause to know, pissing off the middle classes is not a smart move. It rebounds. The legal position of cannabis is a good example: politicians are having to take into account that respectable, well-off people are worried that their children will get arrested, and heavy handed enforcement becomes a vote loser the moment one party is perceived as having a more liberal agenda.
So Sony et al are either not thinking of the possible longer term consequences, or this is a short-term measure because they suspect in the longer run they will lose this war.
In the 60s and 70s, students demonstrated against bad governments (South Africa, Greece, US involvement in Vietnam, Chile and Cambodia). Perhaps the time is coming when they will demonstrate against overbearing corporations.
A lot of the arguments so far seem to be of the "why give up smoking, I might fall under a bus" variety. From the same people that continue to buy SUVs?
Considering the amount of money spent on practising for war every year - "defense", the proposal to the EU is peanuts. It is a proposal to start investigating the possibilities of a very real threat. I seem to recall the Siberian meteor impact as estimated as equivalent to about a 30MT H-bomb, and we were very lucky it hit where it did. It also seems that satellite photography is identifying more and more impact sites on the Earth. When I was a kid very few of these were recognised, and it seems reasonable to me that if we are learning that the frequency of such hits is much higher than expected, we should start to do something. It's also worth remembering that the big impact on Jupiter occurred only a few years ago, and that very visible impact may well have concentrated people's minds. As telescopes get better, astronomers are realising there is far more debris out there than anybody knew- the old idea of 9 tidy planets and an asteroid belt has turned into a solar system full of all kinds of junk, moonlets, comet formation belts- the Solar System seems to be more like Mexico City than Singapore, if you see what I mean. A billion dollars sound like a lot, but how much is the ABM system going to cost?
Dealing with a hard rock or a dirty snowball could need very different approaches (gentle push versus big bang?). Just because a multi-mile wide asteroid could be undeflectable and fatal, doesn;t mean that the real threat might come from a thing 100M across - obviously deflectable with the right technology, but nuking it could result in thousands of destructive small impacts.
To sum up this ramble:
Destructive meteor impacts do occur on Earth
Some of them are potentially preventable
The cost of research is probably going to be far less than the US is going to spend developing nuclear warheads this year
The cost of stopping a small asteroid could be a lot less than the estimated budget for stopping Saddam Hussein
All in all, it looks far from a waste of EU money.
I really don't like the idea of entrusting my digital everything to one small box that has "steal me" written on it in big letters, (especially when you cannot use all the functions simultaneously). After a period of deep initial suspicion I've been doing some evaluation on Bluetooth recently and it seems to me like the connectivity idea in that is much more sound. Bluetooth headset, phone with sensible keys and a small, greyscale display giving excellent battery life, PDA with a decent screen and processor (it doesn't have the same standby power needs as a phone because it isn't always listening). And, as for cameras, even with the small image sensors of digital cameras you need quite a large zoom lens for good pictures. To me it makes sense for someone to produce a good quality camera for which you can use your PDA as the monitor screen, something better than the optically poor add-ons we have seen so far.
It seems sensible to optimise the gadget for its function and enable the gadgets to talk.
If they also had a common battery charger and interchangeable battery, I guess that would be functionality heaven. Your PDA would be able to use expensive mobile phone connectivity only when necessary, otherwise using the local wireless network: I can't see a phone manufacturer wanting to allow that any time soon. So, although this thing looks like a v. cool gadget, I remain unconvinced.
I believe that ABB, in Thailand, tried the idea of running a broadband fibre THROUGH the Earth lead of an overhead powerline. 600 000V on the phases does tend to discourage vandals from stealing the fibre.
The problem with any wire-based HF transmission system is reflections, standing waves, radiation and losses, and a power system by its very nature is not designed for HF. But the existence of the infrastructure - distribution stations, ducting, overhead supports - could make it a very good solution for stringing fibre. Overhead cables are inherently less prone to backhoe incidents than buried cables. There is a benefit to the electrical utility in that they can use the fibre to run their own control systems easily.
Any such idea needs to be planned in from the start- it could be a cheap add-on to rural electrification in places like India and China, but much harder to do in the US or Europe where cables have long service lives.
Reading the patent claim and comments this looks like a version of the old book key. In one company I worked for, encrypted messages were sent using a particularly obscure german technical dictionary in which all the entries were numbered. Usual issues of key distribution, plus the groaning tedium of whoever had to go through the original set of copies numbering about 10 000 entries. Any competent intelligence gathering system like Bletchley Park would rapidly have had enough messages to be able to do frequency analysis.
OK, so this is a book key with additional layers of encryption, but _anyone_ can do the additional layers. It just slows down the encoding and decoding. To be useful, cryptography must not introduce unacceptable traffic delays so the message becomes useless before it arrives. An on-line credit card checker that takes an hour to get a response will not do very well commercially. How fast is this system?
I lived there for 7 years. I like multicultural cities, and I really dislike drunken, abusive, shaven headed white Brits. But I was talking about border controls, and I gather even the UK immigration service admits many of its officers are racists - but they can't replace them because (a)it takes time to train people, and (b)what decent person who wants a career wants to join an organisation stuffed with racists?
Faint praise is all you'll get from me for any programming language. After all, look at current human languages. Despite thousands of years of development they all have big problems:
English - mixture of phonetic and non-phonetic, inconsistent grammatical rules, too many different versions with inconsistencies of use.
Japanese - too many different representations, too difficult for most people
French - poor phonetics, some convoluted expressions, too many written inflexions that sound the same.
German - unnecessary and inconsistent inflexion, over-use of compound words, difficult verb placement for simultaneous translation.
Despite which we continue to use these languages and users of each continue to defend their superiority. Oh, and the bugs don't get fixed.
I think the best we can do is be realistic, and try not to get too hung up on the sucks/cool dichotomy.
Being an old cynic, I suspect there are too many long words in this memo for it to have gone very far up the food chain. Who are these people and what is their access to opinion formers in management?
Not that I'm suggesting they are wrong, I have no way of knowing either way, I just think that producing memos like this - and getting them leaked - is probably not the smartest way of getting the declared objective.
Admission: I use Java. It isn't perfect. It uses too much memory. It isn't hugely fast. But the applications work and the amount of debugging we have had to do is a tiny fraction of what I would have expected with C++. Its suitability for a given project depends on a whole host of factors not considered in the memo, and it would not surprise me if, for some internal Sun projects, it was inappropriate in its present stage of development.
I can't really see how this is different from a grossly fat notebook. The main convenience factor is the thinness of the keyboard, but this is being typed on a normal thin notebook computer and the keyboard is not higher off the desk than standard.
In fact, the Compaq Tablet PC is basically a standard notebook the wrong way round - the motherboard is on the screen bit, the keyboard is the thin part. This is such a logical change I'm amazed it never happened before. All that is needed is a foldout backrest and you have a similar layout to this Vaio.
If it's going to be really significantly cheaper than a new Powerbook or Tablet, there might be some space saving advantages, but an attached keyboard will never be as convenient as a detachable one. So what precisely is the real advantage of this thing?
It reminds me of the Sony PDA with its idiot keyboard, orientation all wrong, keys too small, not actually any faster or more convenient than Graffiti. Form over function.
The fact is that we are nearly 100 years after the Wright Brothers and the mechanisms for rescuing people from aircraft - all kinds of aircraft - are still very poor (except for the ejector seats for some military aircraft.) We accept that if something goes seriously wrong with virtually any kind of aircraft in the air, the occupants will get killed. In terms of aircraft disasters the Shuttle destruction was right down there with light aircraft crashes in terms of number of people killed, though not in financial damage. Far more people have been killed by systems failures in commercial aircraft, and I would be interested to know which is the safer form of transport in terms of either passenger miles or passenger hours. But then, whether you call it cynicism or realism, we accept a level of failure in all transport systems which is capable of killing people. We allow people to ride bicycles in motorised traffic. We allow manufacturers to build cars that are capable of traveling fast enough that a brake or steering failure can kill not only the occupants but anyone who gets in the way. We allow the construction of ships that break up in heavy seas, of railways where trains can pass red lights and crash. There is no public contract about this: we never actually get a chance to vote on the level of risk we want in our transport systems. What we do is react to disasters, and politicians have to decide based on that reaction whether to take some kind of action. Sometimes they do, and as a result we have anti-lock brakes, double-hulled ships, crash barriers on freeways and autoroutes, airbags, automatic train protection systems, and a host of other technologies.
The Shuttle crews are unusual, superior human beings. But they should not need to be heroes, any more than someone who gets on a plane in LA to fly to a meeting in Tokyo is a hero.
Because if the exploration of space is ever to become commonplace, we have to get rid of the idea that this is a dangerous enterprise for heroes. We need to follow the same rules that apply to everything else. We need to ask nasty questions like "Why can't tiles be replaced in orbit, since we have had 18 years to think about things like this?".
A WW1 biplane could keep flying after it had been shot full of holes, yet the Shuttle seems to have a number of extremely fragile technologies failure of any one of which could destroy it on re-entry. If that's so, why haven't we developed a better technology? Is it the mindset that needs to change as much as the design?
If you ever go to a farm show you may see the people who restore old industrial engines. These things used to drive small farm generators, milk pumps, air pumps and the like. They were almost all water cooled by convection, and the smaller ones did not have radiators (so called) but just had a tank of water on top which was allowed to boil off slowly and be replaced from time to time. Exactly the same as this cooler method. The benefit was, in fact, generally increased longevity and reliability, provided that the ports in the jacket and the head were properly designed to prevent dead spaces where the slow convective flow did not circulate.
I saw one guy once using one of these to cook his lunch, using a pan in the water tank as a water bath to heat soup, and they can also get water to the boiling point to make tea. However, and computer system which gets water to the boiling point is not likely to be terribly effective (unless we go back to tube technology, of course)
where there are CCTV cameras even in small market towns.
However, I recently asked a community policeman about this. His view is that they are simply a complete waste of money, but they reassure the large number of unbelievably stupid Brits who never stop to think. Anyone who cares to visit UK towns late at night will see the usual muggers and vandals, all wearing the same identical grey sweatshirts and anoraks with identical deep grey hoods. Any criminal with more than one brain cell will have that one figured out in no time. The CCTV cameras may catch drunks who are too stoned to care - another delightful facet of UK life - but will then have no deterrent effect whatsoever.
The simple problem is that for the last 30+ years the UK has put large amounts of money into policing Northern Ireland and playing at being a world power (despite being poorer than Germany, France or Italy which don't play those games any more) and is now too cheap to have a proper police force. All this biometric scan and CCTV stuff is about trying to do things on no money, while wasting nearly $10 billion a year putting wall to wall police and soldiers into NI and supporting its backward economy. The UK is now about to build 2 aircraft carriers to, and I quote the BBC, "Project UK power around the world". Its Prime Minister wants to go and sort out foreign countries while at home the infrastructure is falling apart and, in a country where handguns are banned, gun crime is rising faster than any other. It's a pity that George keeps pandering to his little pal Tony instead of telling him to go home, sort out his own crappy country and shut the fsck up.
Reminds me of a lecture a former Nato general gave to our school current affairs society.
He said that, in effect, the US had nukes pointing at the (then) Soviet Union, the British pretended to have nukes but just paid for a tiny part of the US arsenal, the Soviets had nukes and pointed them at the US and the USS Gt. Britain, and the French had nukes and couldn't decide where the **** to point them.
In terms of big nukes, nothing much seems to have changed.
Irony is saying something in such a way as to mean the opposite. What you're describing is pure and simple stupidity. If the patent office had said "Of course, Mr. Marconi, there is no use for this invention which in a hundred years will revolutionise society" - that's irony.
But you're in good company. Even Gary (Doonesbury) Trudeau doesn't seem to know the meaning of irony when he uses the word, and yet his strip is riddled with it.
That's the Roman Empire in the east, AKA Byzantium. The Empire in the West had fallen apart long before. I'm talking about the period before the Dark Ages, not the Middle Ages.
Besides, this piece was hardly analytical history, just a rant after a much too long coding session. Anybody who wants to avoid a repeat please just point me in the direction of some really good cheap J2EE debug tools.
Perhaps that's because they are small countries which have been major trading centres for centuries. The position of Benelux in Europe is more or less analogous to NY in the US. Would thet be so successful if they didn't have France, Germany and the UK on their doorsteps, and the NATO shield?
If I was a congressman (in which case I wouldn't be writing this, but suppose) I would be looking at the expected future of the US economy. Technology/manufacturing or content creation.
If the US will ultimately be a service economy producing nothing but music, software, movies and pr0n, obviously the RIAA makes the biggest noise. The US can only protect its content by enforcing its IP across the world. And, as more and more output is derivative (because increasingly everything has been done before) the rules will have to become increasingly twisted. How long before some studio lawyer tries to claim copyright over the Odyssey and the Iliad ("Homer - that's our trademarked name")? On this model, OSS is fscked along with all free content because it would destroy the new US economy. Meanwhile, the Koreans and the Chinese can make all the boxes they like but they will only do anything with the permission of the US.
If the US believes that the future lies with technology, then OSS and free content mean that people around the world will want that technology. It doesn't matter if some Chinese film maker gets ripped off by pirate DVDs if it means that the Chinese consumer is buying a better DVD and HDTV every year or so. Yes, I'm simplifying.
Now, as recent events are telling us, technology is dangerous, but mostly if you don't have it. (Anyone who is surprised that Saddam is trying to build serious weapons must be incredibly stupid. Would you want the US (in the form of Israel and Sa'udi) on your doorstep and no shotgun in the hall? If he doesn't have such weapons, he should be got rid of for neglecting the interests of his own country.) And...well, that applies to the US as well. Letting other people who may not like you take control of the technology you need is...unwise. Churning out boy bands and anorexic junkie singers won't protect anyone in the day when the Chinese can deploy nanoscale weapons.
So how to protect technology? Well, once military tech led consumer tech but now it's the other way round. A dynamic consumer/medical/vehicular sector drives technological advance. So how to keep it dynamic?
Now the historical analogy. The Roman Empire was built on military technology and excellent logistics. What grew out of it was the Catholic Church, which was based on IP (share our core beliefs and pay us money or you go to Hell - bet the RIAA would love that sanction.) And what happened? The barbarians had better military tech.
If I was that Congressman, I'd be thinking about my grandchildren, and how a protected CD doesn't offer much in the way of security against someone with an Uzi.
Of course even apparently simple organs need lots of cell types - the liver needs blood vessels as well as the various types of liver cells, and even skin consists of multiple layers with different properties.And making anything which needs structural properties could be a problem - cells that need to intertwine, like muscle and bone. Not really a case for even a hexachrome cartridge.
But the concept is really interesting for doing things like creating little insulin producing nodes for diabetics.
Or perhaps little skin-graft packages with a cell mix that would attach to the substrate and then align themselves. Or perhaps producing really effective animal-testing substitutes.
A few years back I spent a little time on a manufacturing think-tank. The one thing everybody agreed was needed was a device that produced objects at their final net shape with no intermediate finishing stages. An inkjet printer basically does that already in two dimensions, and it's additive. It's surely potentially much nearer-term for all sorts of things than (say) exotic silicon micro-machining, and much more process-granular.
I wonder if - no, where - someone is trying to develop an inkjet printer that produces sintered metal shapes?
Oh dear. nyaar nyaar nyaar, your version (technologies we can actually use) isn't "real" like my technology that - er - doesn't exist yet.
So what exactly does "real" mean here? If you can arrange the shape of molecules to create particular functionality, does the technology matter? It's a bit like arguing that piece of metal A is inferior to piece of metal B because A was cast to shape in a mold and B was carved from a black by a machining centre. The real question is surely, which is best fitted for its putpose?
Slashdot Mirror
But then, as our English teacher remarked on seeing the football coach wearing an academic gown, "You don't often see a chimpanzee in a black nightshirt"
Surface, surface!
Sorry, Captain, the trim panel is trying to lend me money and the buoyancy controls are telling me where to buy a firewall.....thunk
Try writing on the thing when it's pressed against your ear. Difficult, no? If you have trouble with handsfree cables (no, I don't like them much either)I rather assume the W will work with a Bluetooth headset, a much neater option.
So Sony et al are either not thinking of the possible longer term consequences, or this is a short-term measure because they suspect in the longer run they will lose this war.
In the 60s and 70s, students demonstrated against bad governments (South Africa, Greece, US involvement in Vietnam, Chile and Cambodia). Perhaps the time is coming when they will demonstrate against overbearing corporations.
Considering the amount of money spent on practising for war every year - "defense", the proposal to the EU is peanuts. It is a proposal to start investigating the possibilities of a very real threat. I seem to recall the Siberian meteor impact as estimated as equivalent to about a 30MT H-bomb, and we were very lucky it hit where it did. It also seems that satellite photography is identifying more and more impact sites on the Earth. When I was a kid very few of these were recognised, and it seems reasonable to me that if we are learning that the frequency of such hits is much higher than expected, we should start to do something.
It's also worth remembering that the big impact on Jupiter occurred only a few years ago, and that very visible impact may well have concentrated people's minds. As telescopes get better, astronomers are realising there is far more debris out there than anybody knew- the old idea of 9 tidy planets and an asteroid belt has turned into a solar system full of all kinds of junk, moonlets, comet formation belts- the Solar System seems to be more like Mexico City than Singapore, if you see what I mean.
A billion dollars sound like a lot, but how much is the ABM system going to cost?
Dealing with a hard rock or a dirty snowball could need very different approaches (gentle push versus big bang?). Just because a multi-mile wide asteroid could be undeflectable and fatal, doesn;t mean that the real threat might come from a thing 100M across - obviously deflectable with the right technology, but nuking it could result in thousands of destructive small impacts.
To sum up this ramble:
- Destructive meteor impacts do occur on Earth
- Some of them are potentially preventable
- The cost of research is probably going to be far less than the US is going to spend developing nuclear warheads this year
- The cost of stopping a small asteroid could be a lot less than the estimated budget for stopping Saddam Hussein
- All in all, it looks far from a waste of EU money.
Thank you for reading this far.And, as for cameras, even with the small image sensors of digital cameras you need quite a large zoom lens for good pictures. To me it makes sense for someone to produce a good quality camera for which you can use your PDA as the monitor screen, something better than the optically poor add-ons we have seen so far.
It seems sensible to optimise the gadget for its function and enable the gadgets to talk.
If they also had a common battery charger and interchangeable battery, I guess that would be functionality heaven. Your PDA would be able to use expensive mobile phone connectivity only when necessary, otherwise using the local wireless network: I can't see a phone manufacturer wanting to allow that any time soon. So, although this thing looks like a v. cool gadget, I remain unconvinced.
The problem with any wire-based HF transmission system is reflections, standing waves, radiation and losses, and a power system by its very nature is not designed for HF. But the existence of the infrastructure - distribution stations, ducting, overhead supports - could make it a very good solution for stringing fibre. Overhead cables are inherently less prone to backhoe incidents than buried cables. There is a benefit to the electrical utility in that they can use the fibre to run their own control systems easily.
Any such idea needs to be planned in from the start- it could be a cheap add-on to rural electrification in places like India and China, but much harder to do in the US or Europe where cables have long service lives.
oh please. The day I'm not moderating, there is something seriously funny to moderate.
OK, so this is a book key with additional layers of encryption, but _anyone_ can do the additional layers. It just slows down the encoding and decoding. To be useful, cryptography must not introduce unacceptable traffic delays so the message becomes useless before it arrives. An on-line credit card checker that takes an hour to get a response will not do very well commercially. How fast is this system?
I lived there for 7 years. I like multicultural cities, and I really dislike drunken, abusive, shaven headed white Brits. But I was talking about border controls, and I gather even the UK immigration service admits many of its officers are racists - but they can't replace them because (a)it takes time to train people, and (b)what decent person who wants a career wants to join an organisation stuffed with racists?
Despite which we continue to use these languages and users of each continue to defend their superiority. Oh, and the bugs don't get fixed.
I think the best we can do is be realistic, and try not to get too hung up on the sucks/cool dichotomy.
You're white - welcome to Britain!
Not that I'm suggesting they are wrong, I have no way of knowing either way, I just think that producing memos like this - and getting them leaked - is probably not the smartest way of getting the declared objective.
Admission: I use Java. It isn't perfect. It uses too much memory. It isn't hugely fast. But the applications work and the amount of debugging we have had to do is a tiny fraction of what I would have expected with C++. Its suitability for a given project depends on a whole host of factors not considered in the memo, and it would not surprise me if, for some internal Sun projects, it was inappropriate in its present stage of development.
In fact, the Compaq Tablet PC is basically a standard notebook the wrong way round - the motherboard is on the screen bit, the keyboard is the thin part. This is such a logical change I'm amazed it never happened before. All that is needed is a foldout backrest and you have a similar layout to this Vaio.
If it's going to be really significantly cheaper than a new Powerbook or Tablet, there might be some space saving advantages, but an attached keyboard will never be as convenient as a detachable one. So what precisely is the real advantage of this thing?
It reminds me of the Sony PDA with its idiot keyboard, orientation all wrong, keys too small, not actually any faster or more convenient than Graffiti. Form over function.
That's relative. They were at the limit of what the technology of the time could achieve.
But then, whether you call it cynicism or realism, we accept a level of failure in all transport systems which is capable of killing people. We allow people to ride bicycles in motorised traffic. We allow manufacturers to build cars that are capable of traveling fast enough that a brake or steering failure can kill not only the occupants but anyone who gets in the way. We allow the construction of ships that break up in heavy seas, of railways where trains can pass red lights and crash. There is no public contract about this: we never actually get a chance to vote on the level of risk we want in our transport systems. What we do is react to disasters, and politicians have to decide based on that reaction whether to take some kind of action.
Sometimes they do, and as a result we have anti-lock brakes, double-hulled ships, crash barriers on freeways and autoroutes, airbags, automatic train protection systems, and a host of other technologies.
The Shuttle crews are unusual, superior human beings. But they should not need to be heroes, any more than someone who gets on a plane in LA to fly to a meeting in Tokyo is a hero.
Because if the exploration of space is ever to become commonplace, we have to get rid of the idea that this is a dangerous enterprise for heroes. We need to follow the same rules that apply to everything else. We need to ask nasty questions like "Why can't tiles be replaced in orbit, since we have had 18 years to think about things like this?" .
A WW1 biplane could keep flying after it had been shot full of holes, yet the Shuttle seems to have a number of extremely fragile technologies failure of any one of which could destroy it on re-entry. If that's so, why haven't we developed a better technology? Is it the mindset that needs to change as much as the design?
I saw one guy once using one of these to cook his lunch, using a pan in the water tank as a water bath to heat soup, and they can also get water to the boiling point to make tea. However, and computer system which gets water to the boiling point is not likely to be terribly effective (unless we go back to tube technology, of course)
However, I recently asked a community policeman about this. His view is that they are simply a complete waste of money, but they reassure the large number of unbelievably stupid Brits who never stop to think. Anyone who cares to visit UK towns late at night will see the usual muggers and vandals, all wearing the same identical grey sweatshirts and anoraks with identical deep grey hoods. Any criminal with more than one brain cell will have that one figured out in no time. The CCTV cameras may catch drunks who are too stoned to care - another delightful facet of UK life - but will then have no deterrent effect whatsoever.
The simple problem is that for the last 30+ years the UK has put large amounts of money into policing Northern Ireland and playing at being a world power (despite being poorer than Germany, France or Italy which don't play those games any more) and is now too cheap to have a proper police force. All this biometric scan and CCTV stuff is about trying to do things on no money, while wasting nearly $10 billion a year putting wall to wall police and soldiers into NI and supporting its backward economy. The UK is now about to build 2 aircraft carriers to, and I quote the BBC, "Project UK power around the world". Its Prime Minister wants to go and sort out foreign countries while at home the infrastructure is falling apart and, in a country where handguns are banned, gun crime is rising faster than any other. It's a pity that George keeps pandering to his little pal Tony instead of telling him to go home, sort out his own crappy country and shut the fsck up.
He said that, in effect, the US had nukes pointing at the (then) Soviet Union, the British pretended to have nukes but just paid for a tiny part of the US arsenal, the Soviets had nukes and pointed them at the US and the USS Gt. Britain, and the French had nukes and couldn't decide where the **** to point them.
In terms of big nukes, nothing much seems to have changed.
But you're in good company. Even Gary (Doonesbury) Trudeau doesn't seem to know the meaning of irony when he uses the word, and yet his strip is riddled with it.
Besides, this piece was hardly analytical history, just a rant after a much too long coding session. Anybody who wants to avoid a repeat please just point me in the direction of some really good cheap J2EE debug tools.
Perhaps that's because they are small countries which have been major trading centres for centuries. The position of Benelux in Europe is more or less analogous to NY in the US. Would thet be so successful if they didn't have France, Germany and the UK on their doorsteps, and the NATO shield?
If the US will ultimately be a service economy producing nothing but music, software, movies and pr0n, obviously the RIAA makes the biggest noise. The US can only protect its content by enforcing its IP across the world. And, as more and more output is derivative (because increasingly everything has been done before) the rules will have to become increasingly twisted. How long before some studio lawyer tries to claim copyright over the Odyssey and the Iliad ("Homer - that's our trademarked name")? On this model, OSS is fscked along with all free content because it would destroy the new US economy. Meanwhile, the Koreans and the Chinese can make all the boxes they like but they will only do anything with the permission of the US.
If the US believes that the future lies with technology, then OSS and free content mean that people around the world will want that technology. It doesn't matter if some Chinese film maker gets ripped off by pirate DVDs if it means that the Chinese consumer is buying a better DVD and HDTV every year or so. Yes, I'm simplifying.
Now, as recent events are telling us, technology is dangerous, but mostly if you don't have it. (Anyone who is surprised that Saddam is trying to build serious weapons must be incredibly stupid. Would you want the US (in the form of Israel and Sa'udi) on your doorstep and no shotgun in the hall? If he doesn't have such weapons, he should be got rid of for neglecting the interests of his own country.) And...well, that applies to the US as well. Letting other people who may not like you take control of the technology you need is...unwise. Churning out boy bands and anorexic junkie singers won't protect anyone in the day when the Chinese can deploy nanoscale weapons.
So how to protect technology? Well, once military tech led consumer tech but now it's the other way round. A dynamic consumer/medical/vehicular sector drives technological advance. So how to keep it dynamic?
Now the historical analogy. The Roman Empire was built on military technology and excellent logistics. What grew out of it was the Catholic Church, which was based on IP (share our core beliefs and pay us money or you go to Hell - bet the RIAA would love that sanction.) And what happened? The barbarians had better military tech.
If I was that Congressman, I'd be thinking about my grandchildren, and how a protected CD doesn't offer much in the way of security against someone with an Uzi.
But the concept is really interesting for doing things like creating little insulin producing nodes for diabetics.
Or perhaps little skin-graft packages with a cell mix that would attach to the substrate and then align themselves. Or perhaps producing really effective animal-testing substitutes.
A few years back I spent a little time on a manufacturing think-tank. The one thing everybody agreed was needed was a device that produced objects at their final net shape with no intermediate finishing stages. An inkjet printer basically does that already in two dimensions, and it's additive. It's surely potentially much nearer-term for all sorts of things than (say) exotic silicon micro-machining, and much more process-granular.
I wonder if - no, where - someone is trying to develop an inkjet printer that produces sintered metal shapes?
So what exactly does "real" mean here? If you can arrange the shape of molecules to create particular functionality, does the technology matter? It's a bit like arguing that piece of metal A is inferior to piece of metal B because A was cast to shape in a mold and B was carved from a black by a machining centre. The real question is surely, which is best fitted for its putpose?