I am not simply advocating self-diagnosis via a database, but computer diagnosis. In other words, a computer that takes in relevant data about the patient (temperature, blood chemistry, etc.) and makes a diagnosis based on deterministic rules implemented by software. This should be able to handle 90%+ of what is handled by doctors today.
This is hardly a new idea, but it really clicked for me several years while eating dinner with a friend who was a resident at UC-San Fran hospital. He was complaining about his long hours, and I asked if it was really safe to have sleep deprived doctors seeing patients, making diagnosis, etc. He quickly replied that "99% of what I do, a monkey could do." I thought he was just joking, but he insisted it was true. Anytime a patient with something out of the ordinary did come in, then he would usually consult with other doctors, including at least one superior. Essentially his role was to handle all the easy cases, and to get advice on the hard ones, while offering an opinion on them. This seems like such an obvious thing for a computer to do instead.
I am not suggesting self-diagnosis. I am suggesting computer diagnosis.
Having worked in a pharmacy before, and spending time with government workers/hypocondriacs, I have seen plenty of the downside of letting lay people see technical medical knowledge.
In other words, you have a vested interest in the status quo and you are also a snob.
It takes actual training and experience to take that data and figure out what the cause is.
I get the impression you don't work in the health care industry. As someone who does work for a city and county run hospital in a very large metropolitan area
In other words, you have a vested interest, thus your complete lack of objectivity should not surprise me...
Having one doctor take on five times as many patients
RTFP. I didn't say that each doctor would see more patients. The whole point is that most patients do not need to see a doctor at all! The job performed by most doctors can be easily performed by a machine.
In fact, there has been research done, especially after mortality rates increase in individual hospitals in an effort to improve the care given at those hospitals, which shows that as the number of patients each nurse is responsible for increases, the mortality rate increases by double-digit percentages, especially in ICUs.
No shit. In our current system, the only service providers are doctors and nurses, so obviously if you don't have enough of them, then you won't have enough service and you will suffer. But if something else could provide service, then you need less doctors.
BTW, I am indifferent about nurses. I wish in the current system they would be allowed to do more, since they are definitely capable. They aren't because of licensure (thanks AMA.) Regardless, nurses are cheap, so they are not the burden on society and the economy that doctors are.
It may sound like I hate doctors, but that is not true at all. They are just too expensive, given the services provided by most of them. I have nothing against paying a surgeon a lot, but hundres of thousands a year to say "turn your head and cough"... um hello...
You seem to be greatly confused about just how weighed down with information doctors and nurses are; doctors, for one, go to school that long for a reason. The human body is a very large and complex set of systems that isn't easily mastered. It's simple to sit at a terminal and type in a list of symptoms; it's quite another thing to know how the diagnosis pertains to the patient, whether or not the diagnosis is correct, and how the treatment will affect the patient. Doctors aren't simple databases that accept symptoms and wads of cash as an input and spit out diagnoses and treatments.
Are you arguing that medicine should be subjective? I argue that it should be objective. A doctor's diagnosis and recommended treatment should be based on analysis of data (temperature, blood pressure, blood chemistry, mri's, whatever) using knowledge of diseases/conditions. If a task is objective, then it can be performed by a computer. Now if you want to argue that doctors should be subjective rather than objective, go right ahead, I will not entertain such nonsense.
By removing doctors to increase their bottom line, wouldn't they then still be charging the same, or at least a similar, amount?
So you also lack an understanding of economics... What I am saying is that if technology would allow for a hospital to operate with less doctors, but with no loss of effectiveness, then a corporation would find this irresistable. Less doctors would mean an increase in profits. Now inject this wonderful thing we know as a free market. Compettition among corporations will cause them to decrease prices. In a perfect market, this will continue until all providers charge the minimum possible. This compettition will force all hospitals to utilize the same technologies so that they can match prices. This is economics 101...
Several medical studies have shown that physicians that use medical online databases such as UpToDate, provide better patient care. The medical literature changes so quickly that many books are outdated before they are released to the public.
In residency it was amazing how many "rare" diagnoses were made based on the ability to quickly look up a condition or situation on an online database. Plus, if you can't find it in uptodate or similar online consult references, you can always access PUBMED and review all the medical journals for the latest and greatest information on a disease process.
And here we see the beginning of the end of the corrupt health care system that cripples society and the economy. Diagnosing 95% of all ailments does not take training, it takes a good database. Technology will free society from the tyranny of the licensure enforced, artificially expensive health care system erected by the AMA. Technology will allow for hospitals to operate with maybe 20% the number of doctors they currently employ. Many hospitals are owned by corporations and they will not be able to resist moving to technology to increase their bottom line, much to the dismay of the AMA and medical schools. The demand for doctors will go down, and thus so will the salaries for those that are still needed. This will drive down the demand for medical education, and thus the price for a medical education will go down. That will in turn lead to further decreases in the price of health care, etc.
Now if only technology could some how re-direct pharmaceutical r&d into actually curing diseases (when was the last time that happened, like 50 years ago?), especially deadly ones and those found in third world countries, instead of just finding new pills for heartburn and impotence.
If you are a patient, you want your doctor going to the online databases and journals for information...
Actually what you really want is a computer that is not a sleep deprived resident or a narcissist who is only concerned with buying their next Porsche.
How about so you can buy "Boys of Summer" for $1 instead of having to buy the whole crappy Ataris CD?
Re:Why not just get an Opteron?
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
Opteron does not support ddr400. Opteron motherboards do not support AGP. Opterons (and the Athlon64-FX) require registered memory. Athlon-64 is clocked at 2 GHz. The Operton who price you quote runs at 1.4 GHz. A 2 GHz Opteron will run you $810.
Why should Apple do this? Because you want them to? Or I want them to? It is irrelevant that you or I would want to see these machines compared. An Apple ad talking about the G5 vs. "AMD Athlon 64 FX" would be worthless. When Apple tries to get people to "switch" they aren't after AMD enthusiasts running Linux. They are after mainstream users who would appreciate how much easier an Apple computer is to use and live with on a day-to-day basis. The other types of folks that Apple targets are professionals in music, film, art, print, etc. These are people who need computing power, but are not computer experts. They have never even heard of AMD. AMD is targeting the Athlon-64 to gaming enthusiasts, people who would never switch to an Apple anyways. AMD and Apple target different audiences with very different needs. They do have a few things in common: 64-bits and they outperform Intel's best at somethings and are compettitive with it at most things.
It is the US government who keeps the world in line with the WIPO's artificial monopolies, which ensures Intel can keep people from producing compatible chips.
I am interested in how you think WIPO has created an artifical monopoly for Intel. It's hard to see how Intel has a monopoly at all when other chip makers are free to compete against them in the x86 architecure realm. The obvious example is AMD. Intel has repeatedly felt pressure from AMD and has caused them to spend huge amounts in R&D and marketing, and has also caused them to cut prices repeatedly. Again I would be very interested in how Intel has a monopoly and how WIPO has helped create/sustain such a monopoly.
Even if you were right, then what you are accusing Intel/US of is really the same thing that you are defending for China. So how can you defend a practice by one party, but condemn it for another? Clearly that shows a bias.
RISC based processors had a huge advantage in the server world for many years, despite whatever Intel and its supposed federal conspirators were or were not doing. This was true just two years ago. RISC never caught on in the desktop market, and maybe there's something that Intel did that you could point out that had something to do with this. RISC has been dying on the server side because of Linux and because of the price/performance of x86 hardware. The decline of RISC can only be contributed to economics and the innovation of Intel/AMD.
So in short, I don't think that there are any facts that support your arguments. And even if there were facts, your logic is inconsistent.
China's policy could degenerate in this direction, but I see no indications of that yet.
It's not a matter of degenerating. It is a policy that ASSURES declining quality in the long term, no matter what gains it brings in the short term. It's not a matter of if, it is only a matter of time.
First, protectionism is everywhere. It is very hipocritical of the US to protect its agriculture and job markets, and then expect everyone else to continue to either import or pay royalties on its chips and software.
So two wrongs make a right? This isn't the US government criticizing China, it is Intel. Intel does not have agriculture to protect and is not trying to "protect" American jobs. Intel has had overseas labs and production facilities for years (see Centrino.)
Second, this particular piece of protectionism could actually lead to something.
Protectionism is always bad. There are hundreds of years of history to prove this. A "homegrown only" policy leads to a lack of compettition (you would think pseudo-communists would especially understand this) and thus very poor quality over time. When this burden is saddled on a huge emerging market such as China, it not only hopelessly hinders China itself, it also burdens the rest of the world that wants to do business with China by having to deal with sub-quality, proprietary standards.
And for any moron who thinks that I am making a stab at China when I say all of this, it has nothing to do with China. Any nation or nations who close themselves off to compettition will suffer the same problem. It does not matter how big or small the nations in question are. Of course Intel and the rest of the world certainly wouldn't care as much if it was smaller, less economically significant nations were doing this kind of thing.
This is yet another reflection on Nintendo's failure to appeal to the people most likely to buy video games: teenage boys and men under the age of 35. They keep thinking that video games are mostly bought by younger children, and have made very little attempt to market to the above segments. Sony and Microsoft have done a much better job of this. The people who would buy a sports game such as Madden 2004 are also the same people who are not being targeted by Nintendo.
For the record, I am one of the few people who did buy Madden 2004 for the GC. I own a PS2 I bought in March 2001 and a GC my wife bought for me in November of 2001. Generally I find games on the GC to be better than on the PS2. The only thing I've played on the PS2 recently is GTA-VC. Hence my decision to buy Madden on the GC instead of the PS2 (I don't play online on my PS2 so that didn't make a big difference to me.)
ACID transactions using InnoDB, and performance is quite good on MySQL 4.0. My company uses a MySQL/InnoDB server for the loading of content from our partners to our site. The loader is an extremely multi-threaded piece of code that can put quite a strain on database. The loader also writes part of the data it loads to an Oracle 9i database. The MySQL db is running on a dual processor machine (the same machine the loader is running) and the Oracle db runs on its own 4-processor machine (both run Linux, though the Oracle one uses a slightly older kernel as required by Oracle.) When we crank up the loader, it's the Oracle server that becomes unresponsive first. MySQL scales better, at least in this case. We've had no problems with ACID transactions, and the loader code involves several long, distributed transactions (across dbs) running with isolation level of read-committed. We also use a third party search engine that uses SQL Server for persistence. This is typically the bottleneck in the system. When we talk about improving scalability and performance, the MySQL db is the last thing ever mentioned.
It's both. People download because they don't want to pay. RIAA sues because they want people to pay. If all you want is music, then use one of the "legal" services out there.
Maintaining the free movement of files, and by extension information
You are wrong to make this extension. By your arguments, any restriction on any kind of information would be wrong then. So go burn down your local Barnes and Noble. For that matter, go burn down all private universities, since they charge for tuition. While you are at it, make sure to take out newspapers and magazines. All those folks make money off of information, and to make this money they must restrict its dissemination to those who have paid for it. It is ignorant to think that p2p vs. riaa is about freedom, when it is clearly about greed.
J2EE is an extension of the Java platform. It stresses a component model that works well in a distributed system. As such there are certain parts of it that have analogs in.NET, such as JSP/ASP.NET . What is hard for most people to understand is that.NET does NOT have an analog to the distributed component model that is at the core of J2EE. The.NET philosophy is very much "everything in the enterprise should be running on.NET and if not then 'let them eat SOAP'." And even then you better be aware of.NET's implementation of SOAP and UDDI and its subtle differences to these standards. Even more to the point, most of the major interfaces in J2EE have no analog in.NET..NET's System.data package has much more in common with JDO than with CMP entity beans. JMS, JMX? Ummm.... J2EE is not only more mature, its philosophy is a much better fit for enterprise systems.
Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture
In particular I like trading Britney Spear's "culture." It really enhances my life.
Today culture moves at the speed of light
Isn't this a line from that WorldCom commercial from a few years ago, the one with all the dudes in the office riding around on scooters?
It cannot succeed except by destroying the Internet.
The Wachowski brothers just called to inform you they are suing you for stealing the plot to their next movie.
Seeking all means to do this faster than ever - and ignoring the barriers, such as "ownership", that stand in the way - is the prerrogative of today's world.
Yeah ignore those barriers, they are soooo 1990's.
We simply can't put the genie back into the bottle
Oops, I guess you've been sharing Christina Aguilera culture...
useless vestiges of a material-obsessed past.
Yeah capitalism is so over-rated. Who needs private property? Um, in Soviet Russia the culture flowed freely?
Since DNA "mis"-matches are theoretically possible, they should not hold up in court either, right? The odds of a DNA match being wrong might even be better than the odds of a MD5 checksum match being wrong.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
$ cat/proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 348.491 ...
it does not matter if MS gives away software to college students. As soon as they have to start paying for it (or as soon as their needs outpace its capabilities) then they will make a choice that has nothing to do with what software they used in college.
Of course libertarians also don't think Microsoft is a monopoly...
Sun
gives away a lot of its softwar to students, for free.
And MIT is certainly not the Microsoft Institute of Technology. The Harvard-MIT Data Center is an all Java project, whose faculty are contributors to some of the Apache Jakarta open source projects.
I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. The "variance" of analogy systems is really just manufacturing fault tolerance. The manufacturing process is imperfect and so there is a standard error associated with each quality of a given component. This is a little different than the kind of variance that is related to quantum mechanics.
Imagine an AND gate that is a single silicon atom. For such a gate to be "open" a single electron would have to be "flow" through it. This requires the electron to bond to the atom and it's ability to do that is a function of the position of the other electrons in the silicon atom. Quantum mechanics tells us that the positions of these electrons is not determined UNTIL something (such as the electron in this case) interacts with the atom. Until the time of interaction, the electrons have no discrete positions but are instead described by probability distributions. So this is an AND gate that is non-deterministic. Not only will "not always work", but you have no way of knowing if will or will not until you fire an electron at it, and just because it "fails" once has no bearing on the probability of it "failing" again. This is similar to the analog analogy, but it is even less deterministic.
I think Brokar caused some of the confusion in his interview by bringing up the analogy of variance in speeds of P4 chips. For that to be an accurate analogy, each P4 chip's speed would also vary each time you measured it. Anyways, a chip designed around this kind of non-deterministic behavior would be impressive. And chips will have to be designed this way for the size of components to get much smaller (an atomic diameter is around 0.1 nm.)
The whole point of this thread was that Apple's decline in the education market had little to do with price. There is very little price advantage in going the Wintel route over the eMac route. I thought that point of your post was that there was indeed a price advantage and you used the Dell/VA deal as an example. Now I don't know what kind of productivity software they are installing on those cheap Dells in VA, but I would be absolutely shocked if it was OpenOffice. In fact I am sure that there would have already been multiple stories run on Slashdot if that was the case. So the difference in the VA-only Dell vs. anywhere-eMac was software vs. service. The Dell gave extra service but no software, the eMac comes with productivity software, but only a year of service as opposed to three. The Dell had more memory, the eMac a bigger hard drive, etc. My point was that this was not evidence of any kind of significant price advantage over Apple (especially if you are not in Virginia.)
Slashdot Mirror
I am not simply advocating self-diagnosis via a database, but computer diagnosis. In other words, a computer that takes in relevant data about the patient (temperature, blood chemistry, etc.) and makes a diagnosis based on deterministic rules implemented by software. This should be able to handle 90%+ of what is handled by doctors today.
This is hardly a new idea, but it really clicked for me several years while eating dinner with a friend who was a resident at UC-San Fran hospital. He was complaining about his long hours, and I asked if it was really safe to have sleep deprived doctors seeing patients, making diagnosis, etc. He quickly replied that "99% of what I do, a monkey could do." I thought he was just joking, but he insisted it was true. Anytime a patient with something out of the ordinary did come in, then he would usually consult with other doctors, including at least one superior. Essentially his role was to handle all the easy cases, and to get advice on the hard ones, while offering an opinion on them. This seems like such an obvious thing for a computer to do instead.
BTW, I am indifferent about nurses. I wish in the current system they would be allowed to do more, since they are definitely capable. They aren't because of licensure (thanks AMA.) Regardless, nurses are cheap, so they are not the burden on society and the economy that doctors are.
It may sound like I hate doctors, but that is not true at all. They are just too expensive, given the services provided by most of them. I have nothing against paying a surgeon a lot, but hundres of thousands a year to say "turn your head and cough"
Now if only technology could some how re-direct pharmaceutical r&d into actually curing diseases (when was the last time that happened, like 50 years ago?), especially deadly ones and those found in third world countries, instead of just finding new pills for heartburn and impotence. Actually what you really want is a computer that is not a sleep deprived resident or a narcissist who is only concerned with buying their next Porsche.
How about so you can buy "Boys of Summer" for $1 instead of having to buy the whole crappy Ataris CD?
Opteron does not support ddr400. Opteron motherboards do not support AGP. Opterons (and the Athlon64-FX) require registered memory. Athlon-64 is clocked at 2 GHz. The Operton who price you quote runs at 1.4 GHz. A 2 GHz Opteron will run you $810.
Why should Apple do this? Because you want them to? Or I want them to? It is irrelevant that you or I would want to see these machines compared. An Apple ad talking about the G5 vs. "AMD Athlon 64 FX" would be worthless. When Apple tries to get people to "switch" they aren't after AMD enthusiasts running Linux. They are after mainstream users who would appreciate how much easier an Apple computer is to use and live with on a day-to-day basis. The other types of folks that Apple targets are professionals in music, film, art, print, etc. These are people who need computing power, but are not computer experts. They have never even heard of AMD. AMD is targeting the Athlon-64 to gaming enthusiasts, people who would never switch to an Apple anyways. AMD and Apple target different audiences with very different needs. They do have a few things in common: 64-bits and they outperform Intel's best at somethings and are compettitive with it at most things.
Even if you were right, then what you are accusing Intel/US of is really the same thing that you are defending for China. So how can you defend a practice by one party, but condemn it for another? Clearly that shows a bias.
RISC based processors had a huge advantage in the server world for many years, despite whatever Intel and its supposed federal conspirators were or were not doing. This was true just two years ago. RISC never caught on in the desktop market, and maybe there's something that Intel did that you could point out that had something to do with this. RISC has been dying on the server side because of Linux and because of the price/performance of x86 hardware. The decline of RISC can only be contributed to economics and the innovation of Intel/AMD.
So in short, I don't think that there are any facts that support your arguments. And even if there were facts, your logic is inconsistent.
It's not a matter of degenerating. It is a policy that ASSURES declining quality in the long term, no matter what gains it brings in the short term. It's not a matter of if, it is only a matter of time.
Protectionism is always bad. There are hundreds of years of history to prove this. A "homegrown only" policy leads to a lack of compettition (you would think pseudo-communists would especially understand this) and thus very poor quality over time. When this burden is saddled on a huge emerging market such as China, it not only hopelessly hinders China itself, it also burdens the rest of the world that wants to do business with China by having to deal with sub-quality, proprietary standards.
And for any moron who thinks that I am making a stab at China when I say all of this, it has nothing to do with China. Any nation or nations who close themselves off to compettition will suffer the same problem. It does not matter how big or small the nations in question are. Of course Intel and the rest of the world certainly wouldn't care as much if it was smaller, less economically significant nations were doing this kind of thing.
This is yet another reflection on Nintendo's failure to appeal to the people most likely to buy video games: teenage boys and men under the age of 35. They keep thinking that video games are mostly bought by younger children, and have made very little attempt to market to the above segments. Sony and Microsoft have done a much better job of this. The people who would buy a sports game such as Madden 2004 are also the same people who are not being targeted by Nintendo.
For the record, I am one of the few people who did buy Madden 2004 for the GC. I own a PS2 I bought in March 2001 and a GC my wife bought for me in November of 2001. Generally I find games on the GC to be better than on the PS2. The only thing I've played on the PS2 recently is GTA-VC. Hence my decision to buy Madden on the GC instead of the PS2 (I don't play online on my PS2 so that didn't make a big difference to me.)
ACID transactions using InnoDB, and performance is quite good on MySQL 4.0. My company uses a MySQL/InnoDB server for the loading of content from our partners to our site. The loader is an extremely multi-threaded piece of code that can put quite a strain on database. The loader also writes part of the data it loads to an Oracle 9i database. The MySQL db is running on a dual processor machine (the same machine the loader is running) and the Oracle db runs on its own 4-processor machine (both run Linux, though the Oracle one uses a slightly older kernel as required by Oracle.) When we crank up the loader, it's the Oracle server that becomes unresponsive first. MySQL scales better, at least in this case. We've had no problems with ACID transactions, and the loader code involves several long, distributed transactions (across dbs) running with isolation level of read-committed. We also use a third party search engine that uses SQL Server for persistence. This is typically the bottleneck in the system. When we talk about improving scalability and performance, the MySQL db is the last thing ever mentioned.
It's both. People download because they don't want to pay. RIAA sues because they want people to pay. If all you want is music, then use one of the "legal" services out there.
Maintaining the free movement of files, and by extension information
You are wrong to make this extension. By your arguments, any restriction on any kind of information would be wrong then. So go burn down your local Barnes and Noble. For that matter, go burn down all private universities, since they charge for tuition. While you are at it, make sure to take out newspapers and magazines. All those folks make money off of information, and to make this money they must restrict its dissemination to those who have paid for it. It is ignorant to think that p2p vs. riaa is about freedom, when it is clearly about greed.
J2EE is an extension of the Java platform. It stresses a component model that works well in a distributed system. As such there are certain parts of it that have analogs in .NET, such as JSP/ASP.NET . What is hard for most people to understand is that .NET does NOT have an analog to the distributed component model that is at the core of J2EE. The .NET philosophy is very much "everything in the enterprise should be running on .NET and if not then 'let them eat SOAP'." And even then you better be aware of .NET's implementation of SOAP and UDDI and its subtle differences to these standards. Even more to the point, most of the major interfaces in J2EE have no analog in .NET. .NET's System.data package has much more in common with JDO than with CMP entity beans. JMS, JMX? Ummm.... J2EE is not only more mature, its philosophy is a much better fit for enterprise systems.
You should get a partial tuition refund if you don't use Windows, and thus the university's IT doesn't have to worry about you.
Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture
In particular I like trading Britney Spear's "culture." It really enhances my life.
Today culture moves at the speed of light
Isn't this a line from that WorldCom commercial from a few years ago, the one with all the dudes in the office riding around on scooters?
It cannot succeed except by destroying the Internet.
The Wachowski brothers just called to inform you they are suing you for stealing the plot to their next movie.
Seeking all means to do this faster than ever - and ignoring the barriers, such as "ownership", that stand in the way - is the prerrogative of today's world.
Yeah ignore those barriers, they are soooo 1990's.
We simply can't put the genie back into the bottle
Oops, I guess you've been sharing Christina Aguilera culture...
useless vestiges of a material-obsessed past.
Yeah capitalism is so over-rated. Who needs private property? Um, in Soviet Russia the culture flowed freely?
What is this? I wake up to see factorials on slashdot. Bless my cold, mathematical heart.
Since DNA "mis"-matches are theoretically possible, they should not hold up in court either, right? The odds of a DNA match being wrong might even be better than the odds of a MD5 checksum match being wrong.
Googlebar kicks ass.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
/proc/cpuinfo
...
$ cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 348.491
Startup time < 5s
it does not matter if MS gives away software to college students. As soon as they have to start paying for it (or as soon as their needs outpace its capabilities) then they will make a choice that has nothing to do with what software they used in college.
Of course libertarians also don't think Microsoft is a monopoly...
Sun gives away a lot of its softwar to students, for free.
And MIT is certainly not the Microsoft Institute of Technology. The Harvard-MIT Data Center is an all Java project, whose faculty are contributors to some of the Apache Jakarta open source projects.
I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. The "variance" of analogy systems is really just manufacturing fault tolerance. The manufacturing process is imperfect and so there is a standard error associated with each quality of a given component. This is a little different than the kind of variance that is related to quantum mechanics.
Imagine an AND gate that is a single silicon atom. For such a gate to be "open" a single electron would have to be "flow" through it. This requires the electron to bond to the atom and it's ability to do that is a function of the position of the other electrons in the silicon atom. Quantum mechanics tells us that the positions of these electrons is not determined UNTIL something (such as the electron in this case) interacts with the atom. Until the time of interaction, the electrons have no discrete positions but are instead described by probability distributions. So this is an AND gate that is non-deterministic. Not only will "not always work", but you have no way of knowing if will or will not until you fire an electron at it, and just because it "fails" once has no bearing on the probability of it "failing" again. This is similar to the analog analogy, but it is even less deterministic.
I think Brokar caused some of the confusion in his interview by bringing up the analogy of variance in speeds of P4 chips. For that to be an accurate analogy, each P4 chip's speed would also vary each time you measured it. Anyways, a chip designed around this kind of non-deterministic behavior would be impressive. And chips will have to be designed this way for the size of components to get much smaller (an atomic diameter is around 0.1 nm.)
Yes and they don't universally. It's a case by case basis.
The whole point of this thread was that Apple's decline in the education market had little to do with price. There is very little price advantage in going the Wintel route over the eMac route. I thought that point of your post was that there was indeed a price advantage and you used the Dell/VA deal as an example. Now I don't know what kind of productivity software they are installing on those cheap Dells in VA, but I would be absolutely shocked if it was OpenOffice. In fact I am sure that there would have already been multiple stories run on Slashdot if that was the case. So the difference in the VA-only Dell vs. anywhere-eMac was software vs. service. The Dell gave extra service but no software, the eMac comes with productivity software, but only a year of service as opposed to three. The Dell had more memory, the eMac a bigger hard drive, etc. My point was that this was not evidence of any kind of significant price advantage over Apple (especially if you are not in Virginia.)