Sure there are, the only trouble is simulating more than a handful of qubits will require a really powerful machine. If you had as few as 256 qubits your simulator would need to keep track of 2^256 states, about as many states as there are sub-atomic particles in the visible universe! It's one of the reasons why computer modeling of quantum mechanical phenomena on classical computers is so hard, and probably that this application, far more than Shor's or Grover's algorithms, will be the primary use for the quantum computers that do get built. Gauge quantum chromodynamics simulations, which use the Standard Model to calculate the masses and other properties of sub-atomic particles, have been known to tie up supercomputers for months on end. A quantum computer would be able to perform such computations far more easily.
Actually, if their goal really is quantum computing, the spin of atomic nuclei would have been a better bet than electron spin. The atomic nucleus is one of the best-isolated quantum mechanical systems known, and it usually takes a very long time for decoherence and similar behavior to destroy any superposition of spin states that you create (an absolute necessity for any type of useful quantum computation). The most promising methods to date (such as this and this) for quantum computation are largely based on nuclear spin. Electron spin superpositions are not only hard to create but they succumb to decoherence very quickly, making them difficult to use.
Since electrons are like photons and they are waves at small scales, it's more about these little probability eddies or whirlpools where the electrons hang out more.
Now, while even people who are experts in the field of quantum mechanics are at a loss to explain what the spin of a quantum particle actually is, this explanation you give is about as far from the phenomenology of spin as it gets. It has nothing to do whatever with "probability eddies" where "electrons hang out more", but is an intrinsic property of the electron or whatever other quantum particle (note that it isn't only electrons that have this property, as you seem to think: almost everything appears to have it). If you put a charged particle such as an electron inside a nonuniform magnetic field (e.g. inside a Stern-Gerlach apparatus), for example, it will have only two possible values for its magnetic moment thanks to this intrinsic spin, and hence the electron would be deflected by the field in only two possible directions.
No, its a license to redistribute the software and to create and distribute derivative works.
But well, that is precisely the definition of a copyright license. Redistribution and creation of derivative works are actions restricted by copyright law, and the GPL grants you a license to do these things which are otherwise prohibited by copyright, under certain conditions.
The GPL isn't an EULA. It's a pure copyright license. It grants you the right to do things (like copying, making derivative works, and so forth) which are normally prohibited by copyright law. You are not required to accept the GPL, and you don't even have to accept it in order to make use of software covered by it. You only must accept it if you would do things with the GPL-covered work that would be otherwise be prohibited by copyright law, because NOTHING but the terms of the GPL permit you to do those things. It's really that simple.
Sun still owns the Java trademark. If you try to fork Java, then their lawyers will say to you, either you stop calling your fork 'Java' or we sue you for trademark infringement. They don't need to actively prevent people from making forks in this case. Besides, a license of the kind you describe would neither qualify as a Free Software license by the FSF's definition nor an Open Source license by the OSI's definition. Besides, historically, forks of major projects are extremely rare, and are most commonly the result of either stagnating development (e.g. the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) or license issues (e.g. XFree86/Xorg), but only very rarely disagreements over design (e.g. the continuing Emacs/XEmacs split). I doubt that Sun will allow either of the first two to happen, and with a project as large as Java, it is extremely unlikely that people will want to quibble over the kind of issues that would result in a fork of the third kind.
Well, we all saw Saddam shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld 23 years ago didn't we? He used to be your son of a bitch out in the Middle East not too long ago too... Who knows what embarrassing things he might reveal about the extent of the support he got from the United States back then.
I believe the original Friday the 13th was Friday, October 13, 1306. On that morning, King Philip IV of France had his seneschals unseal orders to arrest the Knights Templar for heresy, treason, and a host of other sins. Well, there you go, it's again an action done by someone, rather than a chance natural disaster or something like that.
The idea is basically an extension of what scientific theories are supposed to do. To understand any phenomenon, it is necessary to compress it. A scientific theory, at its core, explains the data from many different experiments by means of a formula simpler than the data. Say, we did a thousand experiments measuring the energy released from the annihiliation of large numbers of electrons and positrons. We could use something like the Lagrange polynomial of the data from the experiment, and then come up with a "theoretical model" that is just as complicated as the data it tries to explain, and that would tell us nothing that we already didn't know. As Leibniz would say: "When a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes as random." But then, if we had something simpler, like E=mc^2, to explain the experiments, then we might be onto something. That equation explains the whole lot of data from the experiment, and gives an explanation for the transformation of matter into energy and vice-versa, in just a few symbols. I suppose, in the same way, compressing natural language would be a step to trying to get computers to understand natural language. If you want more on this idea, you could try reading the articles on Gregory J. Chaitin's website.
But again, this assumes that Pi is a normal number. So far, nobody knows for sure whether or not this is true. I don't know why everyone seems to make this unfounded assumption when dealing with Pi. Attempts to establish the truth of this matter are one of the main reasons why mathematicians are engaged in calculating Pi to billions and billions of digits; there is no other practical use for that many decimal places of accuracy; 39 digits of the number would be enough to calculate the circumference of the known universe given its radius to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
True, copyright law has existed a lot longer than the MP3 file format, but present amendments to copyright law that criminalize whole host of other actions, some of which might indeed be used to violate existing copyright law, were lobbied into Congress at around the time that digital media was growing in importance. And since treaties like TRIPS basically mandate that all countries signing it should eventually come up with a DMCA-like law, they indeed have dragooned and are continuing to dragoon many other nations into arguably acting as industry enforcers. Don't want to sign TRIPS? Kiss your membership in the WTO goodbye.
You might have been right if they hadn't also been railroading laws that amount to a vast extension of their powers as copyright holders (e.g. the DMCA) over longer and longer periods of time (e.g. the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act), and are continuing to lobby for more and more legislation in the same vein.
Ordinarily, I'd agree, but this is a company whose CEO at the time said on the record that he is "commited to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president". He did exactly as promised, looks like. Open partisan bias like this makes me more inclined to believe that malice was involved.
No one will be hiding behind NAT's or using dynamic IP's with IPv6. These two abuses of IPv4 addressing are the main reason why it is so difficult these days to track down and control sources of network abuse, including spam. This will make it easier to make computers and people responsible for them accountable for their actions, which means spammers and people who insist on running insecure operating systems can no longer hide or deny responsibility so easily as they can now.
You say that it's getting easier and easier to contemplate drilling in the arctic. Why do you suppose that is? Why is drilling in such an environmentally sensitive place like the ANWR in Alaska being considered? Why all the expense to build the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, running as it does through such dangerous regions like Chechnya, Dagestan, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, which if they aren't already active war zones are all set to become such in the near future? Chevron's Jack No. 2 well lies under five miles of water and rock in a region that is heavy hurricane country. Why drill there, and not in some easier spot? Lately, all of the new oil discoveries and the distribution facilities needed to support them are either are in (1) environmentally sensitive regions (like ANWR), (2) dangerous regions (like the path of the BTC pipeline), (3) places which are very difficult to get at (like the Jack No. 2 Well), or some combination of all three. All the easy oil has run out, and now we're being forced to rely on oil sources that are increasingly difficult to obtain. This is the core prediction of peak oil theory, and the fact that we do see it happening today makes me inclined to believe that they're basically correct, even if their specific predictions as to the date of the peak aren't exactly spot on. After all, their best prediction (due to Kenneth Deffeyes) was last December 16, 2005, and we won't know if he was correct for a few years or so. The fact that they've slipped several dates doesn't make their core prediction wrong.
By the way, it's no good synthesizing petroleum, and to mention it at all misses the point. Synthesizing oil consumes more energy than it produces, no matter what the process, so you have got to have some other source of energy if you're going to do it (it is, becomes, just like the much ballyhooed hydrogen economy, a carrier of energy rather than an energy source). The reason why we use petroleum that comes from out of the ground is that we get so much more energy from using it than we consumed trying to extract it. In the early part of the 20th century we got as much as 100 times as much energy using oil as we expended to get it. Right now it's down to about 20 times, and falling. It's doubtful that any future energy source (with the possible exception of nuclear energy) that we can bring online within the next decade or so will have a comparable level of efficiency to that of petroleum, even at today's reduced levels.
And how much petroleum energy input in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, the energy needed to drive irrigation systems, and the like is needed to even allow the 30% of the supposed arable land in the United States to have the level of productivity it has? It's not like a significant percentage of it uses organic farming techniques that don't require those kinds of external energy inputs ultimately derived from petroleum. Last time I checked, nearly all of it does, and even if it did, you'd run into other problems as well. Remember that it's not just land you need, but also water. One reason why the other 70% of possible farmland isn't used as such is that there isn't enough water to do it. Fully 85% of all the US freshwater resources are already used for agriculture and as it is these are already being depleted at unsustainable rates. Increasing land use as you suggest would hasten the looming water crisis.
No, I'm afraid that we'll need to accept the fact that it will be necessary to abandon the personal automobile, easy air travel, and the many other perks that we all have gotten used to that depend on cheap oil.
Really? Then why was the balance of payments deficit for goods for 2005 a record $782 billion? The last time the United States had a positive balance of payments was in 1973, and the deficit has been on an almost steady increase for the past two decades. Read the figures published by the Census Bureau (warning PDF link), or if you prefer, a a graph from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. With these figures, the only reason why the United States hasn't yet suffered an Argentina-style economic collapse is that other countries keep buying up US debt...
Excellent points. The fact that the demands of the home and the demands of the business on computers are diverging may result in a schism between the home and the business machine. While today they are one and the same, they may soon not be. The corporate desktop does not need or want many of the things that a home user would expect, and the presence of such capability might be rightly or not perceived as a drain on productivity. Conversely, many of the requirements of the corporate desktop, such as higher levels of security and manageability, make things harder for the home desktop to do things that would be expected. I've been doubting whether a single system can be all things to these disparate worlds. One of GNU/Linux's greatest strengths is that it can be many things to many people, and that to my mind makes it better suited to positioning itself as a business desktop first, and that will in time create a demand for it at home as well, in a more heterogenous market.
Well, having lived through part of that era I can say that your history is inaccurate. It was primarily business that drove adoption of the IBM PC, not academe. Stuff like Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase was what got the IBM PC going, and those served the needs of IBM's (and later the clone makers') customers, their business needs. Unarguably, today, the corporate desktop is as ever a significant part of the market for computers, and catering to that side of the market will not require so deep a compromise against the principles of GNU/Linux as catering to the iPod generation would. The latter would require kowtowing to the Gods of Media, and perhaps sacrificing on their altars the freedom that allowed GNU/Linux to become what it is today. It may result in the divergence of systems, with corporate desktops being one thing, and home desktops something else, but I fail to see how that would be a bad thing in itself.
I don't see how playing to twentysomethings who have no power, influence, or deep pockets as being an effective strategy. Rather, I would advise pushing to the corporate desktop. Where business goes, the home will follow. If we can push GNU/Linux to the corporate desktop, conquering the home desktop will be easy. How do you think the IBM PC became the standard? It was at first a boring machine, with no color, no sound, and no appeal to anyone, save the suits who make the corporate purchasing decisions. And now, nearly thirty years later, it's evolved now everyone has it on their desktop. GNU/Linux must be positioned as a viable alternative to Windows in the corporate space first. The iPod generation is a useless distraction that can be dispensed with for the time being. If more businesses started using GNU/Linux for office workstations it would drive people to start using it at home as well. At least the media conglomerates have no influence (and in fact negative influence!) when it comes to the corporate desktop.
Most everything is high-tech, including the john. That is if you've got a western-style toilet. Many of the nice places automatically turn on a seat warmer and exhaust fan as soon as you sit down, and there are a number of buttons there which spray jets of water at your anus to wash it, and some others that I'm afraid to try... However, if you have one of them Japanese-style toilets, God help you if you need to take a dump...
There's a reason why triple encryption is used rather than double encryption. There's a technique known as the Meet-in-the-middle attack which, by trading off storage space for time, you can break a double encryption with two independent keys using only twice the time needed for single encryption, meaning that using two independent 64-bit keys would only require 2^65 work, rather than 2^128 as one might expect. That's the reason why you never hear of "double DES" but rather Triple DES with independent keys.
ESR, as much as I have my misgivings about him, didn't quite say that proprietary software was a "good thing". All he said was that in today's changing landscape of computing, GNU/Linux risks being left behind if it cannot achieve a compromise with proprietary software and systems. In other words, far from saying that proprietary software is a good thing, he is saying that compromise with proprietary software is a necessary evil in ensuring that GNU/Linux does not become irrelevant. A valid point, but I must ask ESR how far he is willing to take compromise. His mention of iPods and the like seems to indicate that he's willing to go far enough as to compromise on the issue of DRM, which remains a deeply contentious issue for the entire Free Software/Open Source community. I for one believe that compromising on the issue of DRM to the level required by the media conglomerates would mean that the Free Software/Open Source community will become shackled and closed, no different from the proprietary software systems that F/OSS has been so touted as an alternative. Compromise is a very dangerous game... Frankly, I don't believe that F/OSS should be playing to the twenty-something-iPod generation demographic if the goal really is to dominate the desktop. What we need to do is convince the corporate IT procurement departments that GNU/Linux is a viable alternative to Windows. That's how the IBM PC became the de facto standard. If GNU/Linux can own the corporate desktop, owning the home desktop will be a lot easier. Using different systems at home and at work is extremely painful, and once more businesses start using GNU/Linux workstations, this will drive GNU/Linux home desktops.
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Sure there are, the only trouble is simulating more than a handful of qubits will require a really powerful machine. If you had as few as 256 qubits your simulator would need to keep track of 2^256 states, about as many states as there are sub-atomic particles in the visible universe! It's one of the reasons why computer modeling of quantum mechanical phenomena on classical computers is so hard, and probably that this application, far more than Shor's or Grover's algorithms, will be the primary use for the quantum computers that do get built. Gauge quantum chromodynamics simulations, which use the Standard Model to calculate the masses and other properties of sub-atomic particles, have been known to tie up supercomputers for months on end. A quantum computer would be able to perform such computations far more easily.
Actually, if their goal really is quantum computing, the spin of atomic nuclei would have been a better bet than electron spin. The atomic nucleus is one of the best-isolated quantum mechanical systems known, and it usually takes a very long time for decoherence and similar behavior to destroy any superposition of spin states that you create (an absolute necessity for any type of useful quantum computation). The most promising methods to date (such as this and this) for quantum computation are largely based on nuclear spin. Electron spin superpositions are not only hard to create but they succumb to decoherence very quickly, making them difficult to use.
Now, while even people who are experts in the field of quantum mechanics are at a loss to explain what the spin of a quantum particle actually is, this explanation you give is about as far from the phenomenology of spin as it gets. It has nothing to do whatever with "probability eddies" where "electrons hang out more", but is an intrinsic property of the electron or whatever other quantum particle (note that it isn't only electrons that have this property, as you seem to think: almost everything appears to have it). If you put a charged particle such as an electron inside a nonuniform magnetic field (e.g. inside a Stern-Gerlach apparatus), for example, it will have only two possible values for its magnetic moment thanks to this intrinsic spin, and hence the electron would be deflected by the field in only two possible directions.
But well, that is precisely the definition of a copyright license. Redistribution and creation of derivative works are actions restricted by copyright law, and the GPL grants you a license to do these things which are otherwise prohibited by copyright, under certain conditions.
The GPL isn't an EULA. It's a pure copyright license. It grants you the right to do things (like copying, making derivative works, and so forth) which are normally prohibited by copyright law. You are not required to accept the GPL, and you don't even have to accept it in order to make use of software covered by it. You only must accept it if you would do things with the GPL-covered work that would be otherwise be prohibited by copyright law, because NOTHING but the terms of the GPL permit you to do those things. It's really that simple.
Well, tell that to Jean Louis Gassée.
Sun still owns the Java trademark. If you try to fork Java, then their lawyers will say to you, either you stop calling your fork 'Java' or we sue you for trademark infringement. They don't need to actively prevent people from making forks in this case. Besides, a license of the kind you describe would neither qualify as a Free Software license by the FSF's definition nor an Open Source license by the OSI's definition. Besides, historically, forks of major projects are extremely rare, and are most commonly the result of either stagnating development (e.g. the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) or license issues (e.g. XFree86/Xorg), but only very rarely disagreements over design (e.g. the continuing Emacs/XEmacs split). I doubt that Sun will allow either of the first two to happen, and with a project as large as Java, it is extremely unlikely that people will want to quibble over the kind of issues that would result in a fork of the third kind.
Well, we all saw Saddam shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld 23 years ago didn't we? He used to be your son of a bitch out in the Middle East not too long ago too... Who knows what embarrassing things he might reveal about the extent of the support he got from the United States back then.
A little monster devoured by a much larger monster.
I believe the original Friday the 13th was Friday, October 13, 1306. On that morning, King Philip IV of France had his seneschals unseal orders to arrest the Knights Templar for heresy, treason, and a host of other sins. Well, there you go, it's again an action done by someone, rather than a chance natural disaster or something like that.
The idea is basically an extension of what scientific theories are supposed to do. To understand any phenomenon, it is necessary to compress it. A scientific theory, at its core, explains the data from many different experiments by means of a formula simpler than the data. Say, we did a thousand experiments measuring the energy released from the annihiliation of large numbers of electrons and positrons. We could use something like the Lagrange polynomial of the data from the experiment, and then come up with a "theoretical model" that is just as complicated as the data it tries to explain, and that would tell us nothing that we already didn't know. As Leibniz would say: "When a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes as random." But then, if we had something simpler, like E=mc^2, to explain the experiments, then we might be onto something. That equation explains the whole lot of data from the experiment, and gives an explanation for the transformation of matter into energy and vice-versa, in just a few symbols. I suppose, in the same way, compressing natural language would be a step to trying to get computers to understand natural language. If you want more on this idea, you could try reading the articles on Gregory J. Chaitin's website.
But again, this assumes that Pi is a normal number. So far, nobody knows for sure whether or not this is true. I don't know why everyone seems to make this unfounded assumption when dealing with Pi. Attempts to establish the truth of this matter are one of the main reasons why mathematicians are engaged in calculating Pi to billions and billions of digits; there is no other practical use for that many decimal places of accuracy; 39 digits of the number would be enough to calculate the circumference of the known universe given its radius to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
True, copyright law has existed a lot longer than the MP3 file format, but present amendments to copyright law that criminalize whole host of other actions, some of which might indeed be used to violate existing copyright law, were lobbied into Congress at around the time that digital media was growing in importance. And since treaties like TRIPS basically mandate that all countries signing it should eventually come up with a DMCA-like law, they indeed have dragooned and are continuing to dragoon many other nations into arguably acting as industry enforcers. Don't want to sign TRIPS? Kiss your membership in the WTO goodbye.
You might have been right if they hadn't also been railroading laws that amount to a vast extension of their powers as copyright holders (e.g. the DMCA) over longer and longer periods of time (e.g. the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act), and are continuing to lobby for more and more legislation in the same vein.
Ordinarily, I'd agree, but this is a company whose CEO at the time said on the record that he is "commited to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president". He did exactly as promised, looks like. Open partisan bias like this makes me more inclined to believe that malice was involved.
No one will be hiding behind NAT's or using dynamic IP's with IPv6. These two abuses of IPv4 addressing are the main reason why it is so difficult these days to track down and control sources of network abuse, including spam. This will make it easier to make computers and people responsible for them accountable for their actions, which means spammers and people who insist on running insecure operating systems can no longer hide or deny responsibility so easily as they can now.
Better yet to send snail mail to the judge. Seeing how he's ruled on this case, I doubt he would even have an email address.
You say that it's getting easier and easier to contemplate drilling in the arctic. Why do you suppose that is? Why is drilling in such an environmentally sensitive place like the ANWR in Alaska being considered? Why all the expense to build the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, running as it does through such dangerous regions like Chechnya, Dagestan, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, which if they aren't already active war zones are all set to become such in the near future? Chevron's Jack No. 2 well lies under five miles of water and rock in a region that is heavy hurricane country. Why drill there, and not in some easier spot? Lately, all of the new oil discoveries and the distribution facilities needed to support them are either are in (1) environmentally sensitive regions (like ANWR), (2) dangerous regions (like the path of the BTC pipeline), (3) places which are very difficult to get at (like the Jack No. 2 Well), or some combination of all three. All the easy oil has run out, and now we're being forced to rely on oil sources that are increasingly difficult to obtain. This is the core prediction of peak oil theory, and the fact that we do see it happening today makes me inclined to believe that they're basically correct, even if their specific predictions as to the date of the peak aren't exactly spot on. After all, their best prediction (due to Kenneth Deffeyes) was last December 16, 2005, and we won't know if he was correct for a few years or so. The fact that they've slipped several dates doesn't make their core prediction wrong.
By the way, it's no good synthesizing petroleum, and to mention it at all misses the point. Synthesizing oil consumes more energy than it produces, no matter what the process, so you have got to have some other source of energy if you're going to do it (it is, becomes, just like the much ballyhooed hydrogen economy, a carrier of energy rather than an energy source). The reason why we use petroleum that comes from out of the ground is that we get so much more energy from using it than we consumed trying to extract it. In the early part of the 20th century we got as much as 100 times as much energy using oil as we expended to get it. Right now it's down to about 20 times, and falling. It's doubtful that any future energy source (with the possible exception of nuclear energy) that we can bring online within the next decade or so will have a comparable level of efficiency to that of petroleum, even at today's reduced levels.
And how much petroleum energy input in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, the energy needed to drive irrigation systems, and the like is needed to even allow the 30% of the supposed arable land in the United States to have the level of productivity it has? It's not like a significant percentage of it uses organic farming techniques that don't require those kinds of external energy inputs ultimately derived from petroleum. Last time I checked, nearly all of it does, and even if it did, you'd run into other problems as well. Remember that it's not just land you need, but also water. One reason why the other 70% of possible farmland isn't used as such is that there isn't enough water to do it. Fully 85% of all the US freshwater resources are already used for agriculture and as it is these are already being depleted at unsustainable rates. Increasing land use as you suggest would hasten the looming water crisis.
No, I'm afraid that we'll need to accept the fact that it will be necessary to abandon the personal automobile, easy air travel, and the many other perks that we all have gotten used to that depend on cheap oil.
Really? Then why was the balance of payments deficit for goods for 2005 a record $782 billion? The last time the United States had a positive balance of payments was in 1973, and the deficit has been on an almost steady increase for the past two decades. Read the figures published by the Census Bureau (warning PDF link), or if you prefer, a a graph from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. With these figures, the only reason why the United States hasn't yet suffered an Argentina-style economic collapse is that other countries keep buying up US debt...
"We must remember that we have more power than our enemies to worsen our fate." From "It's Not Another World War" by Ted Galen Carpenter.
You can refuse to be terrorized by them. Get them out of power. Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo. If you care about your country you'll use them.
Excellent points. The fact that the demands of the home and the demands of the business on computers are diverging may result in a schism between the home and the business machine. While today they are one and the same, they may soon not be. The corporate desktop does not need or want many of the things that a home user would expect, and the presence of such capability might be rightly or not perceived as a drain on productivity. Conversely, many of the requirements of the corporate desktop, such as higher levels of security and manageability, make things harder for the home desktop to do things that would be expected. I've been doubting whether a single system can be all things to these disparate worlds. One of GNU/Linux's greatest strengths is that it can be many things to many people, and that to my mind makes it better suited to positioning itself as a business desktop first, and that will in time create a demand for it at home as well, in a more heterogenous market.
Well, having lived through part of that era I can say that your history is inaccurate. It was primarily business that drove adoption of the IBM PC, not academe. Stuff like Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase was what got the IBM PC going, and those served the needs of IBM's (and later the clone makers') customers, their business needs. Unarguably, today, the corporate desktop is as ever a significant part of the market for computers, and catering to that side of the market will not require so deep a compromise against the principles of GNU/Linux as catering to the iPod generation would. The latter would require kowtowing to the Gods of Media, and perhaps sacrificing on their altars the freedom that allowed GNU/Linux to become what it is today. It may result in the divergence of systems, with corporate desktops being one thing, and home desktops something else, but I fail to see how that would be a bad thing in itself.
I don't see how playing to twentysomethings who have no power, influence, or deep pockets as being an effective strategy. Rather, I would advise pushing to the corporate desktop. Where business goes, the home will follow. If we can push GNU/Linux to the corporate desktop, conquering the home desktop will be easy. How do you think the IBM PC became the standard? It was at first a boring machine, with no color, no sound, and no appeal to anyone, save the suits who make the corporate purchasing decisions. And now, nearly thirty years later, it's evolved now everyone has it on their desktop. GNU/Linux must be positioned as a viable alternative to Windows in the corporate space first. The iPod generation is a useless distraction that can be dispensed with for the time being. If more businesses started using GNU/Linux for office workstations it would drive people to start using it at home as well. At least the media conglomerates have no influence (and in fact negative influence!) when it comes to the corporate desktop.
Most everything is high-tech, including the john. That is if you've got a western-style toilet. Many of the nice places automatically turn on a seat warmer and exhaust fan as soon as you sit down, and there are a number of buttons there which spray jets of water at your anus to wash it, and some others that I'm afraid to try... However, if you have one of them Japanese-style toilets, God help you if you need to take a dump...
There's a reason why triple encryption is used rather than double encryption. There's a technique known as the Meet-in-the-middle attack which, by trading off storage space for time, you can break a double encryption with two independent keys using only twice the time needed for single encryption, meaning that using two independent 64-bit keys would only require 2^65 work, rather than 2^128 as one might expect. That's the reason why you never hear of "double DES" but rather Triple DES with independent keys.
ESR, as much as I have my misgivings about him, didn't quite say that proprietary software was a "good thing". All he said was that in today's changing landscape of computing, GNU/Linux risks being left behind if it cannot achieve a compromise with proprietary software and systems. In other words, far from saying that proprietary software is a good thing, he is saying that compromise with proprietary software is a necessary evil in ensuring that GNU/Linux does not become irrelevant. A valid point, but I must ask ESR how far he is willing to take compromise. His mention of iPods and the like seems to indicate that he's willing to go far enough as to compromise on the issue of DRM, which remains a deeply contentious issue for the entire Free Software/Open Source community. I for one believe that compromising on the issue of DRM to the level required by the media conglomerates would mean that the Free Software/Open Source community will become shackled and closed, no different from the proprietary software systems that F/OSS has been so touted as an alternative. Compromise is a very dangerous game... Frankly, I don't believe that F/OSS should be playing to the twenty-something-iPod generation demographic if the goal really is to dominate the desktop. What we need to do is convince the corporate IT procurement departments that GNU/Linux is a viable alternative to Windows. That's how the IBM PC became the de facto standard. If GNU/Linux can own the corporate desktop, owning the home desktop will be a lot easier. Using different systems at home and at work is extremely painful, and once more businesses start using GNU/Linux workstations, this will drive GNU/Linux home desktops.