The idea of giving award prize for the personal achievements is nice, however the Nobel prize by design is limited to a certain number of people that can be awarded. However, nowadays most of scientific achievements is a result of collective works of many people.

There is the story told by the Korolev's daughter (Sergei Korolev was the lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer) about two failed attempts by the Nobel committee to award prize to an engineer who was in charge of the first artificial Earth satellite, sputnik, and the first manned space flight by Gagarin. They didn't know the name of the person(s) who developed the Soviet space program, and the political leader Khrushchev, when inquired, refused to give the names arguing that many Soviet people were working on the project and all of them have to be awarded the prize.

Anyhow, talking about the Nobel prize. There is a remarkable study published in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding "Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates" ;-) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMon1211064

Even today, the US research environment is still better than Europe due to relatively less taxes/regulation.

Just go and read resources, energy, salaries (for science) and other reports, after this it is quite strange to ask what will be better staffed and will have better equipment.

And this is post about a Nobel prize?

A couple of Americans just pulled down the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Amazing how this "Lazy" country that only care about iPhones keeps making all the important science discoveries. What's wrong with this picture?

And this is post about a Nobel prize?

At least with regard to the American mass media -- it has covered it extensively for decades.

It seems like you have some build in mind filters that see only thing you like to see :-)

It would be an even bigger opportunity if they paid them more

Yep, but sadly local managers can't do it even if they wanted, as all main details is strictly detailed by US corporation. If you need to supply one item for $1, no way you can pay for work $2.

It is very interesting to note that mass media tend to ignore that absoltutely same practice had been used by corporations for long long time in other countries, such as Indonesia, Thailand, etc.

in the US, it would be illegal to pay people those wages. They work for the price of electricity in the US- so effectively they are human robots at those wages
Apple should give them at least US standard of pay and 40 hr work week, but they won't because they don't care about quality of life abroad

It is funny. Open reports and charts I posted, and look how US is different. If someone will make your proposal the world will just either collapse or face huge inflation, as you don't have resources to supply all this "US standard of living" to other countries.

Problem for people is that they fail to understand any reality that is different to their neighborhood. For people who work in this manufacturing jobs it is very big chance. For you it is "slave labour".

That's also an oversimplification. If it was as you say, there wouldn't be rioting in those giant labor camps.

letting Apple use Chinese slave labor in work camps

Problem for people is that they fail to understand any reality that is different to their neighborhood. For people who work in this manufacturing jobs it is very big chance. For you it is "slave labour".

It was also a Nobel prize committee that thought awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Obama was a good idea. Yet many people still wonder what exactly for ;-)

(But to be fair: This years winners of the Physics Nobel prize certainly achieved a lot even if that should not lead to a useful quantum computer.)

While I would not call quantum computers a stupid idea, I am pretty convinced that we won't see any of them performing useful things (as in: "as good as or better than ordinary computers") during our lifetime.

I think that quantum computers will have similar strenghts and suffer from the same shortcomings as analog computers, which also produced results by measuring observables of a physical system that was previously prepared to represent a certain numeric problem. The biggest problem will be to prepare results of significant size/accuracy, as measurement will become exponentially more difficult with the result size.

Electric analog computers of past decades at their time outperformed digital computers with certain calculations (like numerically solving integrals), and maybe quantum computers will be good for one or the other kind of calculation, too. But will they ever outperform digital computers now that those are already pretty powerful? I doubt that. As much as I doubt the often metaphysical sounding descriptions of how quantum computers could solve "everything at an instant".

Quantum computers is one of the biggest stupid ideas I know.