To take one example, what does "leadership in promoting the usage of the latest information technology tools" mean? Using Vista? Promoting Web 2.0 hype? Using Linux?

If it means Web 2.0 hype, I'm glad we're not in first - we already have too much.

Real innovation is stuff like inventing transistors, OLED displays, microscopes that can see atoms, programming languages that don't suck, etc.

In my job (programming/robotics/semiconductor/mechanical), I see zero innovation from Denmark. The good stuff comes from the USA, Japan, Germany, and to a lesser extent countries like the UK, France, Korea, and Switzerland.

--Tony

everything again. Too many smart people in too many countries. However, greatness (in engineering, physics, literature, music, etc) isn't spread out evenly through space and time.

Open source projects tend to be international. GvR is Dutch (though currently living in Silicon Valley), but the rest of the core Python team varies.

Lua is Brazilian (the Lua team is at a university, PUC-Rio - one of the few academic groups to make a useful programming language). It's also over a decade old (Python, Ruby, Perl, and Java are also pretty old). Erlang is also old, and Swedish (Ericsson).

But, the only new language (<10 years old) I find really interesting is the Io Language, and I'm pretty sure the lead is American. But I don't care about that.

To give you a taste of what I'm talking about, go to Semicon West in SF in July, and look at the companies there. Or the machine vision show (BTW, Canada has some good machine vision companies, such as Dalsa, Matrox, and Point Grey); I don't see Cognex laying people off. Or go to Photonics West. Or to the Embedded Systems Conference.

There's more to technology than computers, the internet, and software.
--Tony