This will be an unmitigated disaster for the entire eastern end of asian continent. Every country with rivers seems to have hydro dam nazis in the government, unfortunately China controls the source of so many rivers.
A quick glance at the map shows that in that small location is the source of four of the most important rivers in asia (the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Mekong and the Yangze), side by side, one valley after the other.
China, in the process, will single-handedly piss off India, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, let alone the long suffering Tibetans.
And then, of course, there's that issue of nuclear contamination in the water supply...
Well it started with Alan Turing and it's a myth that will probably endure for as long as we have computers. It goes something like this, in five, ten, twenty years from now computers will have become so powerful they will be smarter than us, and then when that happens what will they think of us? This is based on the faulty premise that the mind is really a universal turing machine and therefore can be modelled by another turing machine. This is a leap of faith, pure and simple but it goes deeper into the scientist's desire to be able to understand something completely through the construction of a simple mechanical model. Once you understand a mechanism then you can make another. Computers can model a whole range of physical phenomena but they can only do so with in a very narrow way with lots of omitions, simplifications, fudges and bogus constants. But modelling just ain't the same thing as being. Unfortunately people don't like to accept limits like that computers (both present and future ones) are not powerful enough to produce intelligence or to create life. A photo is not the same thing as its subject matter, a map is not the territory. BTW This is definitely not a religious view, its a skeptical view and a scientific one.
I think the above mesages provide a pretty good indication that americans are totally fucked in the head. So scarred, so traumatized by their little ol' Revolution, Indian Genocide and Civil War. They can't imagine anything else despite a million counter examples. The occasional posters from Canada, Australia and Europe can only shake their heads in amazement, but ofcourse they all live in dictatorships, don't they. Clearly, with that many guns already out there the average joe american thinks he needs a gun in self defence (against other "criminal" joe americans). "More guns less crime", Washington DC, rated the msot dangerous capital city in the world. How about checking a cupla non-US examples, boys? The gun manufacturing industry meanwhile is dumping millions of weopons into the US environment, once out there they will never go away. Its too late to fix it, the US is a basket case, let them blather on on on about their friggin constitutional rights to shoot themselves in the foot and elsewhere. Meanwhile the rest of the world should take active steps to contain the american problem, like building a huge protective glass dome over the USA to keep them in.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be an unmitigated disaster for the entire eastern end of asian continent. Every country with rivers seems to have hydro dam nazis in the government, unfortunately China controls the source of so many rivers. A quick glance at the map shows that in that small location is the source of four of the most important rivers in asia (the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Mekong and the Yangze), side by side, one valley after the other. China, in the process, will single-handedly piss off India, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, let alone the long suffering Tibetans. And then, of course, there's that issue of nuclear contamination in the water supply...
How come I haven't heard the name "Bruce Schneier" crop up in this thread?
This was tried before in 1700 BC in Minoan Crete. Unfortunately no one today knows what version of Word they used...
Well it started with Alan Turing and it's a myth that will probably endure for as long as we have computers.
It goes something like this, in five, ten, twenty years from now computers will have become so powerful they will be smarter than us, and then when that happens what will they think of us?
This is based on the faulty premise that the mind is really a universal turing machine and therefore can be modelled by another turing machine.
This is a leap of faith, pure and simple but it goes deeper into the scientist's desire to be able to understand something completely through the construction of a simple mechanical model. Once you understand a mechanism then you can make another.
Computers can model a whole range of physical phenomena but they can only do so with in a very narrow way with lots of omitions, simplifications, fudges and bogus constants.
But modelling just ain't the same thing as being.
Unfortunately people don't like to accept limits like that computers (both present and future ones) are not powerful enough to produce intelligence or to create life.
A photo is not the same thing as its subject matter, a map is not the territory.
BTW This is definitely not a religious view, its a skeptical view and a scientific one.
I think the above mesages provide a pretty good indication that americans are totally fucked in the head. So scarred, so traumatized by their little ol' Revolution, Indian Genocide and Civil War. They can't imagine anything else despite a million counter examples. The occasional posters from Canada, Australia and Europe can only shake their heads in amazement, but ofcourse they all live in dictatorships, don't they. Clearly, with that many guns already out there the average joe american thinks he needs a gun in self defence (against other "criminal" joe americans). "More guns less crime", Washington DC, rated the msot dangerous capital city in the world. How about checking a cupla non-US examples, boys? The gun manufacturing industry meanwhile is dumping millions of weopons into the US environment, once out there they will never go away. Its too late to fix it, the US is a basket case, let them blather on on on about their friggin constitutional rights to shoot themselves in the foot and elsewhere. Meanwhile the rest of the world should take active steps to contain the american problem, like building a huge protective glass dome over the USA to keep them in.