Not to mention the fact that our ancestors didn't live in volcanic rocks. As long as there are few humans around, we tend to strongly prefer to live on sand. Here in the Netherlands the soil mostly consists of peat and clay, with a few fluvial sand ridges and sand dunes: early humans, even cultures practicing agriculture, are invariably found on the sandy ridges, even though these are least fertile and today considered suitable only for sheep and silviculture. Same for the general pattern of human expansions into Europe: they tend to spread over the highland plains and along rivers. This may have a lot to do with the lack of shoes. Shoes gave us the freedom to live in more diverse environments.
Nevertheless the Dutch education system does not compair unfavourably to other European systems in international assessments, and the Dutch universities also rank high: the European Commission's top 22 contains 7 Dutch ones. That doesn't disprove that the education system is falling apart, but in many other countries things are apparently even worse.
And Denmark is also suspiciously low. Could it be that XiTi made the very French mistake of determining browser use by country based on the ccTLD of the websites monitored instead of IP address of visitors? Firefox use in countries where the IT savvy part of the population is found on the Internet Anglophone most of the time would be seriously underestimated in that case.
Some of the most popular Dutch language websites - like tweakers.net - are also outside of the Dutch ccTLD, and many internet users have personal domains outside the Dutch language ccTLD because Dutch ccTLD domain name registration was limited to companies for a long time. The nu and tv ccTLD's are for instance used a lot. All possible factors that would lead to misclassification of IT savvy Dutchmen.
Monty Python was quite popular in the Netherlands. Google: 231,000 pages in Dutch containing 'Monty Python', which is quite a lot for a small language. The Dutch wikipedia television comedies category lists a dozen British comedies, vs. one American one (Saturday Night Live). Comedy is probably Britain's most visible export product on at least parts of the continent.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. I have been working here in the Netherlands at a university for a decade now, and the pressure from the central office to get rid of non-Microsoft products has been steadily increasing. When I was a student, CS and science faculties still exclusively used sparcstations, and later added some linux pc's for students, and the social sciences mostly used Apple II machines. No Microsoft at all. In those days there was no central system administration, and the central office had relatively little power. Nowadays we still, more or less secretly, use some linux machines, because they are a necessity for research purposes, but central system administration only allows Dell pc's running Windows XP and logging on onto an NT domain, and we are not allowed to purchase computers ourselves with our own budgets. The causes are increased financial centralization following recent changes in education legislation (the universities are semi-public bodies), and nationwide cooperation of the universities in acquisition of computers and software licenses.
I have visited Italian colleagues at their university a number of times, and my impression is that these universities are as chaotic from a management point of view as ours used to be a decade ago, so I wouldn't think of them as being ahead of the curve and us being "stuck in yesteryear". International research university rankings also seem to confirm that the Netherlands beats the south of Europe in research. I wouldn't dare to claim that forcing everybody to use Dell machines running XP is progress, though.
An important factor that retards the adoption of open source in the general population is that advocating open source is often confused with anti-americanism. The socialist party's advocacy of open source is very counterproductive, and drives the majority of the population, and higher management in particular, towards Microsoft. Lobbying for open source is bad for your career.
Negative externalities of green energy production are not only ecological. There are lots of reasons why we will never even get close to the amounts of energy we could theoretically produce.
Here in the Netherlands we for instance have some estuaries which could be used for tidal power, and huge amounts of water coming in from some of Europe's largest rivers: an average 3,300 cubic meters per second, which could for instance theoretically generate 3,300MW through reverse electro dialysis. Obviously it makes sense to try to harness this potential this in some way.
The problem is firstly that these rivers are also major transport systems: any solution that involves closing them is out of the question. Secondly, any reduction in flow rate on the interface of sea and river water is also out of the question because this would cause salinization in below sea level areas (half of the country), which is bad for agriculture and forests, and besides that spoils a major European fresh water supply. Thirdly, the estuaries that are not already closed at present (which serve as fresh water supplies and prevent salinization), are not closed because of either vulnerable protected species who breed only there or because of large scale production of seafood depending on regular tides. Fourthly, any such systems would have to deal with the major, and increasing, risk of summer floods of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse: in reality we spend megawatts of power pumping water out of the country continuously, instead of generating power. The same thing is probably true of many other major river deltas, like China, Bangladesh, Louisiana, etc: it is more likely that they will be major energy users than energy producers in the future (contingent on global warming predictions).
The free market and its invisible hand are always present, no matter what you do...
The same could be said of the law. Eradicate all traces of government and rule of law in a country, and chiefs and tribal courts automatically and almost immediately pop up where government disappeared, and marketplaces will grow up around them. The perfect free market economy is just as impossible as the perfect command economy. The weakness of both models is that you have to work with real people who always sabotage utopian experiments to their own advantage, and others who want to prevent them from doing so.
The question is whether people interested in a sports car are interested in an electric car. Constant torque and 0-60mph in 4 seconds are certainly good selling points.
The link doesn't tell me what kind of batteries the conversion kit uses. Lead-acid? NiMH? Li-ion (if they exist)? I guess unsealed lead-acid, given the quoted price and range, and that is not adequate in terms of pollution, performance, range, battery life, cold weather issues, etc. I want a car, not a toy, and don't live in California.
GM quotes $13.000 for Li-ion Chevy Volt batteries, and the Tesla roadster batteries are better and certainly more expensive. At least $20.000. However, as this link points out, we are comparing apples and oranges here, since the conversion kits don't include labor costs, and GM's and Tesla's calculations certainly do.
So what you are basically saying is that cooperative price fixing works for almost all products. Over the last few years I have heard and read about successful price fixing cartels in bricks, elevators, books, dental medicine, health care insurance, shipping, glass, power converters, banking, road construction, and beer. I see no common ground.
I think the most important factor is how attractive entering a market is for a newcomer. If you need to invest billions before you can start selling, it is a risk to enter a market with artificially high prices because the cartel will temporarily lower prices to push you out. And if even with price fixing a trade appears to be marginal nobody bothers.
Cars are actually perfect for a cartel. Mass production of the alternative-to-the-ice-vehicle requires billions in upfront investment, it has to compete against an existing infrastructure built for ICE cars by previous generations, and the major manufacturers worldwide easily fit in a small meeting room.
I want to bet millions of people want something VW golf-sized with batteries, and i bet they can make it for under $30000.
Not if the Li-ion batteries alone cost $20.000. Maybe a Dacia Logan with $20.000 worth of batteries, but that would be an unattractive proposition.
The advantage of aiming at the high end of the market is that 1) the cost of the batteries is a smaller proportion of the total price, 2) wealthy people spend more on frills, and 2) they are more likely to have private parking facilities at home and more likely to be able to arrange access to a power outlet at work. It makes sense to start with an expensive sports car.
Damn, this is the fscking 21st century! Anyone that is still a communist or economic central planner might as well be a creationist, global warming denier, or a believer that evil spirits cause disease, i.e. ignorant of the sciences.
Someone who believes that market allocation is by necessity more efficient than hierarchical allocation apparently reads the scientific literature on the subject very selectively. The very size and vertical integration of a company like Walmart illustrates that hierarchical allocation can work quite well. If actual markets would work as advertised, Walmart would be pushed from the market by the baker on the corner and his suppliers. Central planning is just too much, and will only work over a long period if the central planner is omniscient.
There may be a potential banking business model in this for people in countries that don't pay taxes on virtual money if interest paid on virtual loans is tax-deductible (against real income).
Indeed. Nearly all diversity in appearance of human beings outside of Africa is also found in Africa, even today. But there seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about what this means, because many people seem to be under the impression that a) Africa is inhabited by black people of the Niger-Congo type, and b) that these people and their ancestors where always all over that continent and all people less black than them are somehow less "African".
In reality the expansion of the Niger-Congo people from a fairly small area in western Africa is a very recent phenomenon, and a large part of Africa was, and in the north still is, inhabited by people with lighter skins and a variety of physical features. The African sun does not select specifically for being of the Niger-Congo type: the expansion has to do with agricultural and military advantages these people had over their competitors. Compare tropical regions in Asia and South America before the Spanish arrived: no blacks there. There is however a limit on how light-skinned a baby can be in the African sun and still survive, so some mutations will only happen once a group has left Africa.
The archaic groups of humans they are speaking of are obviously the previous wave of humans coming out of Africa. Coming "out of Africa" does not by the way suggest a relation with the Niger-Congo ("black") peoples who currently dominate that continent: the Bantu expansion is of much more recent date. The Wikipedia Khoisan article maybe sheds some light on where the brown and yellow skin and epicanthic eye folds typical of most Eurasian populations may come from. The Papua and Australian Aboriginals are for instance also interesting leftovers of previous peoples coming "out of Africa".
It does work for some sectors dominated by big business. Finance for instance, and retail. If you openly do business or invest in Cuba, the US subsidiaries get to pay the bill. I don't think I can easily invest my savings in Cuba through a major European bank if I wanted to, and that basically means that Cuba cannot effectively sell state obligations or for instance privatize state-owned companies if it wanted to. Tourism or importing stuff like cigars from Cuba is on the other hand pretty safe if you don't have business in the US, and even if you do it is easy to set up a side company especially for business with Cuba. Setting up a bank is considerably less easy and not worth the trouble.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey "The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001" and the number of people who believe in no religion AT ALL doubled from 1990 to 2001.
This could actually sort of confirm the thesis. Read the wikipedia article on pillarization: The Netherlands is considered the classical example (of the religious form) of this phenomenon.
In the early 1960s, the Dutch were the most churchgoing of European peoples. More than 80% of the Dutch belonged to a church. Christian political parties consistently polled more than half of the national vote. Thirty years later, in the early 1990s, the Netherlands were the most secularized European nation. More than half of the population said they do not belong to any church, and half of these are self-avowed atheists.
This is often considered a consequence of religion having too big an big impact on public life: more people will openly become atheists when they leave the church of their parents. Atheism thrives on excessive religiousness, while more polite forms of defection like agnosticism.
The maximum fines for antitrust law violations have recently been increased very considerably by European Parliament. The next fine will probably be an order of magnitude bigger than the last two, and will hurt even Microsoft.
The whole point of antitrust laws is to crack down on business practices that unreasonably deprive consumers of the benefits of free choice between competing products in a transparent market. It strikes me as odd to argue that taking on a monopolist deprives consumers of the choice for the monopolist's products, which should according to the economic logic behind antitrust law be too expensive and inferior compared to the substitute products that would exist in a better functioning market.
Did the breakup of Standard Oil deprive American consumers of oil? Of course windows and office are harder to substitute than barrels of oil, but current installations of these programs will just keep working and other businesses will fill the vacuum in no time in the EU, certainly if Microsoft cannot sue them for reverse engineering, patent and copyright violations, etc.
US law is very similar, but the US doesn't enforce it very well lately. Maybe this is because the white house secretly thinks of Microsoft and it monopoly position as a national security asset. Americans apparently still have to get used to the idea that the EU has overtaken the US in free market idolatry and actually takes antitrust law very seriously nowadays. EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes certainly does, and she is just starting: she announced two days ago that she will take on 10 cartels in 2007 and expects to impose 9 billion euros in fines, compared to just 1.8 billion last year.
By contrast, the Romans conquered and ruled Gaul; they didn't kill off 95% of the population.
95% of which population? Ceasar did get censured by the senate for wiping out the Tencteri, the Usipetes, and the Aduatuci tribes in the lower Rhine area. Cato the younger even proposed to give him to the natives as a punishment for his crimes.
Surely mean nomads are the driving force of history. Who scared the meanest SOBs of written history, the Cimmerians, the Dorians, the Skythians, the Vandals, the Alans, the Goths, the Huns, etc, away from their lands? Even meaner SOBs whose names we don't know?
As far as the "Imperialist invasion of spain" theory goes. That too is nonsense. Imperialism is the correct term, but there simply was no "Spain" to be conquered. There was a Roman territory called Hispania, which had collapsed into interfamily and tribal rivalry with the decline of the empire. (Incidentally, many people who fought with the Moors were Jews, fleeing the Church's policy of forced conversion.) The Moors were simply another grouping hoping to take advantage of the chaos.
The Reconquista is a useful national myth for the Spanish, but it doesn't have much basis in fact. The process of the unification of Spain is markedly similar to the process of the unification of England. If the Danes had stood their ground, or the mercians had held out for autonomy the English would have a different national myth, and if the Spanish had failed to retake the south they would have a different story of legitimacy, just as powerful.
I think the original "Reconquista" should be interpreted in the context of a Christian culture considering the Roman Empire as its ancestor (the principle of translatio imperii). In the same sense one could talk about "reclaiming" the holy land, or Eqypt, or Morocco, etc., for Christianity. The Spanish did indeed "reconquer" parts of North Africa. The Byzantines of course also considered themselves heir of Rome, and the Russian tsars considered themselves heir of Byzantium (and copied its double headed eagle), and from that perspective could also "reclaim" former provinces of Rome. Same for Germany (Holy Roman Empire) with its Roman eagle.
Same in the middle east: the Ottoman empire for instance adopted the double headed eagle and crescent moon as symbols from Persia and Byzantium, the two empires it considered itself heir of, and was preceded by a Seljuk sultanate of "Rum" (Rome). In short: basically all conquest in the Meditterean "reclaimed" formerly owned land, except for the Mongol invasion.
In particular we should credit the House of Wisdom in Baghdad for collecting and translating Byzantine, Persian, and Syriac scientific works and passing them on to posterity. Without it we would have for instance lost Ptolemy's Syntaxis (in Arabic the Almagest) to the Dark Age. The most prominent stars in the sky take their name from the Arabic names (Vega, Betelgeuse, Antares, Altair, Aldebaran, Deneb, Denebola, Fomalhaut, etc.) used in the Arabic translation of this work (probably popularized in the West because they were also used in navigation with the Astrolabe which was copied from the Arabs). The original House of Wisdom was destroyed by the Mongols in 1258. Ironically, without the crusades we probably wouldn't have been interested in copying these works in time. An ironic twist of history is that it's lesser successor institute was looted again in 2003, during the American invasion of Iraq.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the fact that our ancestors didn't live in volcanic rocks. As long as there are few humans around, we tend to strongly prefer to live on sand. Here in the Netherlands the soil mostly consists of peat and clay, with a few fluvial sand ridges and sand dunes: early humans, even cultures practicing agriculture, are invariably found on the sandy ridges, even though these are least fertile and today considered suitable only for sheep and silviculture. Same for the general pattern of human expansions into Europe: they tend to spread over the highland plains and along rivers. This may have a lot to do with the lack of shoes. Shoes gave us the freedom to live in more diverse environments.
I was also under the impression that the Netherlands was doing OK in the WoS database, and IEEE, LNCS, and ACM:
The citation impact of the Netherlands academic Computer Science groups is significantly above world average. An overall normalised citation impact of 1.30 was found (a level of 1.0 represents the world average), and increasing: 1.4 and 1.6 for papers published in the last two years (2000 and 2001). [..] It was also found that among the top 10 per cent most frequently cited articles published world-wide in Computer Science, the number of papers by Netherlands academic computer scientists is 50 per cent higher than expected on the basis of the total volume of Netherlands publication output in the field.
I wonder what kinds of sources of CS papers this guy considers relevant.
Nevertheless the Dutch education system does not compair unfavourably to other European systems in international assessments, and the Dutch universities also rank high: the European Commission's top 22 contains 7 Dutch ones. That doesn't disprove that the education system is falling apart, but in many other countries things are apparently even worse.
You guessed right.
Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%
And Denmark is also suspiciously low. Could it be that XiTi made the very French mistake of determining browser use by country based on the ccTLD of the websites monitored instead of IP address of visitors? Firefox use in countries where the IT savvy part of the population is found on the Internet Anglophone most of the time would be seriously underestimated in that case.
Some of the most popular Dutch language websites - like tweakers.net - are also outside of the Dutch ccTLD, and many internet users have personal domains outside the Dutch language ccTLD because Dutch ccTLD domain name registration was limited to companies for a long time. The nu and tv ccTLD's are for instance used a lot. All possible factors that would lead to misclassification of IT savvy Dutchmen.
Monty Python was quite popular in the Netherlands. Google: 231,000 pages in Dutch containing 'Monty Python', which is quite a lot for a small language. The Dutch wikipedia television comedies category lists a dozen British comedies, vs. one American one (Saturday Night Live). Comedy is probably Britain's most visible export product on at least parts of the continent.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. I have been working here in the Netherlands at a university for a decade now, and the pressure from the central office to get rid of non-Microsoft products has been steadily increasing. When I was a student, CS and science faculties still exclusively used sparcstations, and later added some linux pc's for students, and the social sciences mostly used Apple II machines. No Microsoft at all. In those days there was no central system administration, and the central office had relatively little power. Nowadays we still, more or less secretly, use some linux machines, because they are a necessity for research purposes, but central system administration only allows Dell pc's running Windows XP and logging on onto an NT domain, and we are not allowed to purchase computers ourselves with our own budgets. The causes are increased financial centralization following recent changes in education legislation (the universities are semi-public bodies), and nationwide cooperation of the universities in acquisition of computers and software licenses.
I have visited Italian colleagues at their university a number of times, and my impression is that these universities are as chaotic from a management point of view as ours used to be a decade ago, so I wouldn't think of them as being ahead of the curve and us being "stuck in yesteryear". International research university rankings also seem to confirm that the Netherlands beats the south of Europe in research. I wouldn't dare to claim that forcing everybody to use Dell machines running XP is progress, though.
An important factor that retards the adoption of open source in the general population is that advocating open source is often confused with anti-americanism. The socialist party's advocacy of open source is very counterproductive, and drives the majority of the population, and higher management in particular, towards Microsoft. Lobbying for open source is bad for your career.
Negative externalities of green energy production are not only ecological. There are lots of reasons why we will never even get close to the amounts of energy we could theoretically produce.
Here in the Netherlands we for instance have some estuaries which could be used for tidal power, and huge amounts of water coming in from some of Europe's largest rivers: an average 3,300 cubic meters per second, which could for instance theoretically generate 3,300MW through reverse electro dialysis. Obviously it makes sense to try to harness this potential this in some way.
The problem is firstly that these rivers are also major transport systems: any solution that involves closing them is out of the question. Secondly, any reduction in flow rate on the interface of sea and river water is also out of the question because this would cause salinization in below sea level areas (half of the country), which is bad for agriculture and forests, and besides that spoils a major European fresh water supply. Thirdly, the estuaries that are not already closed at present (which serve as fresh water supplies and prevent salinization), are not closed because of either vulnerable protected species who breed only there or because of large scale production of seafood depending on regular tides. Fourthly, any such systems would have to deal with the major, and increasing, risk of summer floods of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse: in reality we spend megawatts of power pumping water out of the country continuously, instead of generating power. The same thing is probably true of many other major river deltas, like China, Bangladesh, Louisiana, etc: it is more likely that they will be major energy users than energy producers in the future (contingent on global warming predictions).
The free market and its invisible hand are always present, no matter what you do...
The same could be said of the law. Eradicate all traces of government and rule of law in a country, and chiefs and tribal courts automatically and almost immediately pop up where government disappeared, and marketplaces will grow up around them. The perfect free market economy is just as impossible as the perfect command economy. The weakness of both models is that you have to work with real people who always sabotage utopian experiments to their own advantage, and others who want to prevent them from doing so.
The question is whether people interested in a sports car are interested in an electric car. Constant torque and 0-60mph in 4 seconds are certainly good selling points.
The link doesn't tell me what kind of batteries the conversion kit uses. Lead-acid? NiMH? Li-ion (if they exist)? I guess unsealed lead-acid, given the quoted price and range, and that is not adequate in terms of pollution, performance, range, battery life, cold weather issues, etc. I want a car, not a toy, and don't live in California.
GM quotes $13.000 for Li-ion Chevy Volt batteries, and the Tesla roadster batteries are better and certainly more expensive. At least $20.000. However, as this link points out, we are comparing apples and oranges here, since the conversion kits don't include labor costs, and GM's and Tesla's calculations certainly do.
So what you are basically saying is that cooperative price fixing works for almost all products. Over the last few years I have heard and read about successful price fixing cartels in bricks, elevators, books, dental medicine, health care insurance, shipping, glass, power converters, banking, road construction, and beer. I see no common ground.
I think the most important factor is how attractive entering a market is for a newcomer. If you need to invest billions before you can start selling, it is a risk to enter a market with artificially high prices because the cartel will temporarily lower prices to push you out. And if even with price fixing a trade appears to be marginal nobody bothers.
Cars are actually perfect for a cartel. Mass production of the alternative-to-the-ice-vehicle requires billions in upfront investment, it has to compete against an existing infrastructure built for ICE cars by previous generations, and the major manufacturers worldwide easily fit in a small meeting room.
I want to bet millions of people want something VW golf-sized with batteries, and i bet they can make it for under $30000.
Not if the Li-ion batteries alone cost $20.000. Maybe a Dacia Logan with $20.000 worth of batteries, but that would be an unattractive proposition.
The advantage of aiming at the high end of the market is that 1) the cost of the batteries is a smaller proportion of the total price, 2) wealthy people spend more on frills, and 2) they are more likely to have private parking facilities at home and more likely to be able to arrange access to a power outlet at work. It makes sense to start with an expensive sports car.
Damn, this is the fscking 21st century! Anyone that is still a communist or economic central planner might as well be a creationist, global warming denier, or a believer that evil spirits cause disease, i.e. ignorant of the sciences.
Someone who believes that market allocation is by necessity more efficient than hierarchical allocation apparently reads the scientific literature on the subject very selectively. The very size and vertical integration of a company like Walmart illustrates that hierarchical allocation can work quite well. If actual markets would work as advertised, Walmart would be pushed from the market by the baker on the corner and his suppliers. Central planning is just too much, and will only work over a long period if the central planner is omniscient.
There may be a potential banking business model in this for people in countries that don't pay taxes on virtual money if interest paid on virtual loans is tax-deductible (against real income).
Indeed. Nearly all diversity in appearance of human beings outside of Africa is also found in Africa, even today. But there seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about what this means, because many people seem to be under the impression that a) Africa is inhabited by black people of the Niger-Congo type, and b) that these people and their ancestors where always all over that continent and all people less black than them are somehow less "African".
In reality the expansion of the Niger-Congo people from a fairly small area in western Africa is a very recent phenomenon, and a large part of Africa was, and in the north still is, inhabited by people with lighter skins and a variety of physical features. The African sun does not select specifically for being of the Niger-Congo type: the expansion has to do with agricultural and military advantages these people had over their competitors. Compare tropical regions in Asia and South America before the Spanish arrived: no blacks there. There is however a limit on how light-skinned a baby can be in the African sun and still survive, so some mutations will only happen once a group has left Africa.
The archaic groups of humans they are speaking of are obviously the previous wave of humans coming out of Africa. Coming "out of Africa" does not by the way suggest a relation with the Niger-Congo ("black") peoples who currently dominate that continent: the Bantu expansion is of much more recent date. The Wikipedia Khoisan article maybe sheds some light on where the brown and yellow skin and epicanthic eye folds typical of most Eurasian populations may come from. The Papua and Australian Aboriginals are for instance also interesting leftovers of previous peoples coming "out of Africa".
It does work for some sectors dominated by big business. Finance for instance, and retail. If you openly do business or invest in Cuba, the US subsidiaries get to pay the bill. I don't think I can easily invest my savings in Cuba through a major European bank if I wanted to, and that basically means that Cuba cannot effectively sell state obligations or for instance privatize state-owned companies if it wanted to. Tourism or importing stuff like cigars from Cuba is on the other hand pretty safe if you don't have business in the US, and even if you do it is easy to set up a side company especially for business with Cuba. Setting up a bank is considerably less easy and not worth the trouble.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey "The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001" and the number of people who believe in no religion AT ALL doubled from 1990 to 2001.
This could actually sort of confirm the thesis. Read the wikipedia article on pillarization: The Netherlands is considered the classical example (of the religious form) of this phenomenon.
In the early 1960s, the Dutch were the most churchgoing of European peoples. More than 80% of the Dutch belonged to a church. Christian political parties consistently polled more than half of the national vote. Thirty years later, in the early 1990s, the Netherlands were the most secularized European nation. More than half of the population said they do not belong to any church, and half of these are self-avowed atheists.
This is often considered a consequence of religion having too big an big impact on public life: more people will openly become atheists when they leave the church of their parents. Atheism thrives on excessive religiousness, while more polite forms of defection like agnosticism.
The maximum fines for antitrust law violations have recently been increased very considerably by European Parliament. The next fine will probably be an order of magnitude bigger than the last two, and will hurt even Microsoft.
The whole point of antitrust laws is to crack down on business practices that unreasonably deprive consumers of the benefits of free choice between competing products in a transparent market. It strikes me as odd to argue that taking on a monopolist deprives consumers of the choice for the monopolist's products, which should according to the economic logic behind antitrust law be too expensive and inferior compared to the substitute products that would exist in a better functioning market.
Did the breakup of Standard Oil deprive American consumers of oil? Of course windows and office are harder to substitute than barrels of oil, but current installations of these programs will just keep working and other businesses will fill the vacuum in no time in the EU, certainly if Microsoft cannot sue them for reverse engineering, patent and copyright violations, etc.
US law is very similar, but the US doesn't enforce it very well lately. Maybe this is because the white house secretly thinks of Microsoft and it monopoly position as a national security asset. Americans apparently still have to get used to the idea that the EU has overtaken the US in free market idolatry and actually takes antitrust law very seriously nowadays. EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes certainly does, and she is just starting: she announced two days ago that she will take on 10 cartels in 2007 and expects to impose 9 billion euros in fines, compared to just 1.8 billion last year.
By contrast, the Romans conquered and ruled Gaul; they didn't kill off 95% of the population.
95% of which population? Ceasar did get censured by the senate for wiping out the Tencteri, the Usipetes, and the Aduatuci tribes in the lower Rhine area. Cato the younger even proposed to give him to the natives as a punishment for his crimes.
Surely mean nomads are the driving force of history. Who scared the meanest SOBs of written history, the Cimmerians, the Dorians, the Skythians, the Vandals, the Alans, the Goths, the Huns, etc, away from their lands? Even meaner SOBs whose names we don't know?
As far as the "Imperialist invasion of spain" theory goes. That too is nonsense. Imperialism is the correct term, but there simply was no "Spain" to be conquered. There was a Roman territory called Hispania, which had collapsed into interfamily and tribal rivalry with the decline of the empire. (Incidentally, many people who fought with the Moors were Jews, fleeing the Church's policy of forced conversion.) The Moors were simply another grouping hoping to take advantage of the chaos.
The Reconquista is a useful national myth for the Spanish, but it doesn't have much basis in fact. The process of the unification of Spain is markedly similar to the process of the unification of England. If the Danes had stood their ground, or the mercians had held out for autonomy the English would have a different national myth, and if the Spanish had failed to retake the south they would have a different story of legitimacy, just as powerful.
I think the original "Reconquista" should be interpreted in the context of a Christian culture considering the Roman Empire as its ancestor (the principle of translatio imperii). In the same sense one could talk about "reclaiming" the holy land, or Eqypt, or Morocco, etc., for Christianity. The Spanish did indeed "reconquer" parts of North Africa. The Byzantines of course also considered themselves heir of Rome, and the Russian tsars considered themselves heir of Byzantium (and copied its double headed eagle), and from that perspective could also "reclaim" former provinces of Rome. Same for Germany (Holy Roman Empire) with its Roman eagle.
Same in the middle east: the Ottoman empire for instance adopted the double headed eagle and crescent moon as symbols from Persia and Byzantium, the two empires it considered itself heir of, and was preceded by a Seljuk sultanate of "Rum" (Rome). In short: basically all conquest in the Meditterean "reclaimed" formerly owned land, except for the Mongol invasion.
In particular we should credit the House of Wisdom in Baghdad for collecting and translating Byzantine, Persian, and Syriac scientific works and passing them on to posterity. Without it we would have for instance lost Ptolemy's Syntaxis (in Arabic the Almagest) to the Dark Age. The most prominent stars in the sky take their name from the Arabic names (Vega, Betelgeuse, Antares, Altair, Aldebaran, Deneb, Denebola, Fomalhaut, etc.) used in the Arabic translation of this work (probably popularized in the West because they were also used in navigation with the Astrolabe which was copied from the Arabs). The original House of Wisdom was destroyed by the Mongols in 1258. Ironically, without the crusades we probably wouldn't have been interested in copying these works in time. An ironic twist of history is that it's lesser successor institute was looted again in 2003, during the American invasion of Iraq.