Smartphones have been around for several years, based on Symbian and PalmOS. And the term has been around for a number of years as well. Microsoft should really not be able to take out trademarks on generic terms like "Windows" and "Smartphone".
The one legitimate point addressed by a milage tax is that electric vehicles don't pay their fair share in road maintainance costs under a fuel tax.
And gas guzzlers don't pay anywhere near their fair share when it comes to pollution, health care, and the occasionally necessary invasion of a middle eastern country. On balance, I think it's gas guzzlers that are getting off easy, even if the gas tax were raised significantly.
Besides, even for pure electric vehicles (rechargeable), there are still vehicle taxes and electricity is taxed as well.
SCO delivered a second blow this month when it sent letters to 1,500 corporations using Linux,
I think "blow" is the wrong metaphor. A "blow" implies strength, power, and the ability to inflict pain and damage. None of those apply to SCO.
SCO is making a lot of noise and releasing a lot of hot air, something that should be embarrassing to SCO and is somewhat annoying but generally harmless to the bystanders. That kind of event is more accurately described as a "fart", not a "blow".
So, using this more accurate metaphor, the reporter should probably change the article to read:
SCO CEO Darl McBride farted again this month in the presence of 1500 corporate Linux users. He did not seem to show any embarrassment.
If you want a gas tax, why not just tax the gas? That has the additional benefit of taxing people more who drive less efficient vehicles. If Oregon wants to impose additional taxes on gas guzzlers, they can do that by a premium on the vehicle tax. And if they want to give certain classes of vehicles a tax break on gas, they can do that via gas deductions (keep the receipts, submit them).
The traditional solution has simply been to raise the [gas] tax rate, but that approach is always unpopular with voters.
Well, and do they suppose voters are going to be overjoyed by not only being charged lots of taxes for driving, but also to have their every move tracked by GPS? The money comes out of their wallet either way.
If a root exploit were discovered and widely used, and it affected government servers, and Microsoft chose not to do anything about it, I suspect they would be sued and the US would win.
You are kidding, right? Windows is full of holes, and many of have been around for years by the time people get around to using them for break-ins, including into government computers. I don't know whether the US government could, in theory, win, but in practice, they don't seem to be sueing.
If the OSS developer drops the project, there is no guarantee that anyone will pick it back up. It may be likely, but that's not good enough for many officials. Without something in writing, there's no real security in your purchase/training.
Microsoft drops products constantly. And when Microsoft does that, you are completely stuck because nobody can pick up the software.
Perhaps what's confusing you is that Microsoft refers to many different, incompatible products using the same trademark. But that doesn't do you any good when your programs stop running.
The reality of it all is that if you buy Microsoft, not only do you have to put up with buggy software, but you get no guarantees, you have to expect security holes and accept the risk for them yourself, you can't fix anything, and the software likely has a much shorter usable life than comparable open source software.
The iPod looks sexy, it's small, and all that, but what about that awful wheel? Why can't Apple ever get input devices right? For years, they have been selling those awful touch pads, and now that wheel thingy? Don't they do any user testing up at Apple?
I can spend a little more and get a nice iBook [or insert your favourite budget notebook here] which is a thousand times more capable.
Real-time video recording on an iBook (or a Windows laptop, for that matter) is a huge hassle, and it costs additional backs over the laptop itself.
Can you see Joe Public or your boss ripping and encoding his own DiVX's from his DVD'a? I can't... I love DiVX but I'm a geek, this just doesn't seem to appeal to the masses.
No, but I can see Joe Public copying video from is digital video recorder to this device and taking it along. I can also see some people recording presentations, lectures, and other events with this.
Ripping DVDs, on the other hand, is still too much of a hassle. Maybe once we are up to 10GHz PCs...
The reason why more standardization is desirable is because businesses and software in one country has to deal with addresses in another country. Forcing Japan to adopt British addresses may go a little too far, but some more standardization than we have right now seems desirable.
Where ZIP codes and country codes go on a letter is by far the most variable part of addresses: many European nations put both the country code and the zip code before the city, but the US and a few other countries put it after. Note, in particular, That means right now, there is no good way to even design an entry form that won't look wrong to a lot of people.
What I suggested as a global standard--country code plus country specific ZIP code at the end--seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Of course
something something something country-specific zip code country-name
would be another alternative. One problem with that is that country names are language specific while ISO codes aren't.
I think it would be sufficient if countries could adopt a common address format; what goes into it is less important. This could look like:
John Smith country specific country specific US-CA-94111
Johann Schmidt country specific country specific DE-11101B
Haruo Tanaka country specific country specific JP-999X763
That is, the ZIP code is always at the bottom, and it begins with the two letter ISO country identifier. The stuff after the dash is country specific.
That way, each country can keep whatever codes they are using and that work for their local setup, but postal sorting equipment can be standardized.
GPS-based ZIP-codes, on the other hand, seem pretty pointless. If you really want to get a ZIP code from a location, a web site can translate GPS addresses into zip codes if you like.
The problem generally is with the latency of the interconnect and not the bandwidth. Most Ethernet switches have latencies in excess of 50us which just sucks in message passing situations.
If you want lower-latency interconnects for something like CFD, you can get rid of the switch altogether--you just hook up your machines directly to one another with the right topology.
Of course, another choice is to just deal with latency algorithmically. It's not too hard for many algorithms to trade off bandwidth and latency against each other.
Once you've factored in the cost of all that Myrinet kit,
What Myrinet kit?
and the time to do all the systems integration, it's probably cheaper to buy an SGI anyway
What system integration? It's a standard Beowulf.
I'd get an Altix with NUMALink instead of a pile of Dells and Myrinets.
An Itanium 2 machine??? You've got to be kidding.
The only thing that machine has going for it, as far as I'm concerned, is that it has the software to make it look like a single big multi-processor machine. But you will get that in the near future for arbitrary Linux systems running on commodity hardware.
Try using a Beowulf-style cluster for a CFD problem, and watch as all computation grinds to a halt as your processors and interconnects devote all their capacity to inter-node coherency and synchronization. You need a traditional supercomputer like an SGI Origin for jobs like that, because of its massive internal bandwidth.
That used to be true, but I don't think it is anymore. A high-end Beowulf compute node these days typically gives you 2 processors and 2-4 Gigabit Ethernet channels, going into a high-end switch. That seems like it's in the same ballpark as the SGI Origin, which gives you nodes with up to 16 processors, up to 12GB/sec aggregate memory bandwidth, and 8 channels going into the router. They aren't going to perform identically, but I think the differences are diminishing.
Furthermore, with distributed shared memory software, parallel linear algebra libraries, and SIMD-on-MIMD libraries, you can program it more or less like you would have a traditional supercomputer, without having to worry a lot about synchronization.
OpenMosix, in an upcoming release, even promises to give you address spaces that cross machines, giving you effectively a NUMA machine on a network of PCs.
Re:Why the emphasis on a polished desktop?
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 1
It supports it, but not implicitly. Otherwise all my apps would get it for free without having to recompile them. That's how Windows works... you don't hear people asking for AA builds of Mozilla all the time, but Xft ones are separate under Linux.
X11 had an old bitmapped font API that many X11 apps are still using and that could not be extended to anti-aliased fonts. That API has been superceded by a new API that permits anti-aliased fonts to be rendered and applications are being upgraded to take advantage of the new API. How does providing backwards compatibility with previous APIs make X11 "antiquated"? Windows and MacOS also support plenty of old APIs.
As for why Mozilla needs recompiling for anti-aliased fonts, that's a problem with Mozilla; its X11 toolkit is just not very good. If it used a better toolkit, it would also give you anti-aliased fonts automatically when available.
[D]COM. Post/SendMessage()?
Those are low-level mechanisms for sending bits and messages around; they have nothing to do with the actual standards for how applications communicate and interact with one another. Sadly, like you, most Windows and Mac programmers don't even understand the problems.
Tablet PCs are physically too large and heavy. Much of that is driven by the requirements of running Windows XP: you need a harddisk and a powerful processor.
The software isn't all that great either. The connected handwriting recognition system is actually not too bad in terms of raw recognition performance, but its integration and user interface is awful. Speech recognition is laughable. Your best bet is the on-screen keyboard or the PDA-like recognizer.
I think a compact tablet with a high resolution 1024x768 screen, long battery life, but without a harddisk and with a low-power processor, would likely be more successful--provided it ran something better than Tablet PC. In fact, even PocketPC would probably be better than TabletPC.
Re:Why the emphasis on a polished desktop?
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
and moving away from antiquated systems like X.
Antiquated in what way? X11 is a client-server system, just like Windows and Macintosh. Like Windows and Macintosh, it supports antialiasing, direct rendering, 3D graphics acceleration, alpha blending, etc. Unlike Windows and Macintosh, it has been designed from the ground up for asynchronous server operations, separate address spaces, and separate graphics processors. Unlike Windows or Macintosh, it uses a well-defined, efficient, binary communications protocol. Unlike Windows or Macintosh, it also has extensive standards for inter-client communication and distributed clients.
I would much rather have a windowing system that didn't have 20-odd years of cruft, but instead had native support for things like antialiasing and an X compatability layer.
Looks to me like Windows and Macintosh would do well to move away from their cruft. Windows pretends to use a frame buffer library even though that doesn't correspond to reality at all. And Macintosh's DisplayPDF system is really crufty--a slight variant of the 20 year old DisplayPostscript system.
One can doubtlessly do better than X11, but none of the commercial or open source projects seem to be even trying.
British science is impressive in how much it gets done with very little money. Most British scientists working on big budget projects have probably already moved to the US or other countries, and the people who are left are experts at making a lot out of very little.
But just because British scientists are very frugal doesn't mean that a little bit of additional money will turn into a huge scientific return. A frugal scientist with twice as much funding may not be any more productive than a frugal scientist with his current budget.
Rather than worrying about project funding, maybe it would be prudent first to make UK scientific salaries more attractive to get more scientists to come to the UK and work there.
Personally, I'd rather be sending astronauts into space and developing a permanent presence there (moonbases anyone? saturn exploration anyone? asteroid mining?
So would just about everybody else. But any permanent presence in space, let alone a self-sustaining independent presence, seems completely infeasible at this point. It will probably be another century or two until technology is up to that. Until then, we should focus on unmanned exploration.
Ah, yes. What we need is an Orwellian superstate with the power to 'license' how many children we'll have. Who gets to decide? No doubt the people you personally approve of to make the decisions, eh?
I didn't say anything about an "Orwellian superstate" at all. I think this is a free market issue, actually, and not very different from what we already have in place for child support.
Right now, divorced parents need to pay child support to ensure that their children have adequate resources to be raised. We just need to extend that to married couples as well: if you have children, you are responsible for making sure up-front that you have enough resources to give them an education, to insure them against disability, etc.
Most people would probably purchase "child insurance", where you'd sign up with an insurer that guarantees that your children will be cared for regardless of what happens to you.
If you keep having children without being able to pay for them, it would be treated just like defaulting on child support payments, or defaulting on a car loan, for that matter.
So, overall, I am all for you being able to make whatever choices you like when it comes to having children. But I also think that you should shoulder the responsibility for your choices. What you want is the freedom to choose without the responsibility that goes along with that, and that is not acceptable.
BUT, it is going to generate *18.2 MILLION kilowatts* of power, indefinitely
"Indefinitely" is about right: nobody knows how long this dam is going to last. What we do know is that it is not going to last forever--probably less than a century.
Of course no other countries I can think of have built massive, environmentally questionable (*cough* Hoover *cough*) dams, have they?
Well, we wouldn't repeat that mistake. Why shouldn't the Chinese learn from our mistakes?
Fuck the chinese because they have no clue how valuable their culture really is. They have no respect forthe human accomplishments that they have made in the past - although almost all of them come at large human cost. (Ironic I know)
If anything, China is a lesson for how ineffective and sterile large, stable empires are. China had all the resources to become a technological powerhouse when Europe was still living in the dark ages. But China's centralized government and bureaucracy prevented that.
It took the squabbling mess of dozens of little kingdoms, nation states, and business empires in Europe to bring about modern science and the industrial revolution.
This is a lesson the US should keep in mind when basking in the glory of being the world's most powerful nation and the single largest economy: size is not good when it comes to innovation.
And it is also the EU should be way of before going too far in terms of integration. The right path for the EU is to restore the free movement and trade effectively enjoyed by Europeans without destroying the individuality and competition among European nations.
1.4 BILLION people. consider. [...] So, yes, three-gorges is a beautiful place, but if this allows that many people to afford heat in the winter, or lights under which to read, so be it.
If we follow your argument to its logical conclusion, at the end of all of this is a world in which every resource is devoted to the survival of a population that fills the planet to capacity.
The only solution to our problems is to get our population under control now. And the only way to do that peacefully is to reduce birth rates to below maintenance levels and shrink down to a global population of 1-2 billion again.
Reducing population growth to below maintenance levels is a very hard thing to do: individual countries see it in their interest to grow just a little more than their neighbors, and our entire economic system is based on ideas of growth and youth. But if things keep going the way they are, global pandemics and wars will decimate populations for us. Which do you prefer? Being limited to one child, or billions dying in wars and epidemics?
Otoh, I really think the current party do partly hope that the dam will turn out to be like the great-wall - legendary, etc. To that I go "huh?"
Oh, it will be legendary alright: if humanity survives long enough, it will be an infamous symbol to the idiocy of the 20th and early 21st century.
Apparently, some people still believe in the tooth fairy, except that the suggestion that the US will manage to pull off any manned mission for $6B is even less plausible. Even if, by some miracle, that were possible, I think there are more useful space-related projects to spend $6B on.
Slashdot Mirror
as the first commercially available Smartphone
Smartphones have been around for several years, based on Symbian and PalmOS. And the term has been around for a number of years as well. Microsoft should really not be able to take out trademarks on generic terms like "Windows" and "Smartphone".
The one legitimate point addressed by a milage tax is that electric vehicles don't pay their fair share in road maintainance costs under a fuel tax.
And gas guzzlers don't pay anywhere near their fair share when it comes to pollution, health care, and the occasionally necessary invasion of a middle eastern country. On balance, I think it's gas guzzlers that are getting off easy, even if the gas tax were raised significantly.
Besides, even for pure electric vehicles (rechargeable), there are still vehicle taxes and electricity is taxed as well.
I think "blow" is the wrong metaphor. A "blow" implies strength, power, and the ability to inflict pain and damage. None of those apply to SCO.
SCO is making a lot of noise and releasing a lot of hot air, something that should be embarrassing to SCO and is somewhat annoying but generally harmless to the bystanders. That kind of event is more accurately described as a "fart", not a "blow".
So, using this more accurate metaphor, the reporter should probably change the article to read:
If you want a gas tax, why not just tax the gas? That has the additional benefit of taxing people more who drive less efficient vehicles. If Oregon wants to impose additional taxes on gas guzzlers, they can do that by a premium on the vehicle tax. And if they want to give certain classes of vehicles a tax break on gas, they can do that via gas deductions (keep the receipts, submit them).
The traditional solution has simply been to raise the [gas] tax rate, but that approach is always unpopular with voters.
Well, and do they suppose voters are going to be overjoyed by not only being charged lots of taxes for driving, but also to have their every move tracked by GPS? The money comes out of their wallet either way.
Yes, I have tried it, and I found it fiddly and difficult to use. If I hadn't tried it, I wouldn't have commented on it.
If a root exploit were discovered and widely used, and it affected government servers, and Microsoft chose not to do anything about it, I suspect they would be sued and the US would win.
You are kidding, right? Windows is full of holes, and many of have been around for years by the time people get around to using them for break-ins, including into government computers. I don't know whether the US government could, in theory, win, but in practice, they don't seem to be sueing.
If the OSS developer drops the project, there is no guarantee that anyone will pick it back up. It may be likely, but that's not good enough for many officials. Without something in writing, there's no real security in your purchase/training.
Microsoft drops products constantly. And when Microsoft does that, you are completely stuck because nobody can pick up the software.
Perhaps what's confusing you is that Microsoft refers to many different, incompatible products using the same trademark. But that doesn't do you any good when your programs stop running.
The reality of it all is that if you buy Microsoft, not only do you have to put up with buggy software, but you get no guarantees, you have to expect security holes and accept the risk for them yourself, you can't fix anything, and the software likely has a much shorter usable life than comparable open source software.
The iPod looks sexy, it's small, and all that, but what about that awful wheel? Why can't Apple ever get input devices right? For years, they have been selling those awful touch pads, and now that wheel thingy? Don't they do any user testing up at Apple?
Availability of Ogg on file sharing networks and availability of Ogg-capable players seems to be a chicken-and-ogg problem...
I can spend a little more and get a nice iBook [or insert your favourite budget notebook here] which is a thousand times more capable.
Real-time video recording on an iBook (or a Windows laptop, for that matter) is a huge hassle, and it costs additional backs over the laptop itself.
Can you see Joe Public or your boss ripping and encoding his own DiVX's from his DVD'a? I can't... I love DiVX but I'm a geek, this just doesn't seem to appeal to the masses.
No, but I can see Joe Public copying video from is digital video recorder to this device and taking it along. I can also see some people recording presentations, lectures, and other events with this.
Ripping DVDs, on the other hand, is still too much of a hassle. Maybe once we are up to 10GHz PCs...
Where ZIP codes and country codes go on a letter is by far the most variable part of addresses: many European nations put both the country code and the zip code before the city, but the US and a few other countries put it after. Note, in particular, That means right now, there is no good way to even design an entry form that won't look wrong to a lot of people.
What I suggested as a global standard--country code plus country specific ZIP code at the end--seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Of coursewould be another alternative. One problem with that is that country names are language specific while ISO codes aren't.
That way, each country can keep whatever codes they are using and that work for their local setup, but postal sorting equipment can be standardized.
GPS-based ZIP-codes, on the other hand, seem pretty pointless. If you really want to get a ZIP code from a location, a web site can translate GPS addresses into zip codes if you like.
The problem generally is with the latency of the interconnect and not the bandwidth. Most Ethernet switches have latencies in excess of 50us which just sucks in message passing situations.
If you want lower-latency interconnects for something like CFD, you can get rid of the switch altogether--you just hook up your machines directly to one another with the right topology.
Of course, another choice is to just deal with latency algorithmically. It's not too hard for many algorithms to trade off bandwidth and latency against each other.
Once you've factored in the cost of all that Myrinet kit,
What Myrinet kit?
and the time to do all the systems integration, it's probably cheaper to buy an SGI anyway
What system integration? It's a standard Beowulf.
I'd get an Altix with NUMALink instead of a pile of Dells and Myrinets.
An Itanium 2 machine??? You've got to be kidding.
The only thing that machine has going for it, as far as I'm concerned, is that it has the software to make it look like a single big multi-processor machine. But you will get that in the near future for arbitrary Linux systems running on commodity hardware.
If your primary computational topology is a grid, you don't need any switches at all: you just arrange your machines in a grid. Also lowers latency.
Try using a Beowulf-style cluster for a CFD problem, and watch as all computation grinds to a halt as your processors and interconnects devote all their capacity to inter-node coherency and synchronization. You need a traditional supercomputer like an SGI Origin for jobs like that, because of its massive internal bandwidth.
That used to be true, but I don't think it is anymore. A high-end Beowulf compute node these days typically gives you 2 processors and 2-4 Gigabit Ethernet channels, going into a high-end switch. That seems like it's in the same ballpark as the SGI Origin, which gives you nodes with up to 16 processors, up to 12GB/sec aggregate memory bandwidth, and 8 channels going into the router. They aren't going to perform identically, but I think the differences are diminishing.
Furthermore, with distributed shared memory software, parallel linear algebra libraries, and SIMD-on-MIMD libraries, you can program it more or less like you would have a traditional supercomputer, without having to worry a lot about synchronization.
OpenMosix, in an upcoming release, even promises to give you address spaces that cross machines, giving you effectively a NUMA machine on a network of PCs.
It supports it, but not implicitly. Otherwise all my apps would get it for free without having to recompile them. That's how Windows works... you don't hear people asking for AA builds of Mozilla all the time, but Xft ones are separate under Linux.
X11 had an old bitmapped font API that many X11 apps are still using and that could not be extended to anti-aliased fonts. That API has been superceded by a new API that permits anti-aliased fonts to be rendered and applications are being upgraded to take advantage of the new API. How does providing backwards compatibility with previous APIs make X11 "antiquated"? Windows and MacOS also support plenty of old APIs.
As for why Mozilla needs recompiling for anti-aliased fonts, that's a problem with Mozilla; its X11 toolkit is just not very good. If it used a better toolkit, it would also give you anti-aliased fonts automatically when available.
[D]COM. Post/SendMessage()?
Those are low-level mechanisms for sending bits and messages around; they have nothing to do with the actual standards for how applications communicate and interact with one another. Sadly, like you, most Windows and Mac programmers don't even understand the problems.
Tablet PCs are physically too large and heavy. Much of that is driven by the requirements of running Windows XP: you need a harddisk and a powerful processor.
The software isn't all that great either. The connected handwriting recognition system is actually not too bad in terms of raw recognition performance, but its integration and user interface is awful. Speech recognition is laughable. Your best bet is the on-screen keyboard or the PDA-like recognizer.
I think a compact tablet with a high resolution 1024x768 screen, long battery life, but without a harddisk and with a low-power processor, would likely be more successful--provided it ran something better than Tablet PC. In fact, even PocketPC would probably be better than TabletPC.
and moving away from antiquated systems like X.
Antiquated in what way? X11 is a client-server system, just like Windows and Macintosh. Like Windows and Macintosh, it supports antialiasing, direct rendering, 3D graphics acceleration, alpha blending, etc. Unlike Windows and Macintosh, it has been designed from the ground up for asynchronous server operations, separate address spaces, and separate graphics processors. Unlike Windows or Macintosh, it uses a well-defined, efficient, binary communications protocol. Unlike Windows or Macintosh, it also has extensive standards for inter-client communication and distributed clients.
I would much rather have a windowing system that didn't have 20-odd years of cruft, but instead had native support for things like antialiasing and an X compatability layer.
Looks to me like Windows and Macintosh would do well to move away from their cruft. Windows pretends to use a frame buffer library even though that doesn't correspond to reality at all. And Macintosh's DisplayPDF system is really crufty--a slight variant of the 20 year old DisplayPostscript system.
One can doubtlessly do better than X11, but none of the commercial or open source projects seem to be even trying.
British science is impressive in how much it gets done with very little money. Most British scientists working on big budget projects have probably already moved to the US or other countries, and the people who are left are experts at making a lot out of very little.
But just because British scientists are very frugal doesn't mean that a little bit of additional money will turn into a huge scientific return. A frugal scientist with twice as much funding may not be any more productive than a frugal scientist with his current budget.
Rather than worrying about project funding, maybe it would be prudent first to make UK scientific salaries more attractive to get more scientists to come to the UK and work there.
Personally, I'd rather be sending astronauts into space and developing a permanent presence there (moonbases anyone? saturn exploration anyone? asteroid mining?
So would just about everybody else. But any permanent presence in space, let alone a self-sustaining independent presence, seems completely infeasible at this point. It will probably be another century or two until technology is up to that. Until then, we should focus on unmanned exploration.
Ah, yes. What we need is an Orwellian superstate with the power to 'license' how many children we'll have. Who gets to decide? No doubt the people you personally approve of to make the decisions, eh?
I didn't say anything about an "Orwellian superstate" at all. I think this is a free market issue, actually, and not very different from what we already have in place for child support.
Right now, divorced parents need to pay child support to ensure that their children have adequate resources to be raised. We just need to extend that to married couples as well: if you have children, you are responsible for making sure up-front that you have enough resources to give them an education, to insure them against disability, etc.
Most people would probably purchase "child insurance", where you'd sign up with an insurer that guarantees that your children will be cared for regardless of what happens to you.
If you keep having children without being able to pay for them, it would be treated just like defaulting on child support payments, or defaulting on a car loan, for that matter.
So, overall, I am all for you being able to make whatever choices you like when it comes to having children. But I also think that you should shoulder the responsibility for your choices. What you want is the freedom to choose without the responsibility that goes along with that, and that is not acceptable.
BUT, it is going to generate *18.2 MILLION kilowatts* of power, indefinitely
"Indefinitely" is about right: nobody knows how long this dam is going to last. What we do know is that it is not going to last forever--probably less than a century.
Of course no other countries I can think of have built massive, environmentally questionable (*cough* Hoover *cough*) dams, have they?
Well, we wouldn't repeat that mistake. Why shouldn't the Chinese learn from our mistakes?
Fuck the chinese because they have no clue how valuable their culture really is. They have no respect forthe human accomplishments that they have made in the past - although almost all of them come at large human cost. (Ironic I know)
If anything, China is a lesson for how ineffective and sterile large, stable empires are. China had all the resources to become a technological powerhouse when Europe was still living in the dark ages. But China's centralized government and bureaucracy prevented that.
It took the squabbling mess of dozens of little kingdoms, nation states, and business empires in Europe to bring about modern science and the industrial revolution.
This is a lesson the US should keep in mind when basking in the glory of being the world's most powerful nation and the single largest economy: size is not good when it comes to innovation.
And it is also the EU should be way of before going too far in terms of integration. The right path for the EU is to restore the free movement and trade effectively enjoyed by Europeans without destroying the individuality and competition among European nations.
1.4 BILLION people. consider. [...] So, yes, three-gorges is a beautiful place, but if this allows that many people to afford heat in the winter, or lights under which to read, so be it.
If we follow your argument to its logical conclusion, at the end of all of this is a world in which every resource is devoted to the survival of a population that fills the planet to capacity.
The only solution to our problems is to get our population under control now. And the only way to do that peacefully is to reduce birth rates to below maintenance levels and shrink down to a global population of 1-2 billion again.
Reducing population growth to below maintenance levels is a very hard thing to do: individual countries see it in their interest to grow just a little more than their neighbors, and our entire economic system is based on ideas of growth and youth. But if things keep going the way they are, global pandemics and wars will decimate populations for us. Which do you prefer? Being limited to one child, or billions dying in wars and epidemics?
Otoh, I really think the current party do partly hope that the dam will turn out to be like the great-wall - legendary, etc. To that I go "huh?"
Oh, it will be legendary alright: if humanity survives long enough, it will be an infamous symbol to the idiocy of the 20th and early 21st century.
Apparently, some people still believe in the tooth fairy, except that the suggestion that the US will manage to pull off any manned mission for $6B is even less plausible. Even if, by some miracle, that were possible, I think there are more useful space-related projects to spend $6B on.