First, because as I said, Marxism assumes that once the proletariat has gotten out from under the capitalist or lord that he will behave in some sort of idealized manner. That simply isn't true. As the free-market economies have shown, when a free person works, he expects a reward commensurate with the work he performs.
Second, you answered it yourself. First you propose a decentralized system of control, then you point out that communism fails to transport resources to where the consumers are. How this is supposed to be accomplished without centralized control, and no market forces to drive distribution, is never explained that I've seen.
Besides, isn't "consumer choice" pretty meaningless in a communist system?
You should perhaps read the US Constitution and the Federalist papers before embarking on a critique of the US system. "Corporatism" is mandated nowhere in our founding documents. Given the limited role permitted to the government, perhaps a free economy is the only one that could possibly have arisen, and given the social and technological changes of the 19th Century perhaps what you're calling "corporatism", whatever you mean by it, was historically inevitable.
But you realize that Communism and individual rights are inherently incompatable, don't you? It's telling that every single Communist (by which I mean Marxist) state that's ever been set up has been totalitarian. There's simply no other way to impose that economic system on people, or even the gross caricature of it that most Marxist states seem to be limited to. The proletariat simply doesn't behave as Marx thought he would. With American-style checks and balances, resulting in an American-style limited government, Marxism is totally unworkable.
The troubling part isn't even so much that our elected officials don't seem to represent the people much. A single man such as the President isn't going to represent everyone's interests no matter how hard he tries anyway. But we actually have far more say in who becomes President now than in the system envisioned by the Founding Fathers. At least now the electors are more or less bound to vote for whom they're told to vote for. That's statutory, or mere custom, not Constitutional. The Constitution just says that the people choose the electors. And we now directly elect our Senators, where for nearly 150 years they were appointed by the state legislatures.
The system we now have in place for selecting Presidential candidates effectively prevents any single person or organization, no matter how influential, from determining who they are to be. It's easy to forget now that before the Iowa caucus, Howard Dean was commonly assumed to be the Democrats' obvious choice. Kerry took everyone by surprise. Unless you're going to assume that some super-powerful organization infiltrated every single caucus meeting in Iowa -- which, remember, takes place among people who pretty much all know each other in settings as intimate as someone's living room -- but I'm sorry. That's just too silly to contemplate.
You can put all the rights you want on a piece of paper, and the people won't derive a single right from it as long as those holding the reins of government are able to override those words with impunity. That the US government has been doing that for many years now, often backed up by the courts, has troubled anyone who's been paying attention. They're just being a tad more obvious about it now in some ways. Or perhaps those troubled about the way they're doing it now is inclusive of a wider set of people.
The Founders assumed that the people would take action to defend their rights when the elected officials trampled on them by voting them out of office in the next election. The American people have proven to favor incumbents far more consistently than the Founders contemplated. That's troubling.
Determined to have an argument, aren't you? I'm well aware that presentations and appearances aren't always consistent with reality. That's why I used qualifications like "often", "seemed", "but not always" and not definitive statements like "always", "is".
You'll be a lot more relaxed if you stop looking for contentiousness that isn't there.
I've always distrusted the ACLU. It's often (although not always) seemed to me they'd take a great deal of trouble to defend so-called left-wing causes such as flag burning as free speech, and devote as little effort as possible to defend so-called right-wing causes, such as protesting at abortion clinics.
But...
Damn me if they're not on the right side in this one.
You generally don't find that kind of thing among the Orthodox. If you assume it was ever similar to medieval Roman Catholicism, you're making a very serious error. There were (and still are) more than enough real relics to go around in the Christian East and they never became a profit center for anyone. There were no equivalents of the "Pardoner", or traveling relic and indulgence seller. (I've got a few relics at home myself. They were given to me for free.) There was therefore never sufficient incentive to overcome the natural moral repugnance over manufacturing fakes.
I can say that an ark replica was never put there as a pilgrimage site because Mt. Ararat never was much of a pilgrimage site. Certainly not enough of one to justify the expense and labor of building a wooden structure that large so far from any source of timber and in such an inaccessible place.
You're right about everything you say with regard to the need for a proper scientific investigation. That was exactly my point, which everyone seemed to have missed in their zeal to exercise their anti-religious bigotry. If this particular investigator indeed finds something, and if he indeed does not carry out a proper investigation, the very existence of an ancient large structure in that place is sufficiently interesting that it's a safe bet that someone will. There are plenty of archaeologists around looking for interesting sites to work, you know.
Well, let's be fair here though. If he finds a very large boat stuck on top of a mountain, there are very few possibilities as to which boat it might be. And *if* it's really there (I'm a Christian and I regard the odds as very low) there will be proper archaeology done on it in due time. Not by this guy perhaps, but by somebody.
While I was typing this comment in, someone modded parent down 2 notches as Flamebait. Come on folks! He's making a valid point, as far as it goes. This is definitely one of those times where you should post instead of moderate if you simply disagree.
Polyethylene glycol is sold as a pharmaceutical under the name Miralax. Boy, that stuff works great! My kid with CP used to suffer from severe constipation, to the point where we had to give him weekly enemas if he was going to be able to crap at all. Then his gastroenterologist started him on regular doses of Miralax. Woosh! Now his crap all has the consistency of chocolate pudding, and he hasn't bee seriously constipated since.
Needless to say, I stay away from chocolate pudding these days....
"Sarge! I gotta crap bad, but I can't!"
"Dammit, soldier! Suck down that armor and get a move on!"
Yes I do. I didn't make up these names, I'm just reporting them. Several decades ago, they'd have been used interchangably, but that's no longer the case.
I suppose I could, and even get some cash out of it. But to be honest, although I've installed several different DOS and Windows versions on my home machines, the last time I paid full retail for it was for... um... I think it was DOS 6.22. When was that released? 1994? And that was an upgrade. Everything else, inlcuding the Office 97 my wife used to use (I've since moved her to OOo) I bought gray-market.
It's not that I have any moral qualms over having done that, but really, MS has gotten very little of my money.
you're correct in stating that the Eastern Orthodox Church is important and widespread there.
No it isn't. The Church of Ethiopia is one of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, along with the Coptic Church, the Syrian Jacobites, Armenians, and several other local Churches. They are not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, i.e. the Greek or Russian Orthodox, due to a Christological controversy dating back to the 5th Century.
There's a strong possibility that communion will be restored sometime in the next century (which is very quickly as such things go) but it hasn't happened yet.
Yes it is. What a load of crap. You shouldn't need a directory in order to understand C source code. The only advantage to this is the bragging rights that come from having written a raytracer that only takes up 2K. If this came up in a peer review at work, me and every single one of my co-workers would slap it down as unmaintainable.
Leave the comments in the source that's distributed, or use descriptive variable names in the first place.
The new GF 6800U is still occupying one extra PCI slot and blowing a whole lot of hot air inside the case.
Now there's a question. If the thing takes up two slots anyway, why did they direct the fan to blow the hot air inside the case? Why not just make it "offcially" take up two slots and use the second position to exhaust the hot air directly to the outside?
Neither of the two cases you mentioned are valid precedents here. Martha Stewart's company hasn't being charged with anything; Stewart herself has. Her case was all about insider trading with respect to her personal, not corporate, investments. In Kozlowski's case, his corporation was the victim, not the beneficiary, of crimes which he personally committed.
The problem is that the ways the laws regulating monopolies are written don't criminalize executives who actually make the decisions for the corporation to engage in illegal behavior personally responsible. Of course they probably should -- but this is still a different class of crime altogether than the instances you cited.
Well, I was thinking more of Israel or France than the Netherlands. I can think of relatively recent instances in both those places where they were ruled by a single party for a time.
It is very hard to grasp for me that someone who is pro a more christian morale will very likely vote for the same party as an atheist with a distaste of strong government.
You wouldn't know it to hear people talk, but we have a very strong tradition here of keeping religion and politics separate. On a legal level we're Constitutionally forbidden to have a state church. Even on issues where you'd swear people's rationale for their opinions was mainly religious, you tend to hear the arguments expressed in non-religious terms. People here who are morally conservative tend to be socially and politically conservative as well, and in the US political conservatism means favoring a weaker central government. This is where they intersect with small parties like the Libertarians who are politically conservative for other reasons. All this dovetails with a very American tradition of distrust for strong government.
But then, I guess it is rather hard to grasp for many people in the states how a democratic society can accept a monarch as head of state.
Not this American. I'm actually a monarchist, although I'd favor a monarch with some actual political authority. (I'm much more familiar in this area with the British system than the Netherlander. The British royal family really are a bunch of toothless lions these days. It's kind of pathetic.)
And I think you misunderstand how a multi party system and coalition governments work.
No, I just edited too drastically. I'm well aware that in a multi-party parliamentary system a majority is not required to form a government, and this is the situation in which coalition must form to create the necessary consensus.
This is absolutely in opposition to the US system in which a consensus in the legislature is not at all required to form a government. You seem unwilling or unable to grasp this point. If a third party were to become a major player on the US political scene and were to capture enough seats in one of the houses of Congress such that no party had a majority, we would still have a government regardless of what they did because we have a separately elected Executive branch. Yes, the other two parties would have to court the third to gain support to get anything passed, but this would be more in the nature of fleeting alliances or cooperative efforts than coalitions. No doubt the procedural rules in the two houses, which now assume a two-party system, would have to be modified, but this requires no Constitutional, or even statutory, changes.
Yes, sometimes in a multi-party system you have checks and balances in place, but only on those occasions when a coalition government is actually in place. Maybe this is even most of the time. Then, the natural tensions among the parties within the government will produce them. But they vanish, or are at least severely attenuated, whenever a single party manages to capture a majority of legislative seats, which you must admit happens from time to time. In the US, they're built into the Constitution. That's also a major difference in the systems.
FWIW, I agree with the basic point that more parties would better reflect the actual sentiment of the populace. Certainly my own views are represented by neither party. But unfortunately, the Carrot Political Front has garnered no support at all even locally....
Also, the USA does have somethign that compares very well to a parliament, the combination of senate and congress.
You mean House of Representatives and Senate. The two together comprise the Congress. You may have gotten confused because the media likes to call Representatives "Congressmen" and memebers of the Senate "Senators", as if one was a part of Congress and one was not, but that's a false impression.
This is similar to a parliament in that it's a legislative body. But that's not what is meant by "parliamentary system."
That it has a different name in the USA and that the way it is elected is slightly different is an implementation issue, it doesnt make it an entirely different system.
I'm sorry, but it does. You mentioned a "coalition government." There's no such thing in the US system; there can't be. The government isn't dependent for its existence on one party or another having a majority in Congress. Yes, the Constitution provides that the President must choose his Cabinet "with the advice and consent of the Senate", so there's always a bit of compromise involved, but he's under no compulsion to appoint members of the other party to his Cabinet even if that party happens to control the Senate. Bush is unusual in that he seems to have considered ability and agreement with himself for the issues under their respective baliwicks over and above party affiliation when appointing his Cabinet, and we therefore have a Democrat Transportation Secretary in an otherwise Republican administration. But Bush is extremely unusual in that respect. The salient point here is that the majority party in the Congress, even if that party happens to control both houses (which happens only rarely) cannot dictate policy. That's the President's job. In a parliamentary system it would be the Prime Minister's job, with the PM being appointed by the majority party in the legislature. A parliamentary system therefore essentially lacks an Executive branch in the government. There's a good definition here. This is far more than a superficial difference.
It seems to me that the way political parties function in the USA is pretty much a continuation of English tradition. A rather substantial part of the representative democracies in the world have more then 2 major parties, and do indeed need coalition governments.
I'm sorry, but when you say something like this it makes it appear as if you don't understand the US system very well. We do not have a parliamentary system. Our Head of State and Head of Government is the same person, who is elected separately from the legislature. In fact, it's often the case that each house of the legislature is under the control of a different party.
Yes, this can make it difficult to get anything done. Only in the rare case where the same party is in clear control of both houses of the legislature and the Presidency can bills be passed into laws without a great deal of compromise. It's also worth noting that the procedural rules in the Senate are such that a simple majority does not guarantee passage of anything. A party needs a 2/3 majority at least to have unconditional control there. And in the US, party members are never bound to vote the party line, so intraparty politics is not uncommonly played out on the floor of the legislature. Sure, the parties can bring certain pressures to bear on individual members and can usually get a majority of its members to vote a certain way, but that's not always a majority of the house as a whole and it can't always be done anyway.
If our government is occasionally slow to move, this is partly by design. Fathers were greatly concerned about a government without any restraints placed on it, and were very careful to build in natural tensions among the three branches of government so that, if they were all acting according to their enlightened self-interest, they would naturally restrain themselves and each other. The balance was upset somewhat with the 17th Amendment which shifted election of the Senate from the states to the people directly, and since then the government has grown by leaps and bounds. (This is not all due to the 17th Amendment, of course. The 20th Century was the occasion of many crises, and with each one the government arrogated a little more power to itself.) But it still mostly works. The two-party system was unforeseen by the Founders, and has served to reinforce some of the other existing checks.
Geez, you could at least provide a link to Ambrosia Software, especially since the latest installment of Escape Velocity has been ported to the PC and the earlier versions have been provided as free plug-ins.
PC users can finally see what they've been missing all these years.
Granted, Teotihuacan is the most impressive site in the Americas, but this is going a tad too far:
"Teotihuacan is up there with Rome, one of the biggest pre-industrial cities in the world. Constantinople is also maybe there but no Chinese city was of this magnitude. Egypt didn't even have cities," Manzanilla said.
Rome had over a million inhabitants at its peak in antiquity, and Constantinople just about the same by the time of Justinian according to most sources, and even those who lowball the populations of both places put them no lower than 400,000. Even classical Athens had 300,000 residents, and second-century Xi'an in China had at least 400,000 during the time Teotihuacan was inhabited with 150,000 according to the article.
Yes, it's a very large city for antiquity, but it's far from the largest.
Incidentally, one might quibble with the definition of a "city", but Memphis in Old Kingdom Egypt had a population of 30,000, which was the largest settlement in the world at the time. I think we can safely call that an Egyptian city.
To be fair, we didn't actually see any computers. The kind of machine you'd use back then for launch ops, or even for satellite q/a, did not fit on a desktop.
Thrill to the computers, the clothes, and the haircuts of 1984.
Although we can be reasonably well-assured that the computers were state-of-the-art at the time, the clothes and haircuts are another matter. Please remember that these are professional geeks we're talking about, and are therefore not exactly cutting edge when it comes to fashion. To all appearances it was closer to 1978 than 1984.
I know this because I was in college in 1984, and we all looked great, but these guys look like dorks.
Slashdot Mirror
First, because as I said, Marxism assumes that once the proletariat has gotten out from under the capitalist or lord that he will behave in some sort of idealized manner. That simply isn't true. As the free-market economies have shown, when a free person works, he expects a reward commensurate with the work he performs.
Second, you answered it yourself. First you propose a decentralized system of control, then you point out that communism fails to transport resources to where the consumers are. How this is supposed to be accomplished without centralized control, and no market forces to drive distribution, is never explained that I've seen.
Besides, isn't "consumer choice" pretty meaningless in a communist system?
But you realize that Communism and individual rights are inherently incompatable, don't you? It's telling that every single Communist (by which I mean Marxist) state that's ever been set up has been totalitarian. There's simply no other way to impose that economic system on people, or even the gross caricature of it that most Marxist states seem to be limited to. The proletariat simply doesn't behave as Marx thought he would. With American-style checks and balances, resulting in an American-style limited government, Marxism is totally unworkable.
The troubling part isn't even so much that our elected officials don't seem to represent the people much. A single man such as the President isn't going to represent everyone's interests no matter how hard he tries anyway. But we actually have far more say in who becomes President now than in the system envisioned by the Founding Fathers. At least now the electors are more or less bound to vote for whom they're told to vote for. That's statutory, or mere custom, not Constitutional. The Constitution just says that the people choose the electors. And we now directly elect our Senators, where for nearly 150 years they were appointed by the state legislatures.
The system we now have in place for selecting Presidential candidates effectively prevents any single person or organization, no matter how influential, from determining who they are to be. It's easy to forget now that before the Iowa caucus, Howard Dean was commonly assumed to be the Democrats' obvious choice. Kerry took everyone by surprise. Unless you're going to assume that some super-powerful organization infiltrated every single caucus meeting in Iowa -- which, remember, takes place among people who pretty much all know each other in settings as intimate as someone's living room -- but I'm sorry. That's just too silly to contemplate.
You can put all the rights you want on a piece of paper, and the people won't derive a single right from it as long as those holding the reins of government are able to override those words with impunity. That the US government has been doing that for many years now, often backed up by the courts, has troubled anyone who's been paying attention. They're just being a tad more obvious about it now in some ways. Or perhaps those troubled about the way they're doing it now is inclusive of a wider set of people.
The Founders assumed that the people would take action to defend their rights when the elected officials trampled on them by voting them out of office in the next election. The American people have proven to favor incumbents far more consistently than the Founders contemplated. That's troubling.
You'll be a lot more relaxed if you stop looking for contentiousness that isn't there.
But...
Damn me if they're not on the right side in this one.
Could that be because you normally build a castle out of stone blocks?
Just wondering...
I can say that an ark replica was never put there as a pilgrimage site because Mt. Ararat never was much of a pilgrimage site. Certainly not enough of one to justify the expense and labor of building a wooden structure that large so far from any source of timber and in such an inaccessible place.
You're right about everything you say with regard to the need for a proper scientific investigation. That was exactly my point, which everyone seemed to have missed in their zeal to exercise their anti-religious bigotry. If this particular investigator indeed finds something, and if he indeed does not carry out a proper investigation, the very existence of an ancient large structure in that place is sufficiently interesting that it's a safe bet that someone will. There are plenty of archaeologists around looking for interesting sites to work, you know.
While I was typing this comment in, someone modded parent down 2 notches as Flamebait. Come on folks! He's making a valid point, as far as it goes. This is definitely one of those times where you should post instead of moderate if you simply disagree.
Apparently that's what "Overrated" is for....
Needless to say, I stay away from chocolate pudding these days....
"Sarge! I gotta crap bad, but I can't!"
"Dammit, soldier! Suck down that armor and get a move on!"
Yes I do. I didn't make up these names, I'm just reporting them. Several decades ago, they'd have been used interchangably, but that's no longer the case.
It's not that I have any moral qualms over having done that, but really, MS has gotten very little of my money.
No it isn't. The Church of Ethiopia is one of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, along with the Coptic Church, the Syrian Jacobites, Armenians, and several other local Churches. They are not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, i.e. the Greek or Russian Orthodox, due to a Christological controversy dating back to the 5th Century.
There's a strong possibility that communion will be restored sometime in the next century (which is very quickly as such things go) but it hasn't happened yet.
Note his sig. He's obviously a liberal arts major. We ought not expect him to understand science.
Yes it is. What a load of crap. You shouldn't need a directory in order to understand C source code. The only advantage to this is the bragging rights that come from having written a raytracer that only takes up 2K. If this came up in a peer review at work, me and every single one of my co-workers would slap it down as unmaintainable.
Leave the comments in the source that's distributed, or use descriptive variable names in the first place.
Now there's a question. If the thing takes up two slots anyway, why did they direct the fan to blow the hot air inside the case? Why not just make it "offcially" take up two slots and use the second position to exhaust the hot air directly to the outside?
The problem is that the ways the laws regulating monopolies are written don't criminalize executives who actually make the decisions for the corporation to engage in illegal behavior personally responsible. Of course they probably should -- but this is still a different class of crime altogether than the instances you cited.
It is very hard to grasp for me that someone who is pro a more christian morale will very likely vote for the same party as an atheist with a distaste of strong government.
You wouldn't know it to hear people talk, but we have a very strong tradition here of keeping religion and politics separate. On a legal level we're Constitutionally forbidden to have a state church. Even on issues where you'd swear people's rationale for their opinions was mainly religious, you tend to hear the arguments expressed in non-religious terms. People here who are morally conservative tend to be socially and politically conservative as well, and in the US political conservatism means favoring a weaker central government. This is where they intersect with small parties like the Libertarians who are politically conservative for other reasons. All this dovetails with a very American tradition of distrust for strong government.
But then, I guess it is rather hard to grasp for many people in the states how a democratic society can accept a monarch as head of state.
Not this American. I'm actually a monarchist, although I'd favor a monarch with some actual political authority. (I'm much more familiar in this area with the British system than the Netherlander. The British royal family really are a bunch of toothless lions these days. It's kind of pathetic.)
No, I just edited too drastically. I'm well aware that in a multi-party parliamentary system a majority is not required to form a government, and this is the situation in which coalition must form to create the necessary consensus.
This is absolutely in opposition to the US system in which a consensus in the legislature is not at all required to form a government. You seem unwilling or unable to grasp this point. If a third party were to become a major player on the US political scene and were to capture enough seats in one of the houses of Congress such that no party had a majority, we would still have a government regardless of what they did because we have a separately elected Executive branch. Yes, the other two parties would have to court the third to gain support to get anything passed, but this would be more in the nature of fleeting alliances or cooperative efforts than coalitions. No doubt the procedural rules in the two houses, which now assume a two-party system, would have to be modified, but this requires no Constitutional, or even statutory, changes.
Yes, sometimes in a multi-party system you have checks and balances in place, but only on those occasions when a coalition government is actually in place. Maybe this is even most of the time. Then, the natural tensions among the parties within the government will produce them. But they vanish, or are at least severely attenuated, whenever a single party manages to capture a majority of legislative seats, which you must admit happens from time to time. In the US, they're built into the Constitution. That's also a major difference in the systems.
FWIW, I agree with the basic point that more parties would better reflect the actual sentiment of the populace. Certainly my own views are represented by neither party. But unfortunately, the Carrot Political Front has garnered no support at all even locally....
You mean House of Representatives and Senate. The two together comprise the Congress. You may have gotten confused because the media likes to call Representatives "Congressmen" and memebers of the Senate "Senators", as if one was a part of Congress and one was not, but that's a false impression.
This is similar to a parliament in that it's a legislative body. But that's not what is meant by "parliamentary system."
That it has a different name in the USA and that the way it is elected is slightly different is an implementation issue, it doesnt make it an entirely different system.
I'm sorry, but it does. You mentioned a "coalition government." There's no such thing in the US system; there can't be. The government isn't dependent for its existence on one party or another having a majority in Congress. Yes, the Constitution provides that the President must choose his Cabinet "with the advice and consent of the Senate", so there's always a bit of compromise involved, but he's under no compulsion to appoint members of the other party to his Cabinet even if that party happens to control the Senate. Bush is unusual in that he seems to have considered ability and agreement with himself for the issues under their respective baliwicks over and above party affiliation when appointing his Cabinet, and we therefore have a Democrat Transportation Secretary in an otherwise Republican administration. But Bush is extremely unusual in that respect. The salient point here is that the majority party in the Congress, even if that party happens to control both houses (which happens only rarely) cannot dictate policy. That's the President's job. In a parliamentary system it would be the Prime Minister's job, with the PM being appointed by the majority party in the legislature. A parliamentary system therefore essentially lacks an Executive branch in the government. There's a good definition here. This is far more than a superficial difference.
I'm sorry, but when you say something like this it makes it appear as if you don't understand the US system very well. We do not have a parliamentary system. Our Head of State and Head of Government is the same person, who is elected separately from the legislature. In fact, it's often the case that each house of the legislature is under the control of a different party.
Yes, this can make it difficult to get anything done. Only in the rare case where the same party is in clear control of both houses of the legislature and the Presidency can bills be passed into laws without a great deal of compromise. It's also worth noting that the procedural rules in the Senate are such that a simple majority does not guarantee passage of anything. A party needs a 2/3 majority at least to have unconditional control there. And in the US, party members are never bound to vote the party line, so intraparty politics is not uncommonly played out on the floor of the legislature. Sure, the parties can bring certain pressures to bear on individual members and can usually get a majority of its members to vote a certain way, but that's not always a majority of the house as a whole and it can't always be done anyway.
If our government is occasionally slow to move, this is partly by design. Fathers were greatly concerned about a government without any restraints placed on it, and were very careful to build in natural tensions among the three branches of government so that, if they were all acting according to their enlightened self-interest, they would naturally restrain themselves and each other. The balance was upset somewhat with the 17th Amendment which shifted election of the Senate from the states to the people directly, and since then the government has grown by leaps and bounds. (This is not all due to the 17th Amendment, of course. The 20th Century was the occasion of many crises, and with each one the government arrogated a little more power to itself.) But it still mostly works. The two-party system was unforeseen by the Founders, and has served to reinforce some of the other existing checks.
PC users can finally see what they've been missing all these years.
Frank Herbert had this many years ago in The Godmakers.
"Teotihuacan is up there with Rome, one of the biggest pre-industrial cities in the world. Constantinople is also maybe there but no Chinese city was of this magnitude. Egypt didn't even have cities," Manzanilla said.
Rome had over a million inhabitants at its peak in antiquity, and Constantinople just about the same by the time of Justinian according to most sources, and even those who lowball the populations of both places put them no lower than 400,000. Even classical Athens had 300,000 residents, and second-century Xi'an in China had at least 400,000 during the time Teotihuacan was inhabited with 150,000 according to the article.
Yes, it's a very large city for antiquity, but it's far from the largest.
Incidentally, one might quibble with the definition of a "city", but Memphis in Old Kingdom Egypt had a population of 30,000, which was the largest settlement in the world at the time. I think we can safely call that an Egyptian city.
To be fair, we didn't actually see any computers. The kind of machine you'd use back then for launch ops, or even for satellite q/a, did not fit on a desktop.
Although we can be reasonably well-assured that the computers were state-of-the-art at the time, the clothes and haircuts are another matter. Please remember that these are professional geeks we're talking about, and are therefore not exactly cutting edge when it comes to fashion. To all appearances it was closer to 1978 than 1984.
I know this because I was in college in 1984, and we all looked great, but these guys look like dorks.