No they won't. I live in a mountain area, where there are a number of hydro plant, and the spillway is always a section/bypass, with nothing impeding the passage of water, which is lower that the height of the dam, and if necessary, with an open conduit built to prevent erosion.
In this photo, the building in the foreground houses the dam controls, the steel gate you see controls the level, and the spill access is to your right, further up lake, and has an unimpeded passage to a concrete spillway that reaches down to about 200 meters down from the dam itself. there are also one or two concrete pools to slow the flow at the end of the spillway.

Is he REALLY implying that any human being, not previously subject to brain surgery, would build anything involving High pressure water and superheated steam confined in a building in a manner not suited to exposure to moisture? because if that's the case, I have just the right entirely-made-of-sugar bathtub for his expensive condo.

No.
It's like the Soviet Union of old. Western government are rightfully scared, because most of the research and technology work is still done in the traditional institutions in western society, and those billions of dollars in research money would go down the drain.The Russian secrete services are still active, probably because of that. It happened in reverse....a few centuries back, when a monk brought back from China the silkworm, which was considered by the Chinese a trade secret.
Also, most of our economy's infrastructure is internet based, and you cannot scare people about Cyberattacks and then disregard the hardware aspect. Many sane people, if explained the situation this way, would utter "..And you waited until NOW to tell me?!?!?", and go crash some Chinese solar panels.

Moreover, it's not called "the hermit kingdom for nothing, and Huawei exists at the behest of an unelected elite wichi is scared by its own people, and that limits political speech in any way possible, remember the great wall of China.
Having said that, other goverments disregard the risk, not because it's not there, but because as an information gathering machine it's too blunt to be of much use, and most of it would not be actionable in democratic societies.

You all miss the point. in the corporate environment, you'd want to have all the three years old doing the same thing, and probably a difficult thing as well, which is totally unrelated to the interface, like pricing exotic options, or doing the engineering calculations for a bridge or a skyscraper. So changing the interface is not useless, is wasteful.
[Steve Ballmer]:" look guys, we've one-upped apple with our easier interface. We've slapped on our new smartphone the very same interface of Mattel's toy phones! All the three year old kids will know how to use it, and we'll have lock in for a generation!!! Any smarter, and we'd glow in the dark!"
Oh yeah? and why would I spend time on that? I am not doing serious jobs on my smartphone anyway! I want my Win7 back!!!

no. It was toilet paper.

Yes. Or at least, they have a "politician solution", let me amplify.
the content providers talking heads go to their IT department and say "Google is making a killing selling ads on news searches in which we're in. I want some of that money coming our way!" ..."Well, we could make a free abstract, and put the articles behind a paywall." ...."No. if the abstract is good, the article won't be bought, and if it's lousy, the article won't be bought. And I want to sell Yearly subscriptions, not case-by-case articles; my shareholders value them more."......"I do not have any solution then."..

US fork:"Fine, I am off to the golf course then."

French fork:."Fine. I'll go to the minister and see what we can do".

Now the minister has two course of action available: send these people off saying "it's the economy, stupid", or.....
"Wait a minute. If it does not work, the only people damaged, in a sense, are these people clamouring for it in my anteroom. They'd hardly come calling out in public that it was my fault, because A. they'd asked for it in the first place, and B. this measure is a gross distortion of objective realities, but they had it wrong first, and any French minister knows that no public figure will EVER admit that a plan of his was botched from the start, let alone someone as public as a newspaper editor. And who knows, maybe there will be some money coming the government's way."

And yet, it definitively should. MM games, FTP online games are all well and good, and for now they are mostly played on MS based environments. but their stranglehold on office application is gone, in the sense that people stick to MS office for compatibility , not features or availability. In fact, few things spread terror through the realm than the words " We at Microsoft intend to improve the consumer experience in MS office". My God, not another interface hassle, please!!!!
So, gaming is important ; if they make viable for Steam to build its own environment, they will.
I play some World of tanks, and I do not think that it would be an impossible task for the to design a non microsoft interface. So, I use Firefox and Thunderbird, which are cross platform; office I can do without and migrate to Open office or something like that; what's holding me there....apart from gaming.

My pc works perfectly well on win XP. as of now I see no reason to buy a new one. provided that no one builds a good PC gaming platform, my cut off date for changing my PC is the end to sales of Windows 7, which has become a perfectly good PC environment. The only better way for MS and Ballmer to commit suicide would be to accelerate that date.

I am one of those guys using Office, and I'm old enough to remember using Lotus 1-2-3. Then, office was a real gamechanger. Now it's a commodity, most of the people using it would just as well use open office. They're not changing it because a) retraining b) admin tools.
As much as the cloud paradigma can be attractive to Microsoft, in their shoes I'd be wary: anybody can enter that market provided that it has given you a login and password ( Facebook document repository?), and they are not asking people for a yearly fee. I'd probably put up ads saying "Microsoft: your documents are REALLY yours", promise to give out free document viewers for eternity with a facility to copy them to newer versions, and to never mess with the program menus and shortcuts, and stick to the personal PC model like it was a mix between a young Gloria Swanson and Adriana Lima.

"Microsoft: we can do without a modem.... can you?" looks like a catchy phrase to me.

what you just said is an assumption, which is why you collect statistics: to find out if an assumption is valid or not.

Easy, under controlled circumstances. you should get the pills from the shrink, and nowhere else; he should get them from me; I would randomly give him, without his knowledge, the true one, or an identical one without any medicinal principle whatsoever. I would ask you to record, time by time, what happened to you when you took a pill, and when you quit taking them.
after a while, we'd have a statistics on how many times your symptoms happen when you take the TRUE pill, as opposed to the harmless one. It's called double blind, and it's the only way to get unbiased responses.

do you know the story about Viagra? its effects were discovered incidentally, it originally was designed as an anti hypertension drug: erection was a side effect. It was then tested for efficacy in people with a known history of erectile dysfunction in double blind mode. It's hard to get at the original data (try searching "viagra" on google.....) but I recall that the control group, those who got a false pill, had an improvement in 30% of the cases, while those getting the drug improved in 60% of the cases. This does not make liars of those in the control group who claimed that the drug worked.

You can always involve OSHA: " you know, it has no sharp angles, so it's safer!"

I've just been to Amsterdam, on vacation, for a week, and there are some missing information here:

1. Small motorbike drivers are not compelled to wear helmets. only big motorbikes drivers are. So, it's quite impossible to impose helmet on ordinary bikers;
2. bikers are absolutely the kings of the roads, to the extent that they do not give a fig about anything else: it's quite possible as a pedestrian to be flattened down by a bike, going full speed in the wrong direction on a one way street;
3. as much as one would like to assign praise to political acts of will, it stands to reason that in a very old city [i.e. big center with very narrow and convoluted streets] on flatland, even in the absence of bike lanes etc. the time saving of biking through, instead of driving around, makes eminent sense.

In that, today's politicians are no different from past shamans that claimed that the sun rose because they compelled it. The human mind has big difficulties in distinguishing correlation from causation.

I do not think that MS has got what it needed; it got what it wanted, and given MS track record in corporate deals, the two are such distant relations that under Catholic law they could marry without dispensation.
AFAIK, Ballmer wanted to jumpstart MS's phone business, and with this deal he will have some numbers tucked in; but the best comparison is with the deals mobile operators do with Apple: if there's money, it trickles Apple's way, not to the operator's coffers. Then again, in the mobile space MS lacks the factors that make it dominant on the desktop:

1. huge installed base;
2.a teeming ecosystem of programs that won't work on other platform;
3. a HUGE corporate market using his program/services exclusively.

I am not in Bill Gates' confidence, but given the above, I'd have gone for RIM everytime; it's already in the corporate space as a service, while nokia is there as a product, and as an indifferentiated product at that, just like any other phone, and having had an HTC and a Samsung, I must say that the competition is fierce; the only thing Nokia could have going for it is backward compatibility, which they just sold down the river for a neat billion bucks; my personal bet is that they will go back to producing toilet paper and car tires, maybe with a chapter 11 in between.... unless Ballmer decides to throw bad money after the bad.