Ha. Ha. Ha.

Do you *seriously* think this is about the Taliban and showing a bit of ankle?

The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception to the FIRST amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a legal hole big enough to drive whatever you want through it, whether it's the local vice squad, or some agency of government, or the entire U.S. military, if it comes down to it.

The Taliban are not different in any way that matters. They want to control people, and to control people, they want to control the flow of information. Obscenity is, always has been, and always will be just an excuse. It's amazing the way the same trick works over and over and over again.

The issue is that industrial processes produce heat, and people were not so thick as not to understand that discharging heated water into a lake, river, or stream would have consequences, even if the discharge water was completely free of pollutants aside from excess heat. Engineers had to think about it because, even if you didn't care about fish and other wildlife, any body of water had a finite capacity for carrying heat away. That finite capacity had economic value. Once you start thinking about how fast you could dump heat into (say) a river, a whole bunch of environmental issues (like dead fish) comes along for the ride. The arrival of Federal law is not an indicator of the first time anyone thought about the issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
The industrial revolution was growing on chill-water supplied by nature long before the triode, never mind the transistor, had been invented. And all the environmental issues came up long before Al Gore was born.

We *already* have aircraft that cannot be flown nearly as reliably by a human being as it can be flown by a computer. Automatic control that is not easily duplicated manually is going to be the rule rather than the exception. You still have to design aircraft so that they can be flown manually in an emergency, but the flight envelope will be more restricted and the performance less than optimal.

I think it was five computers, and what no one ever mentions is that Thomas Watson, who made the comment, wanted the world to continue using punch cards, which were the backbone of IBM's profitability. That is to say, all you IBM'ers out there who think IBM practically invented computing, IBM's first take on the "opportunity" was to try to kill it.

Leave off the cluster as your project and demonstrate the interconnect that would make a cluster of quantum computers a sensible enterprise, and you will be remembered forever.

Just think what would be possible if the megalomaniacs weren't hogging all the money.

One consideration in my leaving the Aerospace Corporation when I did is that I wondered if anyone would notice my absence at any time other than lunch. The irony of the situation is that fining the Aerospace Corporation is a bit like the Federal Government fining itself, as no one but the Federal Government has any pecuniary interest in the Aerospace Corporation as a corporate entity--it might as well be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Air Force.
Although no one ever said so explicitly, I assume that the bizarre legal status of the Aerospace Corporation was to allow it to operate free from the constraints that govern civil service employees and profit-making defense contractors. Furthermore, the fact that the Aerospace Corp. was privy to so many highly-sensitive programs made it seem natural that no one knew what anyone else was doing--even it the employee was doing nothing.

Bulldozer has apparently been a disappointment. Why? One wonders. One suspects that AMD encountered some late-in-the-game, unexpected, and very unpleasant surprises. Maybe 2 billion is closer to the number they wanted it to have. Sounds more and more like the NetBurst Story. Intel never did figure out how to add in enough transistors to make the design work well without breaking the power budget. Robert.