Yes, and there's a Cray I at the Computer Museum here in Silicon Valley, upholstered base and all. You can sit on it if you like. It's not useful for much else.

All modern supercomputers are composed of a large number of microprocessors. The interconnects are faster than with ordinary hosting/cloud operations, but the CPUs are the same. The biggest supercomputer in the world, in China, is 3,120,000 cores of Intel Xeons, running at 2.2GHz each.

The question is whether the problem you're solving needs tight interconnection. If not, you can run it on a large number of ordinary computers. Weather may not be that tightly coupled; propagation time in air is kind of slow.

> The EU seems to have a chip on their shoulders about Google.

Because Microsoft pays better. Just business, nothing personal.

During the OOXML, Microsoft was caught red-handed giving bribes to European officials.

When somebody sticks it to Microsoft, Microsoft often uses the same tactic against it's competitors. Remember Europe saying MS had a monopoly? A few bribes later, and viola, MS competitors have a monopoly.

BTW: I think US politicians are even worse.

1) There are numerous technical reasons against systemd, and not one good reason for it.

2) Admins are way more than users with a special password.

3) It is way more than a few people who oppose systemd.

Does the National Weather Service need that computing power all the time, or could they buy it during major hurricanes from cloud services?

Don't worry, most of those jobs will go away soon. Amazon's newer warehouses use Kiva robots to move merchandise around to picking stations. Picking is still manual; the computers do all the thinking, the humans just pick up what the laser pointer points at. But Bezos owns a robotics startup working on automating that. At Amazon, being replaced by robots isn't a future problem. It's here now.

Customer service is already mostly automated. It's can't be long until customer service chat is with a computer, not a human. Then Amazon will need fewer people.

it's all, once again, a lot of buzzwords, and zero security.

That's a bit unfair. Yes, any security system that tries to be entirely transparent cannot really be end to end secure, but nobody has ever built a mainstream, successful deployment of end to end encryption that lets you use a service even if you don't trust it. There are many difficult problems to solve here. Forward secure end to end encryption behind the scenes is clearly an important stepping stone, and OWS has said they will expose things like key verification in future updates. Just because they haven't done everything all at once, and solved every hard problem, does not mean it's just a lot of buzzwords.

Yahoo doesn't have a search engine. They resell Bing. Yahoo got out of search five years ago. So this is puzzling. One could see Bing paying to be the default in Firefox, but what's the gain in running it through Yahoo?

Mod parent up.

That's correct. The best known demonstration of this is the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, which every signed driver since Windows 7 has passed. It's a proof of correctness system which checks drivers for buffer overflows, bad pointers, and bad parameters to the APIs drivers use. It works by symbolically tracing through the program, forking off a sub-analysis at each branch point. It can be slow, but it works.

Microsoft Research reports that in about 5% of the cases, the Verifier cannot reach a decision. It can't find a bug, but it can't demonstrate the lack of one either. After 45 minutes of case analysis it gives up.

If your driver is such a mess that it's anywhere near undecidable, it's broken. Those drivers get rewritten with a less ambiguous design, usually by adding more run-time checks. Problem solved.

(Remember when driver bugs crashed Windows all the time? Notice that's not happening any more? That's why.)

Honest question. What does Linux offer for servers that BSD does not?

You're willing to sit on the sidelines while ISIS engages in a campaign of genocide and ethnic/religious cleansing? ...... They're barbarians and they need to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

You're against ethnic/religious cleansing but want to "terminate with extreme prejudice" an entire very large group of people largely defined along ethnic and religious lines .........

words fail me

If the entire government became Libertarian today, it would take less than 10 years for corporations to take total control of governance and we'd have just as much (or probably more) squashing of individual liberties, but no longer any accountability to voters.

Isn't that a contradiction? I'd think a libertarian government would not want anyone, owners of large corporations included, to take over governance. That's kind of the definition of libertarianism, I thought.

Additionally, I'm having a hard time recalling the last occasion on which a company squashed my civil liberties. Actually I don't think it ever happened. Companies, even big ones, are typically very simple creatures compared to governments - they have simple needs and simple desires. Even companies that can't be easily reduced down to the profit motive (most obviously Google in this day and age) still have quite simple motivations, in their case "build sci fi stuff".

On the other hand, our awesome western governments routinely kill people for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time or receiving a text message from the "wrong" person (see: signature driven drone strikes).

Whilst these governments aren't quite at the stage of drone striking people who are physically in western countries yet, they certainly are willing to do lots of other nasty things, as residents of gitmo will attest. So given a choice between a government that did very little and mostly let corporations get on with it, or the current state of affairs, it's pretty hard to choose the current state of affairs given the very very low likelyhood of companies deciding to nuke people out of existence of their own accord.

There are many powerful players in society and I'm not one of them. Does it make me a crony capitalist or a welfare queen when I decide I'd rather the power go to those I can vote out of office than those I can't?

No, it doesn't make you either of those things. It does mean you have a lot more faith in voting than other people do. This can be described as either very reasonable or perhaps naive, depending on where you live. E.g. in places like America or the UK voting is driven almost entirely by the economy and matters of foreign policy or the justice system have no impact on elections, politicians know that so they do more or less whatever they like. In places like Switzerland where there are referendums four times a year, preferring voting power to market power would make a lot more sense.

I think it is fair to say that dems, are repubs, are responsible for this.

Trying to imply that Obama is the good guy in the mess is pure bullshit.

This is the problem with outsourcing manufacturing and keeping the "brand". Eventually, if they're good, the outsourcing company takes over. It's about time for this to happen to Apple. The hardware is approaching maturity. The last rev of the iPhone was only a minor change over the previous one, and the technology was comparable to HTC's product of two years ago.

I was one of the original Kickstarter funders.

I threw my money into the pot because I got so much fun and game play out of the original Elite. Basically I thought David Braben and his team had already earned it. Am I disappointed that there's no single player offline? Yes, I am. My home internet connection has a long ping time (it's via satellite) so multiplayer combat was never going to work for me. It may be, for that reason, the game won't work at all - FOR ME. But I'm not making a fuss.

Basically if you back a kickstarter you're taking a risk. This kickstarter has enabled an amazing game to be built, and lots of people will get a huge amount of fun out of it; as far as I'm concerned, my money's well spent.

The military has run short courses for electronic technicians and paramedics for decades. Paramedic boot camp is about 14 weeks.