Lord of the Rings? Didn't we already hear about these?

where the men are men, the women are men, and the 10-year-old girls are FBI agent-bots.

We can't just go into Guilford County North Carolina and pluck a picture out of school files. Because all the computers are broken.

I was assured on Slashdot that Gladwell was supported by evidence and logic and science, and anyone who disagrees is just being politically correct.

What "evidence and logic and science" points to the involvement of hierarchical culture in the command decisions of Asiana Flight 214?

Universities have apprenticeship-like schooling too; it's called graduate school. But the end goal is different than in industry.

It's starting to seem likely that there was gross human error involved, but let's wait to see what else comes out from the investigation before blaming it all on East Asian culture.

Nice rant against an argument made by nobody here.

Both Pinatubo and Krakatoa had noticeable climatic consequences. But those effects lasted only a few years, on the surface. (Krakatoa probably affected ocean heat for many decades.) Tambora helped cause "the year without a summer".

16 nukes wouldn't do much, but a large number of nukes could cause a nuclear winter. For the climatic consequences of that, see this paper.

Just maintaining the nuclear arsenal accounts for around $18million a year currently and it's rising every year.

That's $18 billion a year, on average.

I think the DOE was predicting last year that their first exascale system will come online in 7 to 9 years.

The Jaguar/Titan system mentioned in your link is used for unclassified scientific computing. The NSA is building a computer facility at ORNL, but that's a different system (and was never claimed to be for stockpile stewardship). They don't put classified jobs onto unclassified systems.

Exascale computers would be helpful for climate modeling. Right now climate models don't have the same resolution as weather models, because they need to be run for much longer periods of time. This means that they don't have the resolution to simulate clouds directly, and resort to average statistical approximations of cloud behavior. This is a big bottleneck in improving the accuracy of climate models. They're just now moving from 100 km to 10 km resolution for short simulations. With exascale they could move to 1 km resolution and build a true cloud-resolving model that can be run on century timescales.

True, there are some things supercomputers can do well, but the same effect can be reached with distributed computing, which, in addition, makes the individual CPUs useful for a range of other things. Basically, building supercomputers is pretty stupid and a waste of money, time and effort.

People don't build supercomputers for no reason, especially when HPC eats up a large part of their budget.

The main application of supercomputers is numerically solving partial differential equations on large meshes. If you try that with a distributed setup, the latency will kill you: the processors have to talk constantly to exchange information across the domain.

As someone pointed out, modern supercomputers are like distributed computing, often with commodity processors. They look like (and are) giant racks of processors. But they have very fast, low-latency interconnects.

The above claim is approximately independent of the characteristics of the population distribution. What is more important is whether the sampling procedure is biased/non-representative.