That. And everything else.

American cars are ugly, spend too much fuel, can't withstand bad roads, are too slow and steer too badly to be driven fast as well, and their quality sucks in general. That's why GM has a whole design/engineering team in Germany, to sell cars to the rest of the world.

Too bad that when the japanese started taking over the american market, their cars started to suffer from the same effects: too big, too shabby, too slow, too soft.

I don't know your phone, but the iphone does zoom any app with three finger scroll. Check on accessibility.

It seems they had reached the level of inkjet printers...

It's just speech. It's a milestone. It's not difficult to exceed one exaflops (the name stands for operations per second, it's not a plural) once you got to, say, 0.99 exaflops. Scientists like to talk in orders of magnitude. Right now we are in the tens of petaflops, but didn't get yet to hundreds. Tiahne-2 gets to 55 pflops, but its sustained speed is a bit bigger than half of that.

Problem is much more about how to get there. It's not just machinery. Is how to actually write and debug programs at that scale. As we cannot make the cores much faster than what we have today, the solution is to add more cores.

The added cores increase the stress on the network, and makes programming such thing much more difficult. Good luck debugging a race condition on one million processes.

Other problems arise from things as mundane as equipment breaking. Think that if you have a single broken memory chip during the execution of a program, the whole computation is either compromised or just lost. And with millions of cores, comes millions of motherboards, power supplies, I/O system, storage, all kinds of electronic components which are subject to problems.

So, while technically, it's not a barrier per se, this huge number of variables that makes things exponentially more complex than what we have today is indeed a barrier. As someone asked here, we cannot just make a cluster of tianhe-2s. The thing would be breaking all the time, spending so much electricity and manpower for maintenance that its uptime would be smaller than a windows 98 unpatched machine connected to an open network.

Huge supercomputers have the advantage that they are efficient, when compared to projects such as those running "@home", and their interconnects allows them to solve problems that need strong communications between the computing elements. Such problems cannot be solved in an efficient way by this "@home" model, where a machine receives a work unit, computes it and returns the result for final aggregation.

Those interconnects can sum to as much as half the price of building a supercomputer.

When you mention the environmental rising costs, I suspect you mean the carbon footprint, caused by energy consumption for manufacturing and operating those machines. The costs are not negligible, granted, but they are probably not as big as that caused by the cars of the thousands of scientists who use such machines :-) This is especially true in US, where cars are horribly inefficient, public transport from the suburbs to research centers is spotty and distances are large.

I understand that these environmental costs are much smaller than the benefits given by the use of such machines. Remember that supercomputers are used to simulate things such as nuclear explosions, ballistics and radiation decay. The costs for the environment are certainly better than blowing atomic bombs around! Not to mention the gains in health research, for example.

So, yes, there is a HUGE demand for such behemoths, and they are much better than the alternative.

Who cares about physical formats except for half a dozen music nerds who wants the "experience" of a physical object? It's pretty obvious that the younger generations just want to hear their music, not accumulate dust.

you know why people don't even bother anymore to try buying stuff anymore?

Because the "pirate" download is easier, sometimes faster, and, especially in the case of videos, earlier and better (meaning without all these traillers, fbi screens on the beginning etc).

Besides, the industry only moved their slow butts for two reasons: this piracy they speak of and apple. If they could, they would be selling nicki minaj crap por 30 dollars each song.

Don't do ANYTHING related to it. You will have time for that. Go walk, spend a month in india, climb the andes, whatever. Those things you will miss.

It's not about supporting arts. It's about supporting a dead business model that rewards little to the artists themselves, and which now has the right to spy on what you do online.

Easier said than done. A lot of companies sell you a software, not the source. Zealotry doen't change this.

It has been solved for a while, and works well. You can use the camera app or skype as on any other android device.

Yeah, because using C and having to write your own string, data structures and memory management routines is hardly reinventing the wheel at all.

For this price, I can buy an aerogarden, which comes with the water deposit, water pumps, lights and even comes with some seeds inside an optimized growing medium and fertilizer, besides being an aeroponics system, with a lot of advantages over growing stuff on dirt.

Even for those pot growers this is not a good idea.