Oddly enough, there is a South Park episode precisely on the topic of "What would the world be like if it was free of religious belief": http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103801

And yep, the world is still full of pointless, incessant bickering over things that don't matter.

Cost is a factor, but not really the dominant one.

In the midwest, the big deal is insulation. Wood-frame cavity walls are better at insulating than brick. 4 inches of brick has an r-value of .44 while 3/4 inch plywood uninsulated by itself is .93; try looking it up if you don't believe it. A typical modern wood frame exterior wall has an r-value of 12, when the air barrier, sheathing, air gaps, cavity insulation, etc. are all considered. Hence in the midwest, with the extreme continental weather, nobody builds in brick (although you'll see brick facade). As for tornado proofing, standard masonry is insufficient. Some people pay gobs of money for a single tornado proof room, which involves steel reinforced cinder-block construction; most people just dig a basement.

On the west coast, building code typically requires either steel frame or sheathed wood structure (wood frame covered entirely by plywood or oriented strand board). You do not want to be in or near a traditional masonry structure in an earthquake. Sheathed wood frame has far better quake resistance, and is considered highly survivable for high-magnitude quakes up to 3 stories tall without anything more than paying attention to making sure it is sheathed all the way around and tie down to the foundation & between floors.

That wood frame happens to be quite inexpensive is nice bonus, but not the whole reason.

2000mg is not the daily limit for acetaminophen; 4000mg is. 2000-3000 is the limit for "at risk" populations (e.g. existing liver disease). The linked article doesn't even mention a dosage limit. You can take your 2 Percocets and 2 extra strength Tylenol and still be under the dose limit; that's only 2300 mg even with the high-dose Percocets.

It's one thing to be concerned about an overdose and set a dose limit; it's a completely different thing to arbitrarily lop the max dose in half to cause hysteria.

Google's sorting results from last yeat (link) are much faster; they did a petabyte in 362 minutes, or 2.8 TB/sec. They minute sort didn't exist last year, but Google did 1TB in 68 seconds last year, so I think it may be safe to assume that they could do 1 TB in under a minute this year. Google just hasn't submitted any of their runs to the competition.

From the sort benchmark page, the list the winning run as Yahoo's 100TB run, leaving out the 1PB run; that implies the 1PB run didn't conform to the rules, or was late, or something.

People have commented that this is a "who has the biggest cluster" competition; the sort benchmark also includes the 'penny' sort, which is how much can you sort for 1 penny of computer time (assuming your machine lasts 3 years), and 'Joule' sort, how much energy does it take you to sort a set amount of data. Not surprisingly, the big clusters appear to be neither cost efficient nor energy efficient.

I challenge the premise that paperless is actually green. Cellulose is rather difficult to biodegrade (if it weren't, all the trees in the world would be eaten to mush). Trees for paper making are generally farmed wood. So keeping your paper statement (even if you throw it out later) acts as a carbon sink. Hence it is good for the environment. Plus, you don't have to deal with the "whoops, that statement you need is too old" issue.

It's far worse than just shaving away at the profit margin. Bragging rights for being the processor (Intel vs AMD vs IBM), the interconnect (Myrinet vs InfiniBand vs Altix), or the assembler (IBM vs HP vs Dell vs etc etc etc) are highly coveted. In general, the top end supercomputers are sold at such heavy discounts that the profit margin may well be a loss margin instead. This is especially true if the machine is bought by an academic institution; universities *never* pay retail for this sort of thing.

I'd be interested to see what the market share split is if you exclude machines which appeared in the top 10 (not just this top 10, but previous top 10s as well). Since neither HP nor Dell seem to have a lot of visibility in the top 10, I'd presume that they're in it for the money, not for the fame. And I'm puzzled as to how Cray and SGI manage to hang on (although, the Altix interconnect is impressive; NUUUUUUUMA!).