(1) collecting relevant data accurately; (2) establishing the right kind of summaries and models.
Yes, you are right. But due to sensitivity to initial conditions and a positive Lyapunov exponent, the number of days you are able to forecast scales only logarithmically with your computing power, even with near-perfect knowledge of the initial conditions. So yes, bigger is better when it comes to weather prediction.
As for the idea of watching porn during an airplane flight... the image on the screen is only the beginning of why doing that is frowned upon.
I like the idea. Personally, I often carry a polarizer in a back pocket. Now, I have yet another reason.
Is \include{subdocument} workable when that subdocument is one paragraph long and you have 1000 subdocuments in your book?
I've never tried, but why shouldn't it? LaTeX is a compiler; surely a project of 1000 files could be compiled. Also, there are other ways, such as defining 1000 macros in a single file.
In FrameMaker, you have 'conditional text' which allows you to tag text with a condition. During publishing, you select the conditions you want shown or hidden. This allows you to have one master document to describe a series of related machines (or what have you). All WYSIWYG. Autogeneration of all sorts of lists, and a scripting language are available.
WYSIWYG is a downside IMHO. The UNIX philosophy says "use text, it is a general interface". Also, you can have conditionals in LaTeX code. Oh well, people and their preferences differ, so secretaries probably disagree with me. Of course you could chuck text strings in a database if you wanted to avoid files in a filesystem, too. Heck, you can probably even awk | grep | sed | latex, if you want to - as I said, text is universal, there's a million ways of working with it.
LaTeX/LyX is a nice project, but 'king for technical writing'? Technical writing generally means user guides and other product manuals, and LaTeX is a niche player at best in that market. FrameMaker is popular, and content management systems like AuthorIT are gaining traction. This market is all about reuse of content, and LaTeX doesn't offer that, as far as I know. LaTeX is aimed more at academic publishing.
It may be true that LaTeX is more used in academic publishing, but how is LaTeX not about reuse of content? Define your own commands to write similar equations, easily and portably generate documents from a simple script or program, \include{subdocument}, and a thousand other ways of reuse content makes LaTeX the working environment which allows the MOST reuse, as far as I can tell. Auto-generation of all sorts of references, an index, and so forth also reduces manual labor to an extent I have never seen Word (or whatever) even approach. Please, do correct me if I am wrong, because if something exists that is even better than LaTeX, I'll want to know!
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.