Quite agree.

Given that James Clapper was perfectly willing to lie to Congress, what would the NSA administration have done to a 29 year old system administrator, had he aired his views to them? He would have been sidelined, fired or arrested, that's what. And we would be none the wiser.

It is amusing that politicians will express the need for public discussion about NSA surveillance and then condemn Snowden in the next sentence. You can't have one without the other.

In my opinion, he is the definitive whistle-blower. He had only one way to reveal the NSA/GCHQ excesses and revealed them in the right way. Further, he gained nothing personally from all this: no money and he seems to dislike the attention. And spending a month in a Russian airport can't be much fun.

He has my gratitude and admiration, and I wish him well.

...and has done for years.

We write a scientific code for solving quantum mechanics for solids and use both OpenMP and MPI in hybrid. Typically we run it on a few hundred processors across a cluster. A colleague extended our code to run on 260 000 cores sustaining 1.2 petaflops and won a supercomputer prize for this. All in Fortran -- and this is not unusual.

Fortran gets a lot of bad press, but when you have a set of highly complex equations that you have to codify, it's a good friend. The main reason is that (when well written) it's very easy to read. It also has lot's of libraries, it's damn fast, the numerics are great and the parallelism is all worked out. The bad press is largely due to the earlier versions of Fortran (66 and 77), which were limited and clunky.

In short, the MPI parallelism in Fortran90 is mature and used extensively for scientific codes.

This has already been turned into a personal vehicle some years ago. It won the 1988 Toyota Olympic Ideas competition and ran on perpetually spinning Chinese woks. The best link I can find is

http://books.google.com/books?id=1M3e82yGmZMC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27#v=onepage&q&f=false

Perhaps someone can find a better picture or video.

I had an idea for a duplicitous encryption scheme. Not sure if it's already been done.

It's very simple: you can use one of two keys A and B. If you use key A, then you get the plain-text you wish to keep private. If key B is used, then you get some diversionary data (something innocuous, but for which encryption is plausible). The encrypted files would be larger, but the scheme could be made so that you would never know if there are two sets of data or only one.

Thus if you encounter nosey border guards, you type in key B and show them your soft-core pron collection ("I didn't want the wife to see it, Officer...")