"We'll have +100 exaFLOP systems in five years" - that's totally untrue. There's an active debate going on in the field whether or not we'll be at 1 exaflop by 2020. We absolutely will not get to 100 before then.

It would be fairly easy to have DHS come up with a list of things (physical locations, services, etc) to designate as critical to national infrastructure. In fact, I'd be shocked if they don't already have such a list already.

The organization that runs these these locations/services would have to build into all of their software contracts a liability clause.

Problem solved.

That's just not true. The internet and world wide web both existed in the early 90s, and neither was critical to national infrastructure at the time.

Correction: I meant to said medicaid (which is for poor people), not medicare (which is for the elderly).

This is essentially a government subsidy to software companies that produce crappy code.

Look at Walmart. it pays its employees so little money that they have to use government assistance like foodstamps and medicare. Walmart shareholders reap the benefit, and the public is left taking care of their employees.

Here's a better idea - if a company is making software that's critical to national infrastructure, make them liable for any bugs that occur (and for smaller companies, require them to carry insurance up to a certain level of liability).

The 1200 was second gen Amiga. My first was a 1000 (with the optional 256k RAM module in front) and I preferred it to my Mac. I remember spending $600 for a RAM module the size of a hardback book that hooked to a huge port on the side and gave me (gasp) 1MB of RAM. That was enough to run the whole OS in RAM. This was my bbs machine, and my CI$ and Genie box. I used a C128 to run Quantum Link.

I got a 3000 in 1990 but soon went Mac and Linux for good.

Back when I worked for Supercomputing group at Los Alamos, the supercomputers were categorized into 'capacity' machines (the workhorses where they did most of the work, which typically run at near full utilization) and capability machines (the really big / cutting-edge / highly unstable machines that exist in order to push the edge of what is possible in software and hardware. One example of such an application would be high energy physics simulation) . It sounds like these machines fall into the latter category.

Withdrawing from a treaty is not the same as violating it. In international law, the rule of thumb is that a country is only obligated to comply with the laws (treaties) it has ratified, and is not bound by those that it has not ratified. (Note: One debatable exception to this is the Nuremberg Principles)

Furthermore, countries are free to withdraw from ("repudiate") any treaty at any time, unless that treaty has provisions that provide specific steps for (or prohibit) repudiation.

Just throwing this out there -- two of the major hurdles to doing this right are (a) that Wikipedia's syntax is not formally defined, and (b) that its current implementation is (as defined by the output of the MediaWiki parser) is not a context free grammar. Which means that writing robust, fast parser for it is very hard.

You can claim that as a defense in court. It's called laches - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)
Basically, the defendant asserts that the plaintiff sat on his rights rather than enforcing them, which caused others to put themselves in harm's way.

But the case has to go to trial before you can assert that, by which time you're already out several million dollars.

As always, I will be distributing beer and fried chicken embryos.

That is how we celebrate Halloween in France.

Not quite:

Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase when he wrote "when I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."[1][2] The phrase may also have originated much later with Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, at a labor meeting in 1946 accusing a person of being a communist.[3]

The term was later popularized in the United States by Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., United States ambassador to Guatemala during the Cold War in 1950, who used the phrase when he accused the Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán government of being Communist. Patterson explained his reasoning as follows:

Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says 'duck'. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he's wearing a label or not."[4]

They should just be accepted as a cost of freedom and rejected as a highly improbable occurrence.

In addition, the U.S. gov't should stop oppressing people both at home and abroad. If they spent as much time looking after the interests of the average citizen and the common good of all Americans, and not just the wealthiest, most influential in the top one tenth of one percent of the population, we would not be the target of terrorist attacks.

That just means he's ignorant AND old.