The number of processors isn't the issue. The degree of connectivity is the issue, and IBM, Cray, and Seymour would all get it, even if the current "Cray" and UIUC aren't going to admit it. This version of Blue Waters is just another in a long line of massively parallel jokes. The version of Blue Waters proposed and abandoned by IBM would have been worth talking about.

Flops are nearly free. Connectivity is expensive. That's why flops, irrelevant though they may be, are advertised.

One has the sinking feeling that the window is closing on open source. There are fewer incentives to contribute and enormous incentives to create intellectual property, which is all that interests venture capitalists.

The belief is far from bizarre. It is rooted in this poorly-understood phenomenon called entropy. Being able to posit an orderly beginning that is consistent with the observable and relatively chaotic present is far more meaningful than extrapolating into an unobservable future using equations with iffy and actually unknown stability properties.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Do you *seriously* think this is about the Taliban and showing a bit of ankle?

The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception to the FIRST amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a legal hole big enough to drive whatever you want through it, whether it's the local vice squad, or some agency of government, or the entire U.S. military, if it comes down to it.

The Taliban are not different in any way that matters. They want to control people, and to control people, they want to control the flow of information. Obscenity is, always has been, and always will be just an excuse. It's amazing the way the same trick works over and over and over again.

The issue is that industrial processes produce heat, and people were not so thick as not to understand that discharging heated water into a lake, river, or stream would have consequences, even if the discharge water was completely free of pollutants aside from excess heat. Engineers had to think about it because, even if you didn't care about fish and other wildlife, any body of water had a finite capacity for carrying heat away. That finite capacity had economic value. Once you start thinking about how fast you could dump heat into (say) a river, a whole bunch of environmental issues (like dead fish) comes along for the ride. The arrival of Federal law is not an indicator of the first time anyone thought about the issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
The industrial revolution was growing on chill-water supplied by nature long before the triode, never mind the transistor, had been invented. And all the environmental issues came up long before Al Gore was born.

We *already* have aircraft that cannot be flown nearly as reliably by a human being as it can be flown by a computer. Automatic control that is not easily duplicated manually is going to be the rule rather than the exception. You still have to design aircraft so that they can be flown manually in an emergency, but the flight envelope will be more restricted and the performance less than optimal.