Yes. Did you ever stop to wonder why people left KaZaA, eDonkey, Gnutella and so on for Suprnova and The Pirate Bay? We tried it 10-15 years ago and it was vastly inferior to torrent sites, what's new? Except that torrent sites have now gone torrentless and trackerless to mostly carry magnet links.

Statistics. Google has tons and tons of statistics on what links are actually relevant to the search terms, your decentralized crawler will find some random shit and return it as a hit. Search any of the networks above and you get tons of crap. Perhaps you get better results with a decentralized search engine on the web, but only because you rely on sites like TPB and other popular torrent sites to weed out most of the crap. Searching a fairly centralized resource in a decentralized way isn't exactly being decentralized.

And private charity works so great in the U.S. that 40 mio are without any care?

This is a claim founded by nothing except ideology. No other health care system is as expensive as free market health care. Sorry if that doesn't fit your imagination of a free market, but that are the provable facts of current life. No other country pays as much for health care per person than the U.S., and no other country has so much of a free market health care system. If a free market health care system would at least be the best, then maybe one could talk about it, but the U.S. system is at best average (even included the noble exception of cancer and hearth stroke care, where the U.S. health care excels).

It's some remainings from Feudalism -- employees somehow belong to their employers, so the employers have to tend them like they are cattle, and that includes basic healthcare.

You can always short the waiting lists if you reduce the number of people entitled to wait.

People 'fold' because technological barriers are irrelevant when it comes to legal proceedings. For that matter, when you throw enough resources at it, the law is irrelevant to legal proceedings too. All you need is a name and enough lawyers to destroy the person's life.

They released Haswell in June, they've barely had time to sell that so Q4 2013 to Q1 2014 is still ahead of their yearly tick-tock. They're not announcing any delay to Airmont which is their mobile 14nm chip and we all know one quarter to or from won't change much in the desktop/server market. In related news AMD posted their Q3 earnings today and their CPU sales are still down, their gross margin is down but on the bright side the console sales are finally coming in so overall they're making a profit this quarter. Inventory is way up but I hope that is due to build up before the PS4/XBone launch, what disturbs me is that their R&D is still going down. That's a death spiral in the CPU/GPU/APU business.

According to this paper, from Harvard University, the Iran/Afghanistan wars will eventually cost between $4-6 trillion... now please demonstrate how ObamaCare will cost more than that. I'm not saying you are wrong, ObamaCare may cost more that $4-6 trillion but at the very least I'd like to see you back that up.

Fully decentralized services are full of spam, viruses, trolls, hired goons, crap versions, corrupted versions and garbage. You don't need the bulk data from a centralized source - a magnet link is plenty - but if you don't want to waste a lot of time and bandwidth you want some form of crowd-sourced service to help you find good files. That means moderation, comments, ratings, votes, indexes and so on that don't decentralize well. You could of course try with some PGP "web of trust" system, but you see how well that's worked out for key signing so I really doubt it'll do better at finding good content. As long as places like TPB are up, they'll be used. If they go down, I guess hidden services over TOR are next. If they go down as well, then maybe but not before...

In part, this is because Intel has a compiler for it. On commodity hardware (as in desktop, laptop), you will generally get the best performance running an Intel CPU and using an Intel compiler. That means C/C++ or FORTRAN, as they are the only languages for which Intel makes compilers. C++ is easy to see, since so much is written in it but why would they make a FORTRAN compiler? Because as you say, serious science research uses it.

When you want fast numerical computation on a desktop, FORTRAN is a good choice. We have a few researchers here who use it, and they all use the Intel Fortran Compiler because they want fast computation, but they don't have the money to buy bigass systems for every grad student. What they get out of the IFC and a regular Intel desktop chip is pretty impressive.

Compilers matter, and Intel makes some damn good ones. So if your research calls for lots of performance on little budget, that can influence language choices. Heck same thing on supercomputers. That is not my area of expertise, but it isn't as though all compilers for a given supercomptuer will be equally good. If I were to bet, I'd say the FORTRAN compilers are some of the better ones.

I am not sure how much that helps since unless the person is doing something very specific, chances are it will just shift the problem into 'which library is best' debate, which will again mostly involve people suggesting libraries they like or because they believe they are easy to learn.

Was that supposed to be a crack about popularity? Because auditing fortran is no worse then most other languages, and it can be argued that fortran is better then most in terms of being able to validate models.