So the U.S. tried to halt China's cheeky supercomputing effort by banning the sale of Intel's chips? Reminds me of Tonya Harding's attempt to kneecap a rival. And the U.S. deservedly got what Tonya got: a big fat loss.

You know, this entire fiasco reminds me of a woman's "solution" style. Was Hillary Clinton still at State when the Intel ban was hatched?

The important question, which you have tried to obfuscate, is: Which machine, anywhere in the world, can do more real work?

The heavy applications exist and are evidently working well enough to satisfy Jack Dongarra, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. As one of the head honchos atTop500.org, the list of the world's top supercomputers, Dongarra is difficult to impress -- and he was clearly impresssed.

1.31 petabytes of memory is quite a lot, and the TaihuLight's interconnect is clearly very efficient. I imagine that's why Dongarra liked it.

From TFA, TaihuLight is running "sizeable applications," which include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications, said Dongarra. This "shows that the system is capable of running real applications and [is] not just a stunt machine," Dongarra said.

So the TaihuLight is a real machine, not a toy as you imply.

Ukrainian tanks don't have reactive armor, as the article points out.

The article is probably wrong. Ukraine manufactures tanks with the explosive Kontakt-5 reactive armor, so it's irrelvant whether Russia has ever exported it. The Ukrainians have it. Besides, where are the pictures of "long columns" of invading tanks?

As far as I can tell, those could have been pictures of Ukrainian tanks. Where are the pictures of "long columns" of moving Russian tanks?

When the consequences could be so serious (possibly World War 3), we need much stronger evidence.

Probably payback for the U.S. raking Chinese company Huawei over the coals.

In case you've forgotten, a congressional committee accused Huawei of installing spyware into the equipment it was selling, and even hauled the company president into the Capitol, forcing him to give testimony. Uselessly, of course, as that was a hanging committee, and there was no way the poor guy could prove his innocence. It's impossible to prove a negative. There was an enormous media circus, totally humiliating the company.

Worse, thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that the U.S. corporations (like Huawei's competitor, Ciso) were the ones installing spyware into their products.

So now it's payback time.

PISA does show how much U.S. schools suck, on average. I think that was the point of the test: to prove how rotten the inner cities are -- and how cold and heartless the average American is, that they can allow such rot to continue in the richest country in the world.

China is nowhere near mining out all their rare earths.

Not every country is as short-sighted as the U.S. The Chinese government can see that they will soon exhaust their rare-earth reserves. Total depletion might be 30 years off, but to the Chinese that is every soon indeed. So their government is doing something about conserving their supplies.

The decoder and the register renamer are on the critical path, so the power they dissipate is far out of proportion to their sizes.

That's why ARM has the compact Thumb instruction subset.

The days of becoming another Bill Gates are gone.

You can't become another Bill Gates or Larry Ellison because of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison -- not because of Open Source.

You can''t pull in huge monopoly rents like Microsoft and Oracle, because if you start looking even remotely successful, these companies will eat you. But you can make a bit of money: notice that Red Hat, an open source company, earns a billion dollars a year.

Continuity is more important than high tempo.

A country need only do enough to keep the engineers in practice and the aerospace infrastructure healthy. More than that is unnecessary -- it's nice to have, but not strictly needed.

Lack of continuity, however, can be fatal. Due to Congress's unreliability, NASA has no launchers left. The space shuttle is gone, and so is the Saturn V. Probably permanently gone, as a lot of knowledge has been lost. The U.S. is like a manic depressive: it's unstoppably giddy one year, suicidally gloomy the next. As I look back at all the lost decades since Apollo, I conclude that slow and steady, a continuous progression, would have been better by far.

Slow and steady is what I see from China. In the end, they may win.

Ten years ago, the Internet, especially the high-speed Internet you need for comfortable downloading, was not as pervasive as it is now. Software bought as retail boxes was still important. So MS could not have forced a walled garden on everybody; I have little doubt that they would have done it if they could. They can now.

No, the one being misleading was you. You wrote: "Graphene oxide and graphene are two different materials. As different as iron and rust, particularly in electrical properties."

The Nature news article says explicitly that the Zhen and Chao material is "conductive"; graphene oxide is an insulator. So the new material, however imperfectly reduced, is undeniably closer to graphene than to graphene oxide. It's definitely closer to iron than to rust, to use your analogy.

Implying otherwise, as you have done twice, is deceptive.

RTFA. Graphene oxide is an intermediate stage. From the article: " A final chemical reduction treatment turns the long strings of graphene oxide back into graphene."

So the final product is definitely graphene.