[Cryptography] NSA says China's supercomputing advances put US at risk

[James A. Donald]

On 2017-03-17 21:28, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> But just outright dismissing the whole issue as
> "more pandering for a bigger place at the government trough"
 > just doesn't cut it.


99% of politics is more pandering for a bigger place at the government 
trough.

If you look at any government program up close, it is almost entirely 
waste and corruption.

Sometimes, often, the waste and corruption is inextricably linked to 
vital government programs that really need to be done, like war, road 
building, and law enforcement, and it is easy to say that these programs 
should be done more efficiently (compare the cost of roads built by the 
private sector for internal use, with roads built by the government) but 
hard to do actually do them more efficiently.

(Though I have long argued that logistics should be in the hands of 
contractors and subcontractors classified as camp followers and directly 
employed by the regimental commander and by soldiers, rather than hands 
of people classified as soldiers but who do no actual fighting, because 
if the regimental commander could fire and hire logistic support, 
logistics would be enormously cheaper and better)

In other cases, many cases, the program serves no very obvious urgent 
need, in which case it should not be done by government.

If people need supercomputers for floating point type problems, they 
will build them.  Indeed, they already are building them.  What is a GPU?

Answer: A GPU is a supercomputer that solves a kind of problem very 
similar to those that government supercomputers are supposed to solve at 
about one ten millionth the cost.