Fwd: Re: MIT talk: Special-Purpose Hardware for Integer Factoring

[Steve Furlong]

On 9/16/05, R.A. Hettinga <rah at shipwright.com> wrote:
> Time travel aside (okay, innumeracy aside, some state-school philosophy
> majors can't count, either...), if I'm a reporter, this is "new
> journalism", since most of the missive is about *wonderful* *ME*...

Never mind the numbers. How does this special-purpose hardware make
you _feel_? Can you express the cost of the machine in terms of bags
of rice which could have been given to starving chiiiildren in Nepal,
or wherever children are starving nowadays? How much higher could the
NOLA levees have been built if everyone who worked on this machine had
instead been working full-time pouring concrete and piling sandbags?
What does George Bushitler stand to gain from this machine?

-- 
There are no bad teachers, only defective children.