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

[grarpamp]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Cryptography] NSA says China's supercomputing advances
put US at risk
To: cryptography at metzdowd.com


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.


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