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Reminiscent of "why do our centrifuges keep tearing themselves apart?"


That was the first thing that came to my mind too. Having been inside some really big data centers and seen a bunch of Siemans gear that only worked with Windows XP controller software for monitoring. Generally not as mission critical though as the stuff used in Natanz.

I've also seen my fair share of mis-matched power provisioning and loading, it can be very hard on the equipment. When I did a quick look at a bitcoin mining setup with 700 GPUs I was pretty impressed at how big a swing they had in terms of power consumption. At NSA scale something like that would be really really impressive and real pain to get right.


"That was the first thing that came to my mind too."

The first, and only, thing that should come to your mind is that this is a boondoggle.[1]

Terrorism and the NSA and privacy are nothing but a smokescreen to hide an enormous transfer of wealth.

Make no mistake: the only thing that could possibly be better news (to the stakeholders)[2] than this project being completed is if the project was completed and it burnt to the ground the very next day ... and they got to build it again.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boondoggle

[2] You are not a stakeholder


And if you look at some numbers, you'll get in which industry that wealth transfer happens most:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...




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