Slashdot Mirror
How a Supercomputer Beat the Scrap Heap and Lived On To Retire In Africa
New submitter jorge_salazar (3562633) writes Pieces of the decommissioned Ranger supercomputer, 40 racks in all, were shipped to researchers in South Africa, Tanzania, and Botswana to help seed their supercomputing aspirations. They say they'll need supercomputers to solve their growing science problems in astronomy, bioinformatics, climate modeling and more. Ranger's own beginnings were described by the co-founder of Sun Microsystems as a 'historic moment in petaflop computing."
In an alternate universe much like our own, I invite you to contemplate how the press would react to a white first-term Senator from Chicago, IL, who was proposing to run for President, who had these matters to be accounted for:
-- His ties to a sleazy felon and fixer who had "assisted" him in buying a lavish mansion, said fixer taking a loss on the deal
-- A wife who worked for a local hospital where her role was to find ways to dump lower-income, uninsured, lower-profit African-American patients off onto other medical centers
-- Worshipped for years at a church which had an explicitly stated racially "white" theological underpinning, and whose pastor damned America from the pulpit
-- Helped privatize local housing projects, handing them over to people who were major campaign contributors of his, and having the housing fall into horrible disrepair afterward, including black families living in unheated apartments with broken windows through brutal Chicago winters
Of course, the press would have gone into utter ballistic cyclonic shitstorm mode if any white candidate had been linked to any of these things, much less to ALL of them, and more yet.
But it is true that Obama has been treated differently on account of his race.
That is, he has been treated far, far, far more _leniently_ than a white candidate of comparable background would ever have been treated. And that leniency and special pleading that he was extended as a candidate has now been allowed to extend through six years as President.