Yes, there is always at least one where each city/country can claim the first place, so that local newspapers can make an article about how that piece of land is better than others and local political leaders can show that they achieved something.
Funny, I didn't understand what you were referring to and quickly forgot about your comment. I then read the 500-mile story, got to the end and thought "units? oh cool, new command... wait, wasn't there a comment about `units`?"
Just the kind of bug which seems ridiculous as a bug report, but turns out to be true.
Like the "OpenOffice.org won’t print on Tuesdays" bug, or the bug which crashed the computer when the general visited. Or the one when the server went down whenever a certain guy had a support ticket.
It was in a military facility in the seventies, and always when the general visited the computers crashed. This happened too often to be a demonstration effect, it turned out to be the metal in the generals shoes interfering with the electronics.
It's very difficult to get a 32x speedup from 32 cores as there are always parts that are inherently serial, so it's more likely they tested it on a 64 core machine or something like that.
It also allows scanning all the border-crossing internet traffic. Which is an NSA-style dragnet since there is mostly international traffic in a small country.
