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> Even North Korea must know that internally.

You have a dumb-ass histrionic narcissistic "supreme leader" vs a impulsive narcissistic moron world leader.

North Korea is dumb enough to nuke the USA.
The USA is dumb enough to wipe North Korea off the face of the earth.

You do the math. Stupid people do stupid things.

Intelligent people will occasionally act stupid.
Stupid people act stupid all the time.

There is no hope for these two.
--
Judaism is the source of Christian indulgences: Murdering an innocent animals for heaven insurance.

But THE EMAILS! WHAT ABOUT THE EMAILS! ... the voters

> Even North Korea must know that internally.

You have a dumb-ass histrionic narcissistic "supreme leader" vs a impulsive narcissistic moron world leader.

North Korea is dumb enough to nuke the USA.
The USA is dumb enough to wipe North Korea off the face of the earth.

You do the math. Stupid people do stupid things.

Intelligent people will occasionally act stupid.
Stupid people act stupid all the time.

There is no hope for these two.
--
Judaism is the source of Christian indulgences: Murdering an innocent animals for heaven insurance.

But THE EMAILS! WHAT ABOUT THE EMAILS! ... the voters

> Even North Korea must know that internally.

You have a dumb-ass histrionic narcissistic "supreme leader" vs a impulsive narcissistic moron world leader.

North Korea is dumb enough to nuke the USA.
The USA is dumb enough to wipe North Korea off the face of the earth.

You do the math. Stupid people do stupid things.

Intelligent people will occasionally act stupid.
Stupid people act stupid all the time.

There is no hope for these two.
--
Judaism is the source of Christian indulgences: Murdering an innocent animals for heaven insurance.

> Even North Korea must know that internally.

You have a dumb-ass histrionic narcissistic "supreme leader" vs a impulsive narcissistic moron world leader.

North Korea is dumb enough to nuke the USA.
The USA is dumb enough to wipe North Korea off the face of the earth.

You do the math. Stupid people do stupid things.

Intelligent people will occasionally act stupid.
Stupid people act stupid all the time.

There is no hope for these two.
--
Judaism is the source of Christian indulgences: Murdering an innocent animals for heaven insurance.

Let me add a few datapoints here, as a reminder...

1) The AES competition was launched in part because DES and 3DES were cracked by EFF using FPGA-based brute-force decryption machine. Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html

As a reminder, DES was THE standard crypto algorithm, vetted and approved by NSA. It could be cracked by EFF only because of Moore's Law and some serious budget and effort.

2) Public-key cryptography was invented separately at GCHQ (UK NSA) and NSA itself, several years *before* Diffie-Hellmann. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#History

So, yes, these people (NSA/GCHQ) are very good at what they do. They have had at least 10 years of head-start, since cryptography was considered for many years just a branch of mathematics in academic circles. These guys work on nothing but crypto and digital/analog communications, year in, year out. Do not underestimate them.

3) One of the first electronic computers, was delivered to the NSA in the 1950s. NSA later suggested improvements to the company that built it. The first Cray supercomputers were delivered straight to NSA. Again, that was in the 1950s, when most computer companies (IBM comes to mind) were still struggling to define what a computer was good for. Source:

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_quarterly/digitalcomputer_industry.pdf
http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/370/mathematica/m1_eniac.pdf

4) The NSA and GCHQ have a long history of backdoors. They love these things, as they make their life so much easier. Read on Venona, Enigma, Ivy Bells: all of these were made possible by intercepting/copying one-time pads, selling "unbreakable" German encryption machines and tapping undersea Russian cables. And I am willing to bet these are just a small fraction of what these people have done over the years. Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

Again, this is just a small fraction of what NSA and GCHQ have done over the years. So, yes, suspecting backdoors in open-source software is... shall we say... only natural.

If I was paid to be a professional paranoid, I would be taking a very long hard look at my computers and telecom equipment right now.

Except that Pres. Bush's estimated IQ (based on his scores on the SAT) is 119, which puts him close to the 90th %ile. Source: http://www1.csbsju.edu/uspp/Election/bush011401.htm (there are other sources as well and I've done my own calculations that come up with about the same result).

Sure, but are we talking about dumb people? Most presidents are smarter than average.

See:

http://www.csbsju.edu/USPP/Bush/Bush-IQ-Myth.html

As for Bush himself, see his SAT scores: http://www.iuptown.com/YaleProtest/bushs_yale_transcript.htm
And for a rough pre-1974 SAT to IQ conversion see: http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Pre1974SAT.aspx

I daresay most politicians are smarter than average. You may be smarter than them, but they just have to be smart enough to win elections, e.g. winning the hearts and minds of the average voter.

Average IQ by definition is 100 [1].

They're smart enough to figure out the average person is stupider than they are, and how to get what they want. Even if it means pretending to be dumber than they are.

In the USA, "dumb blonde" sells more than "smart brunette", so some people go "fake dumb" and "fake blonde". e.g. Paris Hilton might be smarter than she behaves, probably even smarter than average.

[1] If the education system gets worse and worse, your IQ scores could go up even if you decline mentally - since 100 by definition is the average score and if the next generation end up really stupid, go figure ;).

Imagine 4 of these babies in an AT&T/Cingular commercial.

Got proof of that? There was a wire-service article making this claim that got a lot of ink back in 2001, but it turned out to be a hoax.

Bush's SAT scores would put him in the top 16% of prospective college students, with an IQ around 115, statistically indistinguishable from the 119 of John F. Kennedy.

Moreover, Bush did very well on his military aptitude tests, so well that it is at least arguable that his IQ is in the 125-130 range and well above that of John Kerry.

Morons don't fly fighter jets without killing themselves, or get degrees from Harvard and Yale. George Bush's daddy may have got him into Yale, but he didn't get him out.

Too many people mistake a lack of glib speaking skills for a low IQ, especially when it confirms their own political prejudices. They are not the same thing at all.

Finally, genius-level IQ is not correlated very well with successful Presidencies, as Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter may testify.

-ccm

The average IQ is about 105 for high school graduates, 115 for college graduates and 125 for people with advanced professional degrees. With his MBA from Harvard Business School, it's not unreasonable to assume that Bush's IQ surpasses the 115 of the average bachelor's-degree-only college graduate.

Can you show me any short paragraphs or excerpts from your well documented evidence? Or will it be a link to a 5 page article full of vague accusations?

A few minutes with Google provides more than enough citations, even after excluding those from lefty publications:

CBS News says "Mr. Bush appreciates loyalty above all."

In Military Week, Lt. Col (ret) Karen Kwiatkowski lays it on the line: "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney habitually reward cowardice and incompetence. They continually place political loyalty above ethics and loyalty to country."

The British Guardian quotes Michael O'Hanlon saying "I certainly think Bush values loyalty above all else."

Time Magazine says "For a President known to prize loyalty above most else..."

The Washington Post says: "But on a matter of first-order significance to many conservatives, the president let personal loyalty override what had been a central tenet of his political strategy."

The St. Cloud Times says: "George W. Bush's particular brand of immoderation lies in the premium he places on trust and loyalty". It goes on to cite Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes and Don Evans as examples. Of course we can add Harriet Meiers and Michael Brown to that list.

In a Newsday story, James Klurfield writes "What's going on here, folks, is that loyalty to the president is being rewarded above all other values, including competent performance."

The Council on Foreign Relations has an entire article called Loyalty as Foreign Policy

The New Republic says "...Moreover, both Johnson and Bush have been known to place a high premium on personal loyalty."

You can look at the whole of a Knight Ridder wire article entitled Bush's Loyalty Raises Doubts About His Political Judgment.

The British newspaper The Telegraph says "...Mr Tenet, who, like President Bush, prizes loyalty above most other virtues..."

I think I've made my point. You can find more for yourself with minimal effort if you care to.

You think an interference **PATTERN** is produced by a SINGLE particle (I don't mean a single particle at a time?), you don't know what you are talking about.

Two things. First of all I gave you a link to a Mach-Zehnder interferometer arrangmentment. The entire "pattern" there is that the photon always hits one detector and never hits the other detector. So yes, in that case even a single photon produces the entire interference pattern.

Secondly, I said that even a single photon will be subject to an interference pattern, which is correct even in a normal double slit interference pattern of lines. The single photon will be subject to that pattern - meaning that the single photon will NEVER strike in the darkest zone of any of the lines, and that it will have a sharply increased probability of stiking at the center of bright constructive zones.

If you want to see the full line pattern, yes you need to fire lots of photons one by one to build up the picture. However the main point is that it is still a single phton interfering with itself.

And this entire issue is irrelevant, because as I said I was specifially citing the Mach-Zehnder interferometer arrangmentment which most clearly demonstrates the fact that the photon interferes with itself, and in which each single photon does produce the full interference pattern.

And as far as I can see you don't have an explaination for beamsplitter interference patterns at all, much less the nonlocality involved in a single photon self interference effect.

-

it's bloody obvious that nothing can spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously

You're right that it is "obvious", but aside from that you are completely wrong. Quantum Mechanics really is that bizarre, all sorts of "obviously impossible" things really are true.

The atom really DOESN'T have a direction until after the measurement. The atom really IS in a quantum supersition rotating in both directions at the same time.

Probably the simplest experiements to prove this principle is the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and you can see a
diagram of it here.

You can fire photons into it one at a time. If photons had real position values, the photon would hit the first beam splitter (a half-silvered mirror) and then either pass through and go across the upper path, or it will reflect down to the lower path. It would then hit the second half-silvered mirror and have a 50-50 chance of hitting the detector on the bottom or the detector on the right.

However that doesn't happen. The photon REALLY DOESN'T have an a real position value before it is measures. The single photon really does take both the top path and the bottom path. The single photon then interferes with itself and always hits the detector on the right. The single photon interferes with itself, and the destructive interference cancels itself out in the direction of the bottom detector.

And here's the really bizzare part... if you block one of the paths (say the bottom path), suddenly some of the photons *do* start hitting the bottom detector. The half of the photons taking the top path then have a 50-50 chance of hitting the bottom detector. The photons that took the top path magically KNOW that the path they DIDN'T TAKE is now blocked.

And you can do the same thing with individual electrons. You can do a double-slit interference experiment. If the electron can cass through two slits, it actually passes through BOTH and itnterferes with itself. It will always be picked up by detectors at the contructive interference points, and it will never be detected at the destructive interference points. The electron really doesn't have a position or momentum value until it is measured. And if you block one of the two slits, the electrons going through the other slit now "know" that the slit they DIDN'T TAKE is now blocked and they now suddenly DO show up at the detectors at the destructive interference point.

They have even done the experiment with 100+ atom molecules. Even a big fat molecule REALLY DOESN'T have an actual position or momentum value until it is measured. Even a molecule really does go in both directions at once and pass through both slits at once. And they fully expect to be able to do this experiment with entire viruses soon. An entire virus will actually go in two directions at once and pass through both slits at the same time, and will be experimentally confirmed.

This is exactly how quantum computers will work. We'll have atoms spinning in two opposit directions at once (or something equivalant), and we will use both directions of spin at the same time to do calculations. At the end of the calculation we will only see one of the two directions, but the opposite direction really DID exist and it really WILL preform its math calculations and that phantom opposite direction spin really WILL make a contribution to solving the problem.

If you just have one atom spinning in two directions at once you can do two calculations at once - one calculation with each direction. If you have two atoms each spinning in two directions at once, you can do 2*2=4 calculations at once. If you have 10 atoms each spinning in two directions at once, you can do 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2=1024 calculations at the same time. If you have 20 such atoms, you can do a million calcuations at once. 30 atoms gets you a billion at once, and 40 atoms gets you a trillion calculations at the same time.

All of those extra calculations are done "for free"

I know of NO device that can emit photons each with exactly the same properties.

There is no need to, because a single photon has the "exact same properties" as itself. It is trivially easy to set up experiments for a single photon (or electron) to take two different paths (and therefore NOT having hidden "real" position and momentum values as you believe), and for that single photon (or electron) to interfere WITH ITSELF.

Interference patterns are not produced from single photons

Wrong.
It has been proven that even a SINGLE photon at a time, or a single electron at a time, WILL IN FACT interfere with itself and WILL IN FACT be subject to an interference pattern.

All you need are two beam splitters and two mirrors to demonstrate this fact. Here's a webpage with the diagram. Under your claims, a photon would take one of the two paths after the first beam splitter and then have a 50-50 chance of hitting either of the two detectors. However you are wrong. If you send a single photon through that arrangment it will always arrive at the constructive interference detector and never arrive at the other (destructive interference) detector.

A facinating aspect - an aspect that is completely impossible to explain under your "real hidden value" model is that if you block one of the paths there is a 50% chance that a photon will take the unblocked path and then 50% of that that it will arrive at the destructive-interference detector carrying the information that the path it DID NOT TAKE was blocked.

Not only can photons and electrons interfere with themselves, even interference of 100+ atom molecules has been observed. It is fully expected that we will soon be doing experiments observing entire viruses interfering with themselves and producing interference patterns.

An electron does NOT have a specific velocity, and does NOT have a specific location while it is traveling through the apparatus. The single photon or electron DOES use both slits and DOES interfere with itself.

If you fire a single electron trough a double slit device, it will never arrive at a destructive interference point. If you then block one of the slits, the electron going through the other slit sometimes does arrive at a destructive interference point carrying the "knowledge" that the path it DID NOT TAKE is blocked.

And reality is even WORSE than you think. Not only do particles NOT have the hidden "real" values that you imagine they have, we have the Kochen-Specker theorem and matching experimints proving the "real values" don't and can't exist. We can do experiments where it is impossible to go back and assign ANY consistant values prior to the measurement.

I'm not going to attempt to explain the Kochen-Specker theorem to you, but I will give you a simplified example of what it means and the sort of results you DO get from actual experiments. You have several random (but quantum-linked) values that can each be +1 or -1... but you can't measure all of them at the same time. It's the same issue you have with Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle - you can measure certain things or certain other things, but not everything at once. In this particular case you can combine the values into one measurement proving that you have an EVEN number of -1 values, and combine the values into a second measurement proving you have an ODD number of -1 values. It is therefore physically IMPOSSIBLE to go back and assign ANY consistant arrangement of real values to the particles.

In Quantum Mechanics the values litterally do not exist prior to the measurement. A photon or electron literally does not have a position value and momentum value before the measurement. A photon or electron really does follow every possible path and really does go through both slits of a double-slit experiment and it really does interfere with itself. The single photon or single electron really is subject to its own individual interference pattern.

-

Not completly correct most plants convert solar energy at an ratio of about 1-3% however some like sugar cane perform at 8%.

http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/geog101/mod ules/ecosystems_biomes/biogeography_eco_energy.htm l

http://www.life.uiuc.edu/govindjee/whatisit.htm

http://employees.csbsju.edu/SSAUPE/biol116/Ecology /energy-flow.htm

However photosynthesis converts light at 100%, all sorts of biochemical reactions make the overal much lower.

Aside from partisan fools, no one seriously thinks that President Bush is a dunce... far from it, he is clearly a clever and intelligent man. However, he is not in the same league as Mr. Gore.

True, but I wanted to clarify a bit. According to this article, Al Gore has an IQ of 133-134, but no IQ data is available for Bush. It's assumed that he's around 119-125, but no hard evidence is available. Certainly by no means a dunce, considering the average IQ is supposed to be 100 (although it's more likely around 96). No matter what estimate you use, GW Bush is not an idiot. Besides, as was mentioned quite a bit in the California recall election, you don't need to be extremely intelligent ... you just need extremely intelligent people advising you.

Also, as you pointed out, you don't need incredible intelligence to be successful.

example 1
example 2
example 3

No, I think it's 'lies'. see here, found in a google search.

A few points from a former 'insider'. I worked in a casino for 6 months before I left in disgust.
Before being hired, I had the naieve view of casinos being glamorous exciting places. They are not. The casino business is about feeding off the compulsive behaviour of regular people. The place the casino makes most of it's money is in the slot machines which typically administer 'rewards' (money) in a perfect variable ratio reinforcement scheme. It is a science that has been known and used for training animals for years.
Now everyone knows who the worst addicts are. They are the slot players who shit in their pants, piss into plants nearby so they don't have to leave their machine. (Yes, this is quite common). But these people never get barred or thrown out. Why not? Because they are the most reliable source of the casino's income. Even the provision in many areas of asking to be "self-tresspassed" is a joke because the way it's done most people will never go through with it or be able to circumvent it.
In a casino, surveillance is "THE" department. They are like the CIA of the casino. This is not an exaggeration. They don't usually eat or fratrenize with the other employees (they aren't allowed), their identities are kept secret and they get all the cool toys. They are extensively trained in the art of cheating, so they can spot it. And it's very cool. Some of the techniques that have been developed over the years are incredibly cunning and could only have come from the most devious of minds. This is what card counters are up against. They are like robin hoods and nobody deserves it more then the greedy pigs that own casinos. There are too few IMHO. I hope more people try to hack these dirty bastards.

I'm a fan of intricate hobbies myself. One book that's on my wishlist is Polyhedron Models by Magnus J. Wenninger. It contains instructions for making all sorts of incredibly cool models of complex polyhedra

I'm a fan of intricate hobbies myself. One book that's on my wishlist is Polyhedron Models by Magnus J. Wenninger. It contains instructions for making all sorts of incredibly cool models of complex polyhedra

I'm a fan of intricate hobbies myself. One book that's on my wishlist is Polyhedron Models by Magnus J. Wenninger. It contains instructions for making all sorts of incredibly cool models of complex polyhedra

Microsoft addresses the simple user. When a user walks into a supermarket these days, they see discount software on sale, often with just the Jewel case. Immediately, "cheap" clicks into their heads.

Microsoft, of course, feels it has to show a bigger box. American philosophy: bigger is better.

I agree, way too much packaging. A man named Roger Sorensen who has a sci-fi modeling page, has a section of his site dedicated to overpackaged models. You can see an example JPEG here.
Maybe CompUSA should invest in a garbage compressor? =P

And I grabbed Mike's copy and mirrored it here.

Thank you, Mike! Good man! I got in right when the page changed, and have been trying to grab source ever since. I got ~225K and it puked on me.

So here is Mirror 1 of US vs MS finding of facts. Because we computer geeks count from 0, right? ;-)

NCSA/1.5.2 running on IRIX 6.5, for those of you keeping score at home.