A lot of people are not getting why Quantum "phenomena" can be explained as a wave on a medium (like water) and they think it's just happenstance and wave functions just crop up everywhere (yeah, sure, like the Golden Rule!).

If there are waves -- what do they propagate through? A particle doesn't lose mass propagating EM fields -- only energy, or more exactly; inertia or heat. Sound does not transfer in space, because it is a vacuum. But that's only because sound is a wave function that passes along molecules.

Shouldn't it be proved that there IS NO MEDIUM for waves like light to propagate through? Seems to me that the Photon as more than a "point at which a specifically tuned field collapses" is a more reasonable answer than making one band of EM field have a particle and not finding particles in microwaves (for instance). And as an exercise -- can someone explain WHY they oscillate back and forth as waves on an ocean do if there is not a medium? I can only come up with a way to explain oscillations in a vacuum by looking at a straight line in 8 dimensions -- which still doesn't rule out a medium in a co-incident dimensional group (another 4 dimensions).

Anyway, I'm frustrated because I can conceptualize most of what is said in Quantum Mechanics, and other than the math -- it sounds like they are describing a Platypus and not a beast that could actually live. There are indeed simple explanations that can satisfy the double slit experiment with waves alone, and also Quantum Mechanics -- as long as EVERYTHING is really a wave. And particles are waves -- they just fold in on themselves in our 4 dimensional space.

The thing I've pondered for the longest time is "why physics is a law"? -- meaning; why do things HAVE to be equal and opposite? We've observed that, and Newton and a few others have proved that it happens -- but I want to know why. And "how do things move" based on Einstein's theory of Relativity because, when I was 12, sure, I spent three days wrapping my head around the basic concept -- but it didn't make sense with a lot of different vectors. It took me years to realize it was another concept that people nodded their heads and echoed "E=MC2" without really understanding. You've got people who can't get beyond the accomplishment of understanding that two photons don't hit at twice light speed, and after that, they take a nap.

The idea that Space/Time stretches for two photons colliding but shrinks if they separate starts to break down if you think of a star where it's often the case that a photon is both arriving and leaving another at relativistic speeds. It means that EITHER; each particle has it's own relativistic space/time or motion takes place in a higher and lower dimensional group. And what does it mean to shrink and stretch space in such a small area?

However, if we say that SPACE is a thing and is moving; then relativity is the "pressure on space/time" -- and it works out a lot nicer conceptually to think of velocity and gravity as pressure. So as the Gravity goes up in a star, it takes more energy/speed to reach light speed -- and it works out a lot like turbulence. As a bonus, we can say that gravity on a planet or a star may have less effect on local objects than on the galaxy itself -- and thus, noting that a lot of galaxies are MUCH HEAVIER than predicted, we can be OK with the fact that gravity may be a lot more powerful than predicted -- but it's pushing on SPACE itself. Where there is a lot of matter and light -- there's more pressure and turbulence, so the objects are not being forced towards other objects. I mean, why don't electrons merge with protons and why didn't the Universe get all clumpy after the Big Bang? Math models predict what we see because they are tweaked that way. But If I've got a room full of magnets and toss them around, they clump up because ALL they do is attract each other. If Gravity is JUST an attractive force -- it's pretty lazy about it.

A balloon with helium "shoots up" in our heavier atmosphere because of equalizing pressure -- and gravity "seems to me" to be working the same way; just pushing the other direction. Particles push "space time" out, and they tend to clump up, but there is a distributive force such that the distribution is equalized -- very much the same as resonance and brownian motion. Which is also still misunderstood and that's another conversation.

Thank You!

I've felt alone on this issue for so long. The removal of the "aether" happened around the time when Physicists adopted Einstein's theories (after apposing them tooth and nail for so long) and Quantum Mechanic became the trend.

I've always felt that the "particle of the week", the Higgs Boson, and Dark Matter were all attempts to compensate for two phenomena; today's physicists MUST explain everything with a particle, and they MUST not say that space is made of the aether. Though the Holographic and "Pixel" Universe theories come close.

And then there's that whole "light is a particle and a wave conundrum" that seems like just a fight against common sense. Microwaves make up a larger spectrum than visible light in the EM band, and then you've got radio waves. ALL of them are waves. Only when we get to this distinct frequency where the wave moves in a narrow direction, is there a question of particles. If the other EM energies are all waves, why suddenly would visible light be a particle?

Quantum phenomena occurs because waves only distribute energy on interfering peaks, and "empty space" is a thing, and it's just not part of our 4 dimensions -- and THAT is what gravity pushes against. So there; that's going to take about another 20 years for someone to work up the math and accept, or we'll have a Higgs Boson -anti-dark matter particle to explain it.

So like the track record of the NSA; one trillion dollar expense budget to catch one dude -- a low paid security guard who donated to Al Qaeda.

Destroying the laptop was not done to keep anything secret.

But without the laptop and the data, the NSA can tell everyone what Snowden stole, and there is no way to prove otherwise except for the credibility and reputation of the parties involved. "Oops! Well, at least no one can get their hands on our nuclear launch codes now!" Their punishment of Snowden, if he were still in the USA, would be based on their evidence, and "OMG -- securing the state!" would be the prerequisite that you don't know what the evidence is, or where it was procured.

Wow, it sucks that the NSA can't prove that they had video of Snowden attaching alien parasites to students at Liberty University for mind control experiments, and their desperate attempts to save the world from this nefarious plot. It would be really helpful to prove their value right about now.

At the next Black Hat competition, they should really mix it up and have teams trying to embed spy-ware and decryption in lengthy and complex encryption code. Some code would be tainted, other code would be not, and some would just be shoddy so as to obscure the obscure.

It would be interesting to see how easy or hard it is to really catch nefarious code.

Because, unless you or someone working with you can understand EVERY line of code in a program -- and its dependancies, you can't really be sure.

The other thing is, you can have exploitable algorithms that can be manipulated. The "buffer overflow" -- where you stuff malicious code at the end of a command that has more data than the query was designed to handle is not based on malicious code in a program -- just an unforeseen and EXPLOITABLE feature.

To guarantee that a program is not exploitable is more difficult than to guarantee that there are no exploits. And an expert hacker, contributing code, might have done so with the expectation that the backdoor would one day be found. It's now more inconvenient, but perhaps one prime number salts all the random number generation, for instance, and knowing that would reduce the complexity of the pass code by orders of magnitude. Or, a specific string is always at a certain location in all messages after encryption, and the cracking can start by having to find a known 128 bit value in the halfway point of any array of encrypted data -- making the process a bit easier. None of those would yield consistent patterns that might be discovered, without knowing WHY each and every routine does what it does.

OR, you might have infected the compiler, and someone naming a variable; "ReallyGoodPasswordSalt" causes it to compile these little "cracking helpers" into any application that is built on them.

Then you might look a components of the computer executing the instructions. It's possible, for instance, that all INTEL chips or emulators, or maybe a chip from some tiny fab in Asia has a component on your computer that looks for some kind of code, or compiler directive, and embeds a hidden "cracker's helper" in whatever string passes through it. So a contributor, puts in some "good clean code" but they use specific variable names, or common routine calls in a certain order -- all it requires is a "pattern". The Developers don't look for these exploits, because it's not a normal business activity to have men in dark suits show up at an office and tell someone to "build this logic area into your silicon design." They never hear of such things. It's crazy to think of it.

People working at AT&T would have laughed at you if you told them that all the data over their backbone was just copied out -- they still might depending on their level of awareness. Why? Businesses that play ball get special treatment -- like a subcommittee in Congress drops a probe, or there's no lawsuits to break up a monopoly for a while. Whether you think that is nonsense or not, depending on electronics that no one person can know all the functions of means that exploits by an organized and well funded government organization, or maybe an NGO, have more places to hide.

How could we test for a hidden "poisoning" of code on devices we cannot fully guarantee? Perhaps when compiling, have an application take all the variables and libraries and give them new, random names, then compile. See if the same salt, same password, and same text after encryption ends up exactly the same way with both applications.

Try sending out various lengths of encrypted messages from various devices (that are the same), and compare them coming from different equipment, times and locations -- they SHOULD BE the same. If they are not, or the HTTP packets have some unexplained padding and/or different byte lengths, perhaps there is unexplained messaging going on from the devices and not the software.

I'm not in software security, but I do have a devious mind, and if I can think of a way to make encryption more crackable, then others can.

I suppose then you look at the compiler and the chips on the computer itself.

There are a number of cases where the Government has forced component manufacturers to embed designs on their silicone. Laser printers for instance; for "some reason" all PostScript rasterizing chips at one time could be turned into passive antennas to indicate their location -- and in the Desert Storm war, this allowed the US to find locations that MIGHT be military command centers (assuming a computer next to a printer). Maybe the antennas are still in laser printers. Or maybe the wires in $100 bills allow them to be tracked by remote scanners and be used as listening devices -- yeah, well, who would have thought 40 years ago that metallic ink could be used to create a simple game on a piece of cardboard? There's no reason we couldn't have a pack-man game that was powered by sugary cereal in milk, is there? And, by pointing two lasers at a solid object in a room through a window, it's possible to record whatever sounds occur in that room. So it's only a matter of whether there is an intention and the creativity employed in embedding every day objects to be used to gather information on us.

For instance, let's look at something that IS PROVABLE; if you have a color printer, print out a period in color at the top of the paper. It will go "zip" and then again "zip" near the bottom. In yellow ink, in very small type, you will see a code indicating your printer's registration number. Was that a feature for you, or to track the unwary? Maybe it's just because they were worried about counterfeiters printing out money -- but the point is, your camera, your printer, your MAC address on your computer are ways to identify whatever you make on them. If the device is recorded as being yours -- whatever you do on it is not anonymous to an outfit like the NSA.

The point is; we sit on top of an infrastructure that we ignore as long as it works. Any one of the components of the Internet Routers at CISCO, or the transceiver in your phone, or in your power supply are BELOW the encryption level we assume is the important message.

So as long as you are OK with your location and identity being known, and who you sent the message to -- then encryption may be working OR, all messages have a tag tacked on with the HTTP packet from some underlying bit of hardware that relays information to a router on the internet backbone and is always being sniffed. Maybe those "lost" packets or in the noise.

The point is; it's great that they searched TrueCrypt -- but not at the expense of giving up on being paranoid. If I can think of a dozen vectors to exploit - think of the people who are PAID to come up with new vectors.

Yes, well, the agenda was; track the population so we can CONTROL THEM.

We all should know that was the excuse. Dick Cheney's PNAC group had the Patriot Act and Iraq invasion plans written years earlier and shows that he used disasters as an opportunity for an agenda - we should only wonder why anyone with internet access can know these things and yet it does not appear as a point of discussion on our TV News.

People on TV and the press talk about "reasonable things." Things that have made the gauntlet of other people on suits on TV.

Everyone watching TV news "KNOWS" that Iran is two years away from developing a nuclear weapon -- yet not that they've been two years away for thirty years now.

Everyone knows that we need security -- yet not that mercenary companies can buy tanks. That foreign companies own weapons plants on US soil. That engineers have tried to go on strike and nuclear weapons facilities over unsafe working conditions and long hours -- and that private companies are running these facilities and cutting costs.

Bill Maher pointed out the other day that about 26,000 people die due to antibiotic resistant bacteria -- the threats of a 9/11 incident each year pale in comparison to the real threats we ignore. There's obviously nothing to be gained by worrying the public with things that won't increase profits or power. You are more likely to be shot by police than a terrorist. So why did we spend $3 Trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan? We could have put everyone in those countries through college and bought them a home -- and 99.999% of them would likely kill anyone who would harm us just out of gratitude.

The media has interviews with “security experts” who debate the dangers of whistleblowers like Snowden. The “enemy” might get our secrets. Really? Did the Media cover the Wikileaks that told how agencies doing work for the NSA and CIA routinely sell databases of information gleaned about Americans to private companies? If China wants to know something - they don’t go to Snowden. They go to a firm.

Is there some “military strategy” that could be compromised? Is that F16 or drone with a GPS guided missile not going to win against that guy with an AK47 4 miles away on the infrared targeting system that costs more than his closest ten villages?

There is no "enemy" just people trying to get power vs. other people in power. A person like Cheney wants to get dirt on some political opponent or to have a war with a country that his friends paid to profit from, or a corporation wants to sell diseased cattle and cut corners and make profits so want dirt on someone who might stand in their way. Tracking EVERYONE, does not track people who are intending to sabotage the system. They will steal, disguise and use low-tech methods. But it's great to manipulate people who are part of the system and ruin their lives if they get in your way.

We can't have a Democracy or even representational government with "total awareness" -- and that's the reason it's the solution to whatever disaster they care so much about. If they cared about human life, I'd have a decent wage and Universal healthcare -- for instance. Doesn't seem to be a priority for "securing" the homeland.

I'm more interested in being protected from our Dick Cheney's and Judicial Punishment System.

I don't think the majority are fooled -- the Majority doesn't vote or is Independent. The MAJORITY is discouraged by the constant deceit and don't want to expend the energy arguing -- just making a living and enjoying what they can.

The people who are FOOLED are the ardent supporters who likely get more information on the subjects they are so ignorant about.

I remember years ago working with a company that sold the Interest Only home loans. They hired a guest speaker for about $100K for their conventions and other speaking engagements who wrote a book on how you could put all that wonderful equity from a home into the market. Keeping a mortgage is your cheapest credit card. Which, conceptually, if you crunch the numbers, works out on paper if you are a wise investor and don't ever use this money for food.

Anyway, the point is; an author who wrote a crap book promoting a crap financial concept got lots of money, and I'm a worker drone who is informed, and thought the idea was going to run a lot of people into serious trouble.

Think tanks and charlatans get paid big bucks to inform people of "wisdom" that makes people with lots of money, lots more money. The Wall Street insiders who have financial shows on PBS or NPR. The numerous "think tanks" who churn out papers on how not having tariffs allows America to "be competitive" -- as if any of that helped 99% of the public.

So who is the fool? People got good jobs and paychecks working at companies selling bad ideas. There are people working at horrible companies that every year find a new way to add a fee to their services and bilk customers.

I was aware and predicting the 2008 bank collapse because I noticed the reserve requirement on banks kept going down (it got negative in the last couple months) -- and that meant they were over-leveraged. For all my wisdom, I didn't improve my economic situation.

There are people who believe in talking snakes, that human activity cannot effect the climate, and who vote for less protection of workers even though they are a worker -- and YET, those people are better off than me financially. People who believe that America can do no wrong and has noble ideals AND can do horrible things because they have those ideals (not noticing that it can't maintain AND break ideals to be noble), are much more promotable. The person who will administer electric shocks because they were told to, and who will happily sell the Interest Only mortgage to a young lawyer with $300,000 in student loans is someone a business wants to hire.

SURVIVAL is why people in our society may not pay attention to things they think are unnecessary. And being a MORON is a good way for an average person to succeed financially. Being both aware and altruistic means that your chance for success is more limited. We have a Darwinian dog-eat-dog system in this country, and dogs are better adapted to it.

I like your comment. When you distill it down to the raw motivations; how COULD a company be trusted? Big or Small, there is a power vacuum. What do you want filling that power? Fast Food, Goldman Sachs, and a Credit Rating agency?

There was good work done by faceless bureaucrats in Washington for many years. Yes, there are careerists and cogs and people who muddle through,... but the "inefficiency"? People have no clue about an economy if they worry about the "cost of government." Every year around sweeps, our TV News covers "lazy government workers."

Someone shows up, gets paid, raises a family. Life goes on. I worked in marketing - and that's not necessary if there is one product. Most accountants aren't "necessary" if the tax code were made simple -- I'd be all for that; no taxes until your family makes over $120k and get rid of sales tax -- then you've got 1,000 less points of taxation on those who an afford and who actually get the most benefits AND that would spur investment to avoid taxation and lose the money (lowering capital gains has the effect of lowering capital investment-- see; history). Anyway -- the point is; for most of us, there is an artificial environment of inefficiency that created our job.

If we had total efficiency; there'd be a robotic plant that created all your stuff, drones would bring it to you, but they wouldn't because you'd have no money to buy anything because you were replaced by a robot.

So fundamentally; business wants you as an outlet, and wants to only pay you as little as possible, and shift costs of educating you to someone else. Government is motivated by the people involved, and who puts them in their job and gives them their power. Increasingly; that's corporate money more than votes -- the same money that owns the insipid news station that covers the heinous crimes of road workers caught napping.

I talked to someone that worked at one of the "Big Three" credit reporting agencies. You know those credit scores that make things cost more, because you have less money? Well, seems they are going to be rolling out "Work Scores" -- ratings of performance of employees that companies can use when the time comes to hire.

If they implement this "reputation system" and things like license plate tracking. Nothing will happen. You will try and get a job somewhere, and will never hear back. You will be curious why you can't get a loan. Nothing will happen TOO YOU, and nothing will happen FOR YOU. You will just be inexplicably a permanent loser.

The invisible hand of the market place will finally find it's way around your neck. The marketplace does not want people who question the way things are done and who cause a fuss. Just be popular, agree with what is shameful or interesting at the water cooler, play golf, laugh at the executive jokes, kiss ass and make a living.

Here's the thing—we may not actually want every otherwise unmotivated late teen to be sitting dubiously through college courses just because it's either that or go back to their dorm and twiddle their thumbs. Some things:

- There is an oversupply of graduates these days in most fields and at most levels
- A dawdle-dawdle unmotivated student is not doing their highest quality learning
- Even students that will eventually use what they learn may not do so for years
- In the meantime, what they learned is getting very rusty between learning and use

So with these things said, *how about* a model in which:

- People are not motivated to learn something until they need to
- Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely
- And they will put it to use right away
- And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)

I would think this would help to mitigate some of the particular supply/demand problems on all sides (for an education/for students/for graduates as employees).

The one caveat, and it's an important one, is that we do of course want people to be generally mature, thoughtful, capable, and culturally literate if they are goint to be participating in society, and right now high schools are failing utterly at even touching these points.

So to address that need, let's just require a minimal level of "general" college-level education, say a one-year or two-year degree that as no "major" or "minor" selections and issues no grades, but certifies literacy about politics/citizenship, social science (particularly social problems), national culture, basic quantitative reasoning, and so on—enough to become a careful thinker and to better understand "how to learn stuff."

This general education certification would be required in order to:

- Vote
- Get a business license
- Sit on a corporate board

But would be disconnected from particular vocational or other subject-oriented learning issued via, say, MOOCS as well as face-to-face alternatives. And instead of a major in a single discpline, outcomes from MOOC courses could be used to calculate a nationally databased and relatively involved (many measures) "bar chart" for each student, that tallied their experience and competence with particular subject areas, expressed quantitatively as a figure without an upper bound, that is added to with each additional course, and perhaps incorporating quantitative feedback about their performance from employers as well:

So instead of wanting someone with 4-year degree and a "major" in computer science, employers could seek someone with their general education certification along with "at least a 1400 in OS design, a 650 in Java, and a 950 in medical organizations and systems" and so on.

Over the course of a lifetime, scores in any particular area could continue to increase, either by taking additional MOOCs to get more exposure, or by having employers report on accumulated skills and experience to the system.

So that someone that took only a few courses in X in school, but in the real world and on the job, became—over 20 years—the best X in the country, would have this gradually reflected in their national education/experience scores as the years of experience and successes mounted.

Meanwhile, we'd also no longer have the weird mismatches that come when an employee has a degree in Y but actually works in Z, and then has to explain this in various ways to various parties. First of all, at the level of the 1-or-2-year general education, they would no longer gret a "degree in" Y. That would be handed by MOOCs and represented in varous numbers that increased as the result of completing them.

But if someone did do an about-face and choose an entirely different subject or work area in life, this would also gradually be reflected in their education/experience scores. We'd know when someone who'd studied chemistry in their '20s finally became a "real biologist" because their scores in biological areas would begin to overtake their scores in chemical areas, and so on.

Of course none of this is plausible because social systems simply don't work this way. But (after a long digression) getting back to the point, it's not all that bad that a MOOC isn't the same as forcing someone in their late teens or early '20s to sit in a classroom and drag their feet through a BA/BS.

What they're trying to say, using the usual feminist sociology over-loquatiousness is:

For some on the planet, keeping it under 2 degrees will preserve a relatively familiar or at least acceptable quality of life.

For others on the planet, quality of life can only be preserved by keeping it under, say 1.5 degrees, or even one degree.

The first group (that can live with a higher threshold) are those in the upper portions of the global economic scale, and it's an acceptable rise for them because they can also afford technologies and tools (getting crude, say, air conditioners, new home materials, new kinds of agricultural output, etc.) that make a 2 degree rise tolerable.

The second group (that can't live at the 2 degree threshold, and really need a lower one) are going to tend to be in the lower portions of the global economic scale, who won't have access to the technologies and tools that make a 2 degree rise livable for those at the top of the scale.

Policymakers and scientists tend, by virtue of their privileged position, to be in the first group, and have thus set the 2 degree rise in connection with thinking of their own, best-case lifestyles, rather than—say—a member of one of the globe's largely impoverished equatorial populations without access to much in the way of resources, tools, or technologies already.

It's a good point: the effects are not uniform, and if 2 degrees is the upper bound for the people who are the globe's *most* comfortable, then it's probably a bad upper bound in general, because it will "cook" (even more than already occurs) those that are the *least* comfortable.

It was, however, bad language and clarity—which is a sin that social science commits far too often.

Their point is well taken:

Just partially kidding...

Paul B.

Not really a good comparison; the polar bear is already a killing machine, and putting a radio collar on it "could" make it a cyborg. It's either a cyborg killing machine, or a radio tracked killing machine.

The bacteria are in essence, armored AND tracked, which makes them pretty a more like Emo kids with smart phones who tweet their every action. Sounds counter productive; "LOL, just arrived at the Colon and man, this dude is whack!" Sorry, my slang is 10 years un-hip.

That was an awesome and insightful response.

So while Nuclear is getting better technology -- it's providers are only in the game if the Government can flip the bill.

Has any business in the past two decades actually financed and built a nuclear power plant? If not, then that would challenge the concept that they are economical.