An NSA employee once told me "If we could do what people think we can do, the world would look differently". I still find that very convincing and plausible. All what the NSA does is the same that ordinary IT criminals can do, just scaled up. Regarding the respective groups at the NSA as ordinary IT criminals is in fact a rather accurate model, as in the end, they are just after money and power. All this "fighting XYZ" propaganda is just the usual lies.

I completely agree. Sure, some implementations are flawed, but they can be fixed. All that fear-mongering and fact-distorting just serves to drive people to less secure alternatives. That is by design and I expect that quite a few people posting in this thread here (and in other places) on this subject are actually paid to create a certain atmosphere of fear and uncertainty about tools that are very likely secure or can only be broken by targeted, high-effort attacks.

As to Elliptic Curve Crypto (ECC): Stay away from that like the plague. Maybe, just maybe the DJB curves are secure, but anything the NSA may have gotten its hands on is sure to be compromised, and, by design, you cannot prove that a curve is secure unless you prove it was generated in a way that does not allow a compromise. There is also a highly suspicious trend by VPN vendors to recommend using ECC. That does not make sense at all, unless driven by the NSA. The thing is that ECC is not needed at all. Normal asymmetric crypto is by far fast enough, unless you go to very slow processors, like you have on chip-cards.

It is a plain, simple marketing lie. Religion has several thousand years of experience with those. They will use anything and everything to sell their product.

In related news, religious people (or those faking it), have long since come up with "God" being extra-rational. For example, Occam was a very capable logician, philosopher and a monk, and had to come up with some way do do logic and at the same time (very likely only pretend) to believe in God. The solution is to make God extra-rational. Islam still offensively does this today, Christianity hides this bit in shame, and others do it too.

No. But it happens to be the only reliable fact and only for me (Solipsism being a possibility).

I usually do not use vi ("VI VI VI, the editor of the beast") or emacs ("escape meta alt control shift"), but joe, since I learned the WordStar commands first. Does that make me an agnostic?

You have no frame of reference, hence your statement is nonsense. It does show that you have some mental affliction of the religious kind though. Logic is usually one of the first casualties.

The matter whether somebody is an asshole is not tied to religion, but it is one of the known amplifiers, especially in its fundamentalist forms. But so is any other fundamentalism, religion is just the most prevalent form of fundamentalism. Assholes are drawn to fundamentalism, as it gives them some perceived superiority. That is often direly needed, as many of them are underperformers with limited capability for insight and limited success where it counts. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is also a lot stronger with them, because of that superiority effect.

Indeed. And while Science at this point does not rule out the existence of a God (with some limits, the all-powerful part is not possible, for example, as it immediately leads to a host of contradictions), the current state-of-the-art says it is an exceedingly unlikely option. Unlikely enough to call taking it serious a delusion, which is far, far more likely.

Unfortunately, the existence of fantasy constructs cannot be _disproven_ scientifically, otherwise this "discussion" would have long since over. What continues to amaze me however is how cretins hijack Science because of its credibility to generate false proofs and indications (that non-scientists often cannot identify as such) for anything that catches their fancy. That is just exceedingly unethical ("evil" for those of you afflicted with religion)...

Not in time to actually make enough money off it, if they ever make money in that area.

From what I have recently seen of IBM "consultants" they do not even have people left that can get basic IT engineering work right. I agree they are dead. Might still take more than 10 years for them to actually keel over though.

Oh? And what about the ever-growing zoo of particles that _all_ need to be in there in order to get a complete model?

The other thing is that physics majors are extremely tough when it comes to non-discrete mathematics. I do not disagree on your stated numbers, just that I regard things that need this amount of time and talent as "complex" and as a CS person, anything complex is also a "mess" that any good architect/designer/implementer avoids. I guess we just have a different perspective, but I think I do understand yours now.

Also note that I never claimed anything was "special" about QM mathematics. Being "complex" is not the same as being special. I am not into the "Quantum Mysticism" nonsense that some people use as surrogate religion. The only thing special in quantum effects is that it is the last bastion of "true randomness" (being just an admission of "we have no clue, but it has nice statistical properties", not more at this time). However, in a sense that does make quantum effects pretty exceptional and special and more research is needed.

Have a look into an advanced masters' curriculum for discrete mathematics some time. Most universities rather strongly disagree with your statements...

Of course that is "Modern Algebra" or "Abstract Algebra" (as anybody with the least bit of clue in the area would have realized), and advanced topics in Logic like Automated Deduction, HAL and the like (again, as anybody that has a clue, unlike you, would have realized).

Well, yes. But you are not one bit smarter, as the catastrophic effects are indeed ensured, but the CO2-levels are just one piece op the puzzle and by themselves they are meaningless.

Fascinating fail.

I have a full mathematical base education and some advanced subjects like logic and algebra. That means I have more than about 90% of all scientists and I passed all on the first try. Looks like you are the clueless one here.

No, that problem is not solvable in this infantile fashion. Either you are a moron or you are doing propaganda for the CO2 industry.