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Today, while driving through town, I wound up behind a minivan that had a big sticker on the back. The sticker had an Israeli flag in the middle of it, and under it the quotation from the book of Genesis that reads âoeI will bless those who bless thee.â

I would like to take this time to list my own reasons for thanking and blessing Israel, our lone ally in the Middle East, for everything she has done for us, since I am quite sure most Americans are unaware of just what kind of friend she has been to us.

For extorting from me and my fellow Americans $4,000,000,000.00 a year for the last 4 decades, we bless thee.

For taking our most sophisticated weapons technology and stealing it for yourself without paying the American patent holders, we bless thee.

For taking that high-tech military technology and selling it to our enemies, such as the Russians and Chinese, thus further endangering us, we bless thee.

For using that weaponry in a sustained attack against a United States ship, the USS Liberty, in an attempt to sink her, thus preventing US servicemen from revealing to the rest of the world information concerning the war crimes they witnessed you commit against Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Desert during the Six Day War, as well as for the purposes of dragging the US into yet another one of your murderous adventures, we bless thee.

For killing 35 and wounding 170 American sailors aboard the USS Liberty, we bless thee.

For bribing the United States government into covering it up, preventing any justice from being done for the benefit of the families of the lost sailors - as well as the American People, we bless thee.

For sending your agents into Egypt and blowing up American buildings for the purpose of blaming the Arabs in an event known as the Lavon Affair, we bless thee.

For sending your agents into Libya during the Reagan administration, and broadcasting radio messages in Arabic that were designed to sound like âoeterrorist cell planningâ so that the US would initiate military strikes against Khadafi in an event known as Operation Trojan Horse, we bless thee.

For withholding information from us concerning the planned attacks against the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, attacks you knew about through your moles in the Islamic world and about which you deliberately refused to warn us in order to further your interests against the Arabs, we bless thee.

For employing Jonathon Pollard, an American serviceman paid to spy for Israel in order to steal even more of our National Security secrets for your parasitic purposes, we bless thee.

For blackmailing President Clinton through one of your sayanim, Monica Lewinsky, in order to prevent a coherent peace program from being pushed forward between yourself and the Palestinian people whom you have brutalized and murdered for the last 50 years, we bless thee.

For breaking every agreement you have made with your Arab neighbors, stealing their land, displacing, murdering, and treating them like the animals you see them as, we bless thee.

For using your agents within the first Bush administration to involve us in the first Gulf War, causing the deaths of American men and women, and exposing our servicemen to whatever bioweapons were and are responsible which have led to Gulf War Syndrome, we bless thee.

For your role in the September 11 attacks in this country, and for blackmailing and bribing the US government into deporting back to Israel the 100 or more intelligence agents that were arrested after the attacks, we bless thee.

For suppressing the information from the American people of your involvement in the September 11 attacks and sending us in the wrong direction in search of answers, we bless thee.

For using one of your agents in the US Army Weapons Lab to steal anthrax and distribute it into our mail system, terrorizing US citizens and killing several in order to blame the Arabs, we bless thee.

For using your agents in the US Government, namely, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, and the rest into initiating this war in the Middle East so that you could bring to heel all the enemies you have made during the last 50 years, we bless thee.

For using your agents in the media to lie to us on a minute by minute basis about the war, lying to us as to how âoejustâ this cause is, and what the real reasons behind it are, we bless thee.

For using your agents in the Christian Evangelical community, such as Falwell, Graham, Swaggert, Robertson and the rest who praise you as Godâ(TM)s chosen people and further keep Americans in the dark about who you really are what you have done, and what you are truly about, we bless thee.

For bringing idiots like Limbaugh, Liddy, Hannity, Beck, Oâ(TM)Reilly and Savage to the forefront as paid liars who will support you and further lead Americans astray, we bless thee.

For making America your attack dog, and for sending her sons and daughters to fight and die in all your future wars, we bless thee.

For using your influence in the media to hide the real statistics about the war, the dead and wounded on both sides, we bless thee.

For using us in such a way that not only further inflames the Arab world against us, but as well has succeeded in our alienating ourselves against those nations with whom we have been friendly for over a century, we bless thee.

And finally, for using your influence in our media and academia to flood our minds with pornography and lies, as well as inculcating in us a hatred for our history, religion, and culture, for dividing our nation between races and sexes, and for releasing into our society all of your plagues and filth that have left us a rotted out corpse of a once great nation, oh Israel, our friend,

we bless thee.

Section two of the wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis) is the great importance here. If indeed there is a proof of Riemann's Hypothesis, then there is a similar proof of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, which is in turn a big step in finding the exact distribution of prime numbers.

Finding the distribution of prime numbers has epic consequences, like breaking most encryption, for starters.

Me, I use math to write dirty words on my calculator.

Such as 80085?

zorro6 writes "I thought this might be an interesting question/topic and it would sure help me to get some kind of answer. I recently got internet service from a small, local wireless ISP in my area (south central Colorado, USA). The strange thing is that many, many web sites think I am in Quebec, Canada when I use the service. Evidently some geolocation service thinks my IP address indicates I am in Canada. I have checked the obvious. The WHOIS information for my IP correctly indicates a location of Durango, CO. So the bad info is coming from some more sophisticated geolocation service. My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French! Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada. So far I know that Yahoo! (or their ad provider), Nvidia, Movielink, etc. all think I am in Canada. I would sure appreciate any help/info on how to get this corrected."

eldavojohn writes "A teacher is offering empirical evidence that when you're mining data, augmenting data is better than a better algorithm. He explains that he had teams in his class enter the Netflix challenge, and two teams went two different ways. One team used a better algorithm while the other harvested augmenting data on movies from the Internet Movie Database. And this team, which used a simpler algorithm, did much better — nearly as well as the best algorithm on the boards for the $1 million challenge. The teacher relates this back to Google's page ranking algorithm and presents a pretty convincing argument. What do you think? Will more data usually perform better than a better algorithm?"

Many readers are sending in word that Arthur C. Clarke has died in Sri Lanka. He wrote over 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama, and popularized the ideas of geosynchronous communications satellites and space elevators.

An anonymous reader sends us to the site of Science Magazine for news that will interest those who have followed experiments to slow and stop light. Research groups in Canada and Japan have succeeded separately in storing a special kind of vacuum — a "squeezed vacuum" — in a puff of gas and then retrieving it a split second later. Such experiments might lead to advances in quantum encryption. At the very least they will help to illuminate the boundary between quantum and classical realms.

privacyprof writes "Fans of the show Battlestar Galactica might be interested in our interview with writers and producers Ron Moore and David Eick. Three law professors at the blog Concurring Opinions have an hour-long interview with Moore and Eick about the legal, political, moral, and economic issues raised by the show. The interview is available in audio files; alternatively, people can read a transcript of the interview (Part I) and (Parts II and III). Part I examines the lawyers and trials in the show, how torture is depicted, as well as how the humans must balance civil liberties and security. Part II examines politics and commerce. It explores how the cylon attack affected the humans' political system, and it examines how commerce works in the fleet. Part III examines issues related to cylons, such as the humans' treatment of cylons, how robots should be treated by the law, how the cylons govern themselves politically."

RemyBR writes "A Japanese government panel is proposing to govern "influential, widely read news-related sites as newspapers and broadcasting are now regulated." The panel, set up by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, said Internet service providers (ISPs) should be answerable for breaches of vaguer "minimum regulations" to guard against "illegal and harmful content." The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, is seeking to have the new laws passed by Parliament in 2010."

An anonymous reader writes "The Consumerist is reporting that one unlucky individual had to send his Xbox 360 in for repairs. The catch is he had spent a great deal of time getting signatures and artwork on the outside of the console from notable members of the gaming industry. He specifically asked and even sent a letter along with his console requesting that the outside of the case be returned intact. When he got it back it was once again, plain white. Assuming that this is a genuine claim, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the missing/cleaned case Microsoft should at least apologize to the guy."

Croakyvoice writes "Fans of Homebrew on the Nintendo Wii can celebrate with an explosion of releases today, in just a few hours there has been a release of a proof of concept version of Linux for the Wii, an MP3 Player, the Super Nintendo emulator Snes9X has been ported and a converter that converts Gamecube Dol files into Elf for usage on the Wii (Which opens up a multitude of emulators and homebrew games and applications). A tutorial on how to get homebrew working with the Twilight Hack will help those interested."

An Anonymous Coward writes "The Washington Post has an article about the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's take on the numerous virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life) that have cropped up in recent years. IARPA's thesis is that because the Government can't currently monitor all the communication and interaction, terrorists will plot and scheme in such environments."

Just so you don't think Americans are the only people who have no clue when it comes to their history, a recent survey found a fair number of British people believe that Churchill, Charles Dickens, and Mahatma Gandhi were fictional characters. Who made the "real people" list? Over half the people asked thought Sherlock Holmes was real. Many people were surprised to find out that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was not a documentary.

necro81 writes "On Thursday, after much speculation and wrangling, the FCC will begin auctioning licenses to the coveted 700 MHz band that will be vacated by analog TV in 2009. The NY Times has a good summary of the players (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Google, et al.), how the auction will work, how Google has already scored an open networks victory, and what it could all mean for consumers. The auction will go on for several months, but you can keep tabs on the bids at this FCC site."

angus_rg writes ""Residents in a small town about 150 miles from Austin are attracting national attention because of their claims to have seen evidence of extraterrestrial life." While Lockheed Martin provides the military with aircraft and has a branch 70 miles outside of the town, the potential UFO was said to have been flying too low to be a military plane. Hopefully it wasn't Star Scream."
http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2008/01/16/StateLocal/Stephenville.Reports.Ufo.Sighting-3154230.shtml