As time goes, I get tired of keeping the paperback bindings open. Kinda inconvenient when you want to read and scratch your wife's back. She loves when I read. She gets scratched for hours :)

Yup, because an English degree and love of literature makes one no more fallible to typos. Never ever, unh unh.

Yeah, because most of COBOL's syntactic sugar and library functionality couldn't be replicated, say, in C++. LOL.

Now that's insightful!

Now that is a meaningless phrase if I ever saw one. Could someone explain what the fuck was the submitter thinking while writing this nonsense?

Anyone who was following current developments in physics was aware of the possibility well before WW II started.

I actually wish that U.S. had tech to do fast factorizations since then we might be needing some new innovations when it comes to public key cryptosystems. RSA gets boring after a while and I really wish there was something fresh and just as fundamental to come since. Maybe there is and I missed it?

Bullshit. Sure it was no great battle, I agree. It was a small-scale siege of a jail where the entrenched honcho's deputies were attempting to tamper with ballots. I don't see what has it got to do with vigilantism, it was very obvious what was going on and there was no other law enforcement available to deal with it.

Exactly. Throwing the Iraq and Afghanistan money after heart disease research would be way more productive. My bet is that the whole field of medical research, worldwide, has not seen that kind of money ever. Even if you add everything up since medical research has ever began.

I think they could have enough hardware to break small numbers (a couple/day, maybe) of RSA-encrypted negotiations of session keys, and perhaps may have something that can go much faster through keyspace of common symmetric ciphers. I think all you really need to stay secure these days is to change your private keys often and make sure all valuable data uses public key cryptography only, no symmetric ciphers. Unfortunately, common internet protocols like SSL only use public key crypto to negotiate symmetric session keys (IIRC). If you can recover session keys quickly, you don't even need to bother with brute-forcing factorization problems in public key crypto.

LOL. Classical computers can theoretically decrypt anything too, so what's your point? So far there was no demonstration of any non-classical computer system that runs significantly faster than classical ones. Even if you take a rather mediocre measure of being "significantly" faster - I merely mean faster by a low-order polynomial in N (say, N or N^2 times faster). I'm not even hinting at expecting something that can do O(N!) problems in polynomial time.

Let's hope there's a whoosh in order here. I'm in a positive mood today :)

As far as backdoors go - let's be realistic, there's nothing to suggest either way. That's the sad world we live in...

That's of course after first verifying that the CPU doesn't contain backdoors that trigger code execution upon hitting a special sequence of data. You pretty much have to lay out a simple 8-bit CPU by hand on large sheets of mylar, have that fabbed, toggle the monitor, then assembler, into it, then code a simple Pascal compiler, then use it to design something larger, and keep doing it until you've got yourself to the modern days.

But this is purely a thermal effect! The radiation doesn't ionize, the radiation heats up the material sufficiently so that the ionization occurs spontaneously due to collisions between atoms or molecules. Just because you have ionization doesn't mean that the radiation is ionizing!!

This is a rather nonsensical statement. Everything depends on the thermal balance of the sample you're heating up. Without knowing that, you can't make any arguments as to how much power is needed. Hint: low-pressure gases have low thermal conductivity and low volumetric heat :)

Tissues are not very transparent to UV-B, so this problem is limited to outer skin layers. Moreover, we adapt over generations by varying the melanin content. It takes about a 100 generations to go from full white to full black, and vice versa (there go the racial arguments, LOL). I'd say that given DNA's efficiency of storing information, the UV-B sensitivity is but a nitpick.